Yeah, I figured Chromebook is just the next generation of this stuff and the mac gifting is probably on decline now that they’ve got their market share. It’s good to hear an edtech perspective though. It’s all about cost at this point, I imagine…

Ironically, the US is practically already off MS in schools and has been for a while but it’s Mac and Google Suite that took over. I literally had a college student in my class ask “What is Excel?” as it was listed as an option to conduct calculations.

It’s not better, but I thought that was funny. Big reason that happened, btw, Apple gifted whole computer labs to schools back when it was trying to get market share in the 90s, and now Google does likewise with Chromebook. Too bad there isn’t a Linux organization with enough money to do something like that, as it’s much more effective than banning something.

Unfortunately yes, although it’s hopefully not commonplace for my ad bloated W11 start menu to take 10 seconds to open.

I admit, I’m tempted to read the AI answer when I search something; but holy crap is it a patronizing waste of time. Just now I was searching about a game and the long page of AI answer essentially boiled down to “kill stuff to get stronger,” like brah, I know, I’m trying to look up exact formulas here, you piece of shit.

My questions are never answered by it, and when it tries, it’s wrong even with follow up info. Man I really could live without it, lol.

Edit: oh, and this is a relatively new game but on both Google and Bing indexes, the first page and a half are clearly AI generated. Same boilerplate nothingburger answers. No surprise the search AI isn’t good, it’s regurgitating other AI answers. MAN I could live without it.

Keep in mind if you transition to Windows you will need to relearn a few things! Lots of your software might have issues and I sure hope you have Nvidia because AMD is straight to broken with all their open source code. Yuck!

Windows is just better (I use Windows 11 PRO BTW) because you get lots of background processes and there’s even a copilot that’s right about stuff sometimes. Microsoft even keeps a backup of lots of your data up in something called a Cloud, which I assume is good because clouds are up there in the sky like heaven!

I sure hope 2026 is the year of the Windows PC!

(/s cause writing this joke hurt my soul)

When playing with prompts before I realized how stupid this whole thing was (in 2023 lol), I found myself also copying and pasting a lot so… it’s probably not even going to speed things up in prompting, even ignoring the whole thinking part that we’ll omit here since, well, they probably aren’t.

I did hear Arch is a bit more trouble, yeah. CachyOS was pretty straightforward from desktop environment to automatically detecting hardware and such. Pretty much the same features you see with Windows, just a lot faster.

In the case I’m referencing, I was installing Windows 11 for a five year old gaming computer using the Windows 10 upgrade software, no USB or anything like that.

Technically I was going to use a custom USB made with Rufus to remove copilot, but by the time I got there they had already started the upgrade process. It really did take two hours, including the 15 minutes before I got there.

Sure, and Internet speeds probably matter a bit too. The download part was a bit faster than I remember, but then it hung up on the later parts for a while. Lol

The most obvious bait to be was 1 hour install time. Windows 11 took 2 hours to install, CachyOS took like 5 minutes. I imagine Arch is similar, there is simply no way. Lol

Useful list for those who do use Arch; I’ve only got like two things from AUR and neither is on that list (although I kinda recognize a couple with slightly different names, like what, knock off plugins for official stuff?)

Yes, same; the real solution is Linux podium with an adapter in every room by default. But that’s not happening anytime soon, lol.

Technically it’s not the projector with the issue either, the podium is more or less a very fancy hub with a monitor built in. I feel like the adapter could just be built in if necessary, lol.

Yes but it’s generally easier and less prone to issues to just open their PowerPoint (or really, Google sheets) on the podium since I’m already using it. I’m sure the admin uses adapters as their excuse not to update the hardware though… (even if they are still using Win 11 on decades old computers).

I just want to share that last semester, the Windows podium computer we used decided randomly to update during a student presentation. It did not help their nerves, but I did turn it into a chance to evangelize Linux.

And no, they can’t use their own laptop, the connections to the podium computer, and thus the projector, use VGA…

Maybe not my biggest pro, but I was able to customize my UI way more than I ever could on Windows. I made an FFIX theme for my wife and I might make an Earthbound theme for myself whenever I get around to figuring out how to make a customized window style.

Is the phone integration a iPhone thing? My KDE Connect app lets me text and share files pretty easily, plus a few other nifty features, but I use Android.

I’ve got the same setup but I found the issue wasn’t the hardware but a driver conflict with my Nintendo Gameboy Printer. I was able to rollback and get it working fine.

Oddly, not a single problem on my 2070 system but I think age helps Linux get stable. Older the hardware, the better open source works.

You know what, I double that sentiment. The Linux community definitely helped me make the switch too, even if not by DMs.

I still have issues with an Nvidia card computer I own, but all my other machines work just fine and I simply like it more. I’m sure my card will come around sooner or later anyway.

Not for my daughter, I’m starting her early on Arch (she’s 4 but she will learn to love the terminal lol)