Soleil (she/her ♀)

Really I think a temporary dual boot to test everything would be the sanest option, and then when you’re ready to commit, back up your home folder and repartition your drive accordingly. If you end up never ready to commit, well, second-gen Ryzen is officially supported on Windows 11 as long as you enable fTPM and Secure Boot in your BIOS.

Here’s a few pointers based on what I’ve found out:

1. The desktop environment or WM is important. Given your need for Steam Link to work I’d suggest using one with X11, as last I checked Steam Link just gives you a black screen and audio under Wayland. Linux Mint would carry over your knowledge of apt while maintaining an interface that’s pretty familiar to Windows users and is I believe still an X11 distro for now.
2. I got the EA app working using Bottles but it constantly feels like a cat-and-mouse game fixing it whenever it has an update. I basically stopped using it altogether for that reason. Not trying to scare you off — it’s just not a great experience.
3. Play with drivers for your GPU. The situation with Nvidia is, I’m told, not as dire as it once was on Linux but still needs more work than AMD or Intel graphics to work well. The proprietary driver may still give the best experience on games, though Nouveau seems to be doing very well. This is admittedly something I need to come back to in order to confirm (I have one machine with Nvidia graphics and it’s in storage specifically because Nvidia graphics under Linux were such a pain).

I’ve run Ubuntu Server frequently on VMs for work, but I could kinda go either way on it. The majority of people who have issues with Ubuntu have philosophical differences. I’m inclined to agree for my personal stuff (in principle I’d rather not get my packages from a single source that works on their own whims, in practice I never use anything but Flathub unless I need a package with deeper permissions) primarily because I believe that Linux should be as open as possible. That said, I already mentioned that my principles there only apply to machines I own, so I guess I’m a bit of a hypocrite 😅

So do cell phones and tablets

I don’t have much to say on this, other than that I appreciate how well-written this deep dive is and I appreciate you for writing it. People get so polarized with these viral math problems and it baffles me.

This is a real post, for what it’s worth, and that’s Wil Wheaton’s real Tumblr.

Ok look I’m not a huge Arch fan either (it’s great for learning the ins and outs of Linux but I’ve gotten to the point that stability is more important than anything to me) but the wiki is the most thorough Linux documentation you can get anywhere. It always, always has the answer, even if you don’t use Arch, lol.

Wikipedia is giving me this:

“Potassium is the chemical element with the symbol K (from Neo-Latin kalium)”

Is it a Core i7 or a Core 2 series processor? 2007 would suggest the latter, and I would absolutely argue for either that you really should prefer something with Xfce or a similar lightweight desktop (maybe Cinnamon or MATE).

I’d probably recommend Linux Mint as a lightweight user-friendly distro, and I’d suggest any of the three available variants based on what you like the most aesthetically.

Additionally, if you haven’t opened them up for a while, pick up an inexpensive SSD for both of them if they don’t have them already. Modern OSes really expect an SSD over a spinning disk as the boot drive.

Hwhat’s this? An overabundance of bees in the workplace? My briefcase full of bees ought to put a stop to that!

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Hi, I have an iPhone and like it because it’s the best device for my needs and Android doesn’t have a critical app I use, and workarounds on Android break things. My case is rare, I admit, but it’s true. I would happily switch to a Pixel once that app’s available on Android.

Assuming that just because I buy a company’s products means I like everything they do is an awfully Rossmanny take though. I like the guy well enough but the blanket statements on things where he doesn’t consider any reasoning other than his worldview absolutely frustrates me.

But the same can be said for some Apple fanboys. The absolute foaming at the mouth when some people get a green text message blaming the customer for buying an Android phone rather than thinking about Apple’s lack of interest in industry standards absolutely baffles me.

Android has many issues with privacy that don’t apply to iOS. While you can degoogle Android, some services don’t work as well and some apps won’t be available at all.

And hey, maybe that’s okay with you! Maybe your phone isn’t as big of an extension of your digital life as it is mine. Maybe it is, but you can get by on exclusively FOSS apps. I think all of that is fantastic, but I am not you, and you are not me, and I think the real sucker is the one who’s sowing division amongst people over how they use their personal devices.

It’s not 2031 yet but I’d absolutely rock a jress

It’s exactly as most people describe: Arch with a Calamares installer, for all the good and bad that entails. I’ve never been sold on Arch for daily driver use since stability and simplicity is paramount to me, so I tend to use Fedora as a relatively up-to-date distro that I can generally trust not to totally break.

However, if you really want to jump in both feet first into troubleshooting and learning Linux, Arch and EndeavourOS are fantastic. Neither holds your hand too much out of the box but they also have an excellent and helpful community and documentation if you run into trouble or don’t know how to do something. Just… you have to be willing to deal with that kinda stuff, and not everyone is (I’m certainly not).

Thinness is not necessarily something that’s super important to most people.

Also, even if it was, my LG V20 is basically the same thickness as my iPhone 13. I say “basically” because the phone with a replaceable battery is actually slightly thinner in this comparison.