Quazatron

Don’t switch based on hype.

Put your chosen distro on a USB pen and boot from that. Try to do the activities you usually do, see if it works for you.

If you feel comfortable, make the switch. If you have any doubts, get a second disk and install Linux in it so you can have a fall back plan.

My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.

I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.

I just have to do a system update every year or so.

She’s now 87.

I recommend creating 3 partitions. One for UEFI, one for /boot and one for LVM.

Inside the LVM you can assign volumes with complete flexibility. You can expand and shrink volumes. You can leave space unallocated and allocate it when the need presents itself. You can combine multiple disks in a single volume. You can do RAID over LVM or the other way around.

Or you can go with ZFS or BTRFS, they have subvolumes and other nice features built in.

What you don’t have is to be stuck with fixed layout partitions anymore.

It blows my mind that we had multiple modern ways to setup volumes in Linux (LVM, ZFS, BTRFS) for decades, yet people keep using partitions like it’s 1990.

You brought back traumatic memories I had successfully repressed.

Patient gamers unite!

Also, who has time to waste waiting for a 90GB game to load and compile it’s shaders or whatever so you can enjoy the main character’s pimples in full anti aliased resolution when you can just double click some 20 year old game and be right in the thick of it in zero time? I play to have fun, I don’t need all this ultra realistic crap. Give me 5 minutes with some obscure indie game and I’m happy.

I’m old enough to have clustered some 16 desktop PCs using openMOSIX a long time ago, before the era of multiple cores and threads.

The whole cluster would function like a single Linux system, automatically spreading the work between nodes.

I used it to run SETI@Home for a bit of fun.

It was a neat idea, but never went mainstream. Soon single PCs were powerful enough to run virtual machines and be partitioned instead of clustered.

I don’t hate it, I know that it adds a lot of security to a system, it’s just that it’s not user friendly and it can sometimes leave you scratching your head wondering what the hell happened.

That’s pretty much it.

So you’re implying we can expect Half-Life 3 for Christmas?

I’ve used Gimp for as long as I can remember, it’s one of those tools I always have installed in my workstation. It’s quirky, but I love it anyway.

Glad to see 3.0 released. Valve, are you paying attention? Those is how it’s done.

Back the hell up. Seriously. I cannot overstate how peaceful life is when your ass is properly covered.

A lot of man-hours went into engineering it. Very smart people from many distros went over it, kicked its tires and deemed it good enough to replace old SysV. We’ve been through this, if you don’t like it for some reason, use something else.

It’s just software, people, it’s not a frelling religion.

Believe me, it used to be so much worse than that.

Hardware vendors see the need to allocate their resources to support the majority of the users, so that means making drivers for all current flavors of Windows and Mac. Linux has a residual market margin, so no incentive there.

It usually is up to some talented person or persons somewhere out there to come up with support for dinner shiny new hardware, usually months or years after the shininess went away.

The path is clear: buy from vendors who support Linux, make yourself heard if they don’t, or put up the work to make it work if you have the capability.

Not a secret, but annoying as hell. I usually replace it with a Flatpak and uninstall Snap.

A Linux VirtualBox instance.

Can’t be bothered to work around WSL’s idiosyncrasies.

Don’t.

Everybody hates preachers.

Lead by example.

I keep backups (regular, incremental, remote) to keep my data safe in case something happens to my local data. This protects me from things like theft, hardware failure, accidental deletion of some important files. Having multiple generations (daily, weekly, monthly) will protect me when I delete some files and only realize weeks later.

All of this is a separated issue to having encryption or not. I encrypt both local and backup copies, and store the keys in a password manager.

See what works for you, but don’t confuse the issues.

Encryption and backup are orthogonal domains. If you don’t understand why, I’m sure you’re not going to take a random strangers’ opinion on the subject.

Yes.

If my computers are stolen or lost with the luggage, or if I suddenly die (as one sometime does), I don’t want whoever goes through my computers to get hold of my ex-girlfriends nudes, my credentials for online banking or my porn habits.