Re: Windows Is A Great OS ... If Your Time Is Worth Nothing

On 2025-02-25, CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote:

On 2025-02-24 9:10 p.m., Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2025 20:55:55 -0500, CrudeSausage wrote:
 

If you can still get Windows or MacOS
running on the machine and it doesn't lock you out in any way, don't
bother with Linux. It's fine, but it's not always worth the struggle.

 
I think people are habituated to the kind of struggles you need to get
Windows working, so they discount those compared to effort on a Linux
installation. Because Linux is less familiar (even though the
configuration setups are better understood), that is somehow seen as a
greater struggle.

>
It's not even that. Even if you have the patience to set Linux up
properly, you'll find that a good amount of your hardware won't end up
working. There are always people here and there who claim that they get
it working, but when you follow their own instructions and the
distribution they've used, you get different results. Heck, I followed
the instructions to enable the hardware encryption of my nvme through
Linux and, lo and behold, they didn't work. It works fine in Windows if
you follow the instructions (which require you to have a separate
Windows installation on a USB drive), but Linux won't even get past the
unlocking stage. That is part of why a lot of us just stick to Windows
or MacOS.

It doesn't take much patience to install Linux. In twenty minutes it's
installed and fully updated for me — including most of the applications.
Can't do that with Windows hobbyware. (This depends on how fast your
Internet is — I'm moving soon so my Internet may soon be slower.)

I just got my 2017 MacBook Air with MacOS Monterey yesterday. I am
surprised that most of the software I need installs fine (except
Microsoft Office 365 which requires at least MacOS 13), and the hardware
is in perfect order. The SSD still has 75% health, the inside of the
laptop was fairly clean, HDMI sound somehow works through a
mini-DisplayPort to HDMI adapter and suspend/wake works as it should.
There is no reason to install Linux on this, an eight-year-old Mac I got
for $150. Considering that, I now wonder what hardware is a candidate
for Linux.

My 2012 Mac Mini works fine with Linux Mint 21.3. I dual boot it with Mac
Monterey (using OpenCore). I guess Monterey is now also outdated. I hear
that Ventura is a step too far for these old machines — so this Mac will
probably never be up to date again on the Mac side. On the Linux side I can
probably keep updating it for another ten years.

So you're back in the Mac fold? (You're almost as "computer restless" as I
am.)

--
“Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy
what has been invented or made by the forces of good.”  —J.R.R. Tolkien