The command line is perfect for lazy people like me. You spend a bit more putting together a little automation and shove it in a script in ~/bin and you can forget about how it’s done.

Example: I have a small script that does the backup for me using Borg. It backups only the directories I want, ignores a bunch of stuff and keeps 6 months of backups. I spent some time crafting that but now I just plug my external HDD and type backup.sh. or if I’m feeling extra lazy I just click the desktop link.

My suspicion for Nvidia not opening their drivers is that they have something shifty going on, maybe benchmark “optimizations” or some other trickery.

That, and they’re plain evil.

I think it was a Finnish philosopher who once said it best: Fuck you, Nvidia.

How I’m doing it: setup nginx-proxy-manager as frontend and put all services behind it, using different names (cloud.home, media.home, etc) but with the same IP (the proxy IP).

I agree, I notice more new blood around Linux compared to the previous “OMG, Micro$oft suxx, let’s all ditch Windoze!1!!” craze (I guess it was Win8.1 -> Win10, maybe?)

Each person knows what it feels more comfortable with.

Linux is not inherently hostile, it just has a very different way of doing things that what you’re accustomed, so you perceive it as hostile. It is sometimes easier for someone who never touched a computer to learn Linux that someone who grew with Windows to unlearn the habits.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling comfortable in Windows, it’s the system you grew up with and know how to work with and maintain.

I’m old enough to have seen this “flocking” several times. Some people stay and are pleasantly surprised. Most people go back a few weeks/months later, and leave a “Linux suxx” post behind them. I don’t expect this time will be any different, and that’s totally fine.

I just want to add that you that you can also setup multiple user accounts for different uses. One for banking, one for gaming, one for downloading random crap. It will not protect against privilege escalation attacks but will help against random scripts exfiltrating your personal documents.

Another nice layer is containers and containerized applications (flatpaks, bubblewrap, etc). Each app will be somewhat limited in what damage it can do.

Running pi-hole as your DNS or using some other filtered DNS provider (Mulvad or others) will also protect you from some shady sites.

Cups is awesome. I have an ancient HP laserjet 1100 connected to an ancient parallel-to-Ethernet adapter, connected to my ancient router. Cups works flawlessly with this setup, Windows never worked.

It sometimes is, but then sometimes Linux is not to blame.

Yesterday I was installing CachyOS on my son’s laptop, because that’s what he chose to use instead of Windows 10. The desktop came up fine, but no wifi adaptor was detected. I could try another more mainstream distro, but I wanted my kid to have what he chose. So we went troubleshooting. Googled the laptop model, found the adaptor, found the matching kernel module, checked the logs… and there it was, a cryptic error -110. Googled that and there was an answer: disable Windows Fast Boot.

It turns out that Windows locks the wifi adaptor when shutting down in Fast Boot mode. So after disabling it and a couple of reboots later, CachyOS was installing flawlessly.

It served as a lesson for me and an example for my kid to persevere and learn more.

My advice is: this isn’t Windows, so if you look at the logs you will probably find clues to what is wrong. With those clues you can find help online, either from blog articles or from Linux forums like this one.

I know reinstallation is the default in the Windows world, but you stand to learn a lot from trying to solve the issues you are facing.

I have a machine with specs like those where I installed Haiku.

I don’t daily drive it, but it’s fun to use and it’s quite snappy.

I use Flatpaks for a lot of stuff (Steam, Firefox, and some other stuff that I feel should not have access to my tax returns in the Documents directory). It’s not just for beginners, Flatpaks are useful for other reasons.

Good advices.

A bit of research goes a long way. If you get a solid understanding of the basics, you can then build on it.

Don’t feel bad, I’ve used Linux since 1995 and don’t have enough skills to use Bottles.

I do however game a lot, using mainly Steam and Heroic. You can try to start there.

You are right, it is not the case. She comes across as a very focused and motivated person that sets goals and achieves them, benefiting the community in the process. I wish I was like that. 😅

I just expressed my own feelings towards people that don’t recognize all the free hard work that developers like her have given them, and blame all the community for not supporting the piece of hardware that the vendor saw fit not to support.

This is the kind of selfless, talented, focused person that I am thankful for when I look at the FOSS ecosystem and how far it has come.

An it really deeply annoys me when these talented persons, who’ve spent countless hours reverse engineering crap, undocumented, proprietary technologies that the original vendor didn’t care enough for its’ users to document or open source, get blasted online by entitled brats that say “Linux sux, my AAA game don’t work!”.

My thank you to all of them that made all the great tools that I use and love today.

Why do you have to have this xor that? Why can’t I like both? I’m sure both have use cases where they work best.

Drop the hate already.

Do we? Who’s we?

smaller pool of desktop users

There, I fixed it for you.

This is about desktop Linux, so I was wrong to correct you. My bad.

Another vote for PiHole. It keeps your home network cleaner by ignoring the ads.