That’s what I’m finding. I was on Pop-os for a while and battery life was amazing. I started hopping again and found a real drop on Debian, Elementary, and now Ubuntu.

If you don’t mind my asking, what are your main use cases? Mine are mainly browser-based and documents.

Any experience with laptop battery life on Cachy?

Yes, exactly. You would choose your Linux distribution that has a “live boot” option, download the appropriate .iso file, and then make a bootable usb drive using that file, via software like Rufus. When that’s all complete, you would plug in the usb drive and reboot. (You may need to press a key or access your system’s BIOS settings to ensure your system boots from the usb as well - sometimes this is not automatic.)

The chosen OS will load directly from the USB and give you a chance to try it out. You may not have access to the data from your existing system in this mode, but you may not need that if you’re just kicking the tires.

This exercise also helps focus you more on what you actually need/want your system to be able to do. Most of my personal use is web browsing, media consumption, and basic documents and Linux is more than capable of delivering on all of that right out of the box.

If you get stuck on a step, there are probably hundreds of posts out there where someone had the same problem, so you should be able to find solutions to any problems that occur with some patience.

I have found the journey to be very freeing and rewarding, and hope you find the same.

What you’ve found is probably sufficient if you have a small amount of data or only need this type of display rarely.

Another approach to solving this would be to create a date table listing all of the date units between the start and end of your timeline and represent those as having no value. When you add your values to this data set you ensure proportional spacing, as every date unit in the set will be represented. This type of work is much easier to do using Power Query, if you have access to that Excel add in.

I have several older laptops that would not perform well on windows 11 running Linux mint, Debian, Ubuntu with no problem. If you stick with distributions that let you try the os from a bootable usb first, this should increase your comfort level and help you feel better about your decision.

One note, depending on your laptop BIOS, you may have trouble booting a live USB. I experienced this with Ubuntu and Pop-os, but the issue is solved by creating the bootable USB with a GPT partition instead of the default MBR. The only reliable way I have found to do this is using Rufus on Windows, so keep in mind you may need a Windows machine around for this purpose.

Good luck and have fun!

While fentanyl is deadly serious, the “crisis” of it flowing over the US border is the made-up emergency on which Trump bases his legitimate authority to levy these tariffs. Without an emergency he would have no legal basis to fuck around like this without violating our trade agreements (which he signed last time around), so it’s part of the narrative, regardless of any amount of truth to it.

The “crisis” will end only when they determine it is no longer useful to pursue these tactics and switch to some other type of fuckery. It’s just as likely that he will declare them resolved as a face-saving measure so he can stop the bleeding at home. Art of the deal!

I fucking hate Adobe.

These fucking headlines.

Hey LA Times, how about

“Air Force conducts routine unarmed test launch of ballistic missile”

or something similar that doesn’t make me panic and think “wtf have these circus clowns done now?” Plenty of “shit-your-pants” scary headlines happening just now, no need to make up new ones just for the clicks.

I saw these a few days ago and they reminded me that I am a moderator of a sleepy little community. 😆

Thankfully the mod tools were very effective in banning the user and nuking comments.

Thanks for the summary. I signed up for it just in case, but don’t think I’ll end up using it. I have a similar experience with Mastodon, but then I was never really into Twitter, either.

I share your feelings on the importance of open platforms. While reddit may have been shitty for a while, the whole third-party apps thing was an eye-opener for me, and started me thinking about (and moving toward) open source.

My next big challenge will be to de-Google, but I’m increasingly up for it. Problem is I have a ton of site identities associated with my email address there, so we’ll see how that works out.

I agree that if you’re finding it hard to go in every day it may be time for a change. The main strategy I have used is to try to get clear on what you want, what you would consider to be need-to-have vs. nice-to-have. You can do this by making lists of things you like where you are now and things you don’t. The things you like are what you want to try to replicate somewhere else.

The main thing is to try to be more about moving toward something you want, and less about moving away from something you hate. Not always possible, but good to strive for. Otherwise you could end up repeatedly changing jobs to get away from bad people and drama, which, as many others have pointed out, will always be there to some degree.

I wish you well in your search. Stress is a real killer, and sometimes we don’t know how bad it is until we’re out of that environment. Trust your gut.

Like others here, I dumped Reddit and moved here (and to Mastodon) full time. I also moved to Linux full time on my home laptop and haven’t missed Windows one little bit. I’m looking forward to experimenting more with a couple of other distros of interest (currently Pop_OS) and am having actual fun using my computer again. Heavy emphasis on adopting as many FOSS alternatives as possible in ‘24, and starting to separate myself from the big G.

Sounds like a great experience! Congrats.

I switched from full-time windows to full-time Linux with Pop_OS and haven’t looked back. I’m very happy with it and enjoy finding FOSS alternatives to my former go-to apps. So far so good. I’m also keeping an eye on Vanilla OS as that sounds like a very cool project that is headed to beta by summer.