Quazatron

Look, I’m doing my best, ok? Back off!

Lenovo ThinkPads are quite compatible.

They are also easy to get into, just undo some screws and you’re in. Just make sure the insides have expandability in case you want to plug in another SSD or more RAM (in this economy?! 😉).

Use whatever feels comfortable. Both are fine. People are complaining about micro annoyances that should not really affect you at first.

When you get comfortable with Linux, you’ll also get to pick sides in micro battles like KDE vs Gnome, vi vs emacs, systemd vs sysv, flatpak vs snap and all the other wonderful my-side-is-better-than-yours fights.

I respectfully disagree. XFCE having the same experience is its main appeal.

AFAIK it’s a project that does not have many developers, so the pace is quite slow, but the reverse side is that there are no surprises. When running production systems you do not want surprises. You want a desktop that lets you work and gets out of the way. That is the reason why XFCE doesn’t get much press but has quite a few satisfied users.

You have much to learn about how things work in FLOSS.

Projects don’t die because you and your cool friends decided that they are old news. They will live on as long as there are users and developers interested in keeping them going. There are countless examples, I’m sure you can find some if you get past your short sightedness.

You can have all the opinions you want. In the end, the ecosystem (Linux is an ecosystem, not an OS) evolves by people with different drives trying different things, some aspects are successful and are kept, some are developed for a while and dropped, some are brilliant but never reach critical mass.

It’s a somewhat chaotic mix of engineering and tinkering that ultimately works while embracing widely opposing opinions. This quirky nature provides it with strength and flexibility.

Bottom line: we need strong opinions and people who act on those opinions to build the vision they want.

Greybeard here.

I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.

Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.

The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.

At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?

Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.

I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.

I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.

Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.