I’m not sure there is a go-to, which is good. There are some gaming-focused ones to be sure, but i’m using Mint which is super mainstream focused and user friendly (and based on ubuntu and debian) and I’ve had a great experience.

It’s funny you mention the office side of things in addition to gaming, because I have remarked about the same thing.

Using Librewolf(firefox) on Linux, all of the M365 applications work fine in the browser. Probably even better, since I can actually close them when I want to. I use Teams the most, which is obviously a very connected thing. But for a word processor, which seems like the most local thing ever, the web app lets me share in MS format and accept comments and all that.

I could absolutely see Microsoft’s execs planning out the most efficient way to grind every bit of value out of the windows brand on their path to subscription everything.

So, I don’t know off the top of my head, but I need to figure it out as well because I have plenty of game installers that I’ll want to use eventually. Lots in my GOG account, others from 20 years ago with sources lost to time, lol.

I would expect that Steam could be used as a launcher, but I know there is also an app called Lutris for managing games and compatibility layers and such.

I’m thinking about it, and yeah I may have not yet installed a windows version of a game outside of Steam at all. Honestly I have most often installed Linux native versions via steam.

Games work great in Linux!

And that’s not like “oh, about 3/4 of my favorite old games work without too much trouble.” It’s more like opening steam and “holy crap, half of my old favorites have native Linux versions and everything else just works using proton.”

Remember, the Steam Deck and the general shittiness of Microsoft has directed a lot of Valve’s resources towards gaming on Linux.

If you want to play some brand new AAA multiplayer thing with rootkit type anti cheat, then maybe you’d be stuck dual booting into windows.

I’d argue that those games could be abandoned, because there is SO much choice out there that I am certain I already own copies of dozens of games that I will never play. But if it’s a matter of playing what your friends are into, then yeah make the computer adapt to the human needs and not the other way around.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

I think that’s also the case any time you are the OS installer and administrator for your own system. I haven’t purchased an off the shelf PC for myself since the '90s, and in the years since then I’ve had many more basic “this shit won’t boot” issues with Windows, though granted I used Windows much more during that time.

And even if you ARE setting up your pen system from scratch, I would submit that the install process for Linux Mint is an order of magnitude simpler than Windows these days.

From the perspective of the MBAs and economists, small landlords being nice like that is just an inefficiency that the invisible hand of the market will eventually sweep away in favor of cold efficient corporate management.

It seems to be that a local landlord is basically just a mom and pop shop that hasn’t closed down yet because it only needs to find one customer to buy its one service.

Being simple to use out of the box is NOT a bad thing on its own. We are simply used to seeing the proprietary profit-driven version, which is the path to enshittification. When something works great out of the box but you still own your machine and have access to any damn thing you want that’s hidden from view by default, that is just a good product.

I’ve been an engineer in electronics and software for over 20 years. I have a masters in software engineering. I currently work on C and C++ code every day for embedded systems, including one that’s embedded linux. The terminal is my comfort zone. Screens full of super-legible monospaced text please my eyes.

I run Linux Mint Cinnamon (btw) on every computer of mine, even my work machine, and I don’t care who knows it!

I recommend it to anybody of any skill level who will listen.

Plus not everybody sees every news story.

Oh I didn’t mean that it couldn’t be done. Just that it wouldn’t be. The people who control such things are actively moving our system in the opposite direction.

That reminds me of the fascist playbook, where the enemy is both strong and weak.

Maybe we should just call it the “lying to control others” playbook.

Making it so corporations cannot directly own some random valuable thing?

It’s a nice thing to think about, but it has 0% chance of happening in our current system.

Absolutely, plus since index funds are cap weighted, ordinary retirement fund investing folks are very much vulnerable to it.

If I pull up VTSAX (vanguard total stock market index fund) what I find is…

Sectors: Technology is 38% of the fund and I see 11 sectors listed.

Top 10equity holdings, in order from the top:

NVDA MSFT AAPL AMZN META AVGO (Broadcom) GOOGL TSLA GOOG BRK.B (Almost like its own index fund)

This is fine!!

the people that like trains and struggle with social cues and are sensitive to sound

Well there goes the last shred of doubt I had that I’m high masking AuDHD.

It’s not new information, and it’s simple stereotypical stuff, but something about the way you phrased it made it hit different.

My kid is exactly like me, so learning how to deal with my issues is doubly valuable.

Why does the real world have to be a YA novel adaptation with paper-thin and one-dimensional villains who are not believable?

Can you please write a metal-as-fuck version of Charlotte’s Web where your black widow blood line watches you work on cars, or just live life or whatever?

I am imagining her as kind of a black leather halloween catwoman punk or slutty version of the original, but only you can tell her real story.

it may not always be projection, but the narrative they’ve been convinced of by their media

You are absolutely correct for the vast majority of ordinary conservatives, in my experience anyway.

They don’t care about finding the best cause or even about being correct. They need to feel outraged and persecuted, so once that’s fed to them they latch on.

Ooh, I have not read this and it sounds pretty good. Just got lost reading a couple pages of it. Thanks for the link!

To that I say, welcome to Lemmy!

It’s pretty wild. There were a few years in the early 2000s where I listened to a lot of talk radio on my commute. I had not yet stumbled upon things like streams/downloads of the Howard Stern show, or the world of podcasts. So I got to hear a bunch of the scary republican talking points back then.

That was about a decade before the dictator projection discussed in the meme, and what sticks out in my memory that is super relevant today?

“Activist judges!”

“Legislating from the bench!”

This effect can be really messed up once you have a kid and they get to the ages where you can remember childhood memories.

Things that took FOR FUCKING EVER as a kid just zip past in the blink of an eye when I’m the parent instead of the child.