If you’re already thinking of extracting/attempting to run a desktop version of Office, you may as well save yourself the effort if you can and give the free online version a try. You’ll be using a proprietary piece of software either way.

Servers are the one thing I’ve generally heard people agree that snaps are good for, so given its history it’s a bit of a strange thing to hear of Ubuntu being a better server distro than desktop distro nowadays.

I’m a centrist but I lean slightly right, and I’ve used Linux for 15 years. There are plenty of conservatives who use Linux for the privacy and security advantages it offers. At least one of the Linux YouTubers I watch is quite conservative. That said, Linux dev communities don’t tend to take kindly to conservative members voicing opinions while many allow left-wing opinions free rein, and some distro devs have openly stated they don’t want conservatives using their software. They should either allow political opinions from everyone or nobody, IMO. I’d say preferably just leave politics out of it altogether, FOSS should be open to be used by anyone regardless of politics or any other factors.

GNOME is more different from Windows, which means that users will have to put more effort in to get used to the UI, but it doesn’t have as many complicated settings or customizability for EVERYTHING that Plasma does, so it can be less confusing in that sense. I switched to primarily using Plasma a couple years ago and I’m probably with Plasma to stay, but personally I think GNOME might be better for Linux beginners. Though if you really want a beginner-friendly DE, go for Cinnamon.

Definitely, XP was by far the best version of Windows. (Telling that I switched to Linux in the Vista era).

Temple OS returns!

Temple OS returns!

Vista bricked my laptop after a year without a reliable way to recover. Made the switch over in 2009.

It’s the Lutris version shipped with 22.04, which by today’s standards is definitely ancient. Because I’m not generally a Flatpak fan for stuff that requires larger packages or dependencies, I went directly to the Lutris PPA. And because I’m running KDE Neon, I had to work around the annoying libpoppler dependency issue that’s always plagued Wine on Neon.

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.

For security Because no one knows of it Why not run Haiku?

In addition to the perception that you have to be “good at computers” (aka a programmer) to use Linux, in my experience a lot of Linux media outlets (websites, YT channels, podcasts, etc) tend to be heavy on advanced features and tools without much explanation in layman’s terms and tend to be geared towards an IT professional/hobbyist audience, which can reinforce that stereotype among those (like me) who are not.

IMO the title of “worst computer tech company” is essentially a tie between MS and Google right now, with the two constantly one-upping the other back and forth on stupid ideas and corporate practices.

Advertising costs money to produce, and the vast majority of paid Linux distro users, such as Red Hat, SUSE, etc., are business/enterprise users, who usually wouldn’t rely on advertising through TV, YouTube, and so on to find enterprise computing solutions. It would be a disconnect between the ad platform and the primary target market.

I don’t really see a whole lot of difference in opinion about Linux itself among the various Linux YouTubers I watch, TBH, nor do I see much difference in honesty in that regard, but I do appreciate Linux Experiment quite a bit for having the most focus on the “average computer user” compared to the others who so often get deep into the technical side of things and put a larger amount of focus on high-level stuff for IT professionals. I just want to find some cool FOSS software and DE features for stuff like media, office software, email and privacy/security. I don’t need hour-long deep dives into the latest distro vs distro or GitHub drama, or in-depth comparisons of the minutiae of different terminals and programming languages for development/networking/so on that most “average computer users” like me are rarely, if ever, going to use. Not that such information doesn’t have value, but it just doesn’t have much value to me specifically.

Really, this seems to be the best way to spread Linux adoption to me. I would bet that Linux got at least a good few users from the Steam Deck coming with it pre-installed. Big way to show people that for most things the average user doesn’t need to go into the command line to use their system for what they need as well. Of course, continued improvement in the software included in the most popular distros would really boost Linux adoption as well. I’ve seen plenty of people say they’d make the switch - if only they could use MS Office or Adobe software on it. Alternatives like LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Kdenlive and the GIMP have come a LONG way since I first made the switch around 2009, but especially the Adobe software still outclasses the competition when it comes to features. MS Office isn’t as hard to let go of, especially since you can still use Office 365 Online on Linux and LibreOffice is closer to having all the OOTB features of MS Office than the other programs are to Adobe, but you have to convince people to give it a try first and a lot of employers still require MS Office for work.

I will also say, though, that it was only due to Windows Vista otherwise bricking my laptop back then that I even made the switch. I’d heard of this mysterious OS named Ubuntu so I thought I’d give it a try to save my laptop before I bought a new one, especially since I was living abroad at the time and didn’t want to deal with the hassle of buying a computer with a foreign language version of Windows on it. So I had a friend burn me a copy of Ubuntu 8.10, it worked like a charm, and I only ever since ran Windows at home when dual-booting for a couple years for gaming purposes before Proton became a thing. I didn’t even know Ubuntu was Linux until I’d installed it and started learning how to use it in earnest. Really showed me how even then Linux wasn’t so difficult to use for the average computer user.

It seems to me to be mainly from people who are dedicated to the Unix philosophy that programs should do only one thing, and do it well. Tying everything up into systemd doesn’t follow that. I don’t care either, and I don’t mind systemd, but some people care about it enough to throw paragraphs of hate on it wherever it’s mentioned online. And apparently it’s “bloat”, and to some " bloat" is worse than the devil himself.

The hate mostly comes from the community that prioritizes free and open source software and being able to control when and how that software updates. If one has those priorities and wants more control over their software, then Ubuntu is not going to be popular. If someone isn’t really aware of the whole idea of FOSS and is just looking for an alternative to Windows, and just picks Ubuntu up and uses it, they’re still likely to find it a perfectly serviceable alternative that they don’t have to spend much time and effort to manage and tinker with to do basic home or office tasks: what most average users use a computer for.

Getting packages from a spider web of repos then not untangling the web before upgrading from one LTS release to another. Ended up with an unfixable problem with essential packages and dependency versions and had to do a fresh reinstall instead. Fortunately I backed up my files first so I didn’t lose anything important.

I used it a few times. Essentially having a one-click scan was nice, but I could never get it to properly update the virus definitions. Now I just run clamd, freshclam and clamonacc at startup. Uses a ton of RAM but then I don’t have to worry about actually doing anything beyond that.