Linux Mint is probably the perfect educational OS to switch to like that. I’m assuming most people are coming from Windows, are mouse+gui only, and are not used to being their own admin and installing all the basics like Firefox and libreoffice.
But it’s still Linux, so the user friendliness doesn’t mean you are locked out from going on tech or customization deep dives. Daily terminal user here, still love me some mint.
I picked up a great little test along the way: type the word ill or illegal followed by 100, using a capital I in illegal and mixing an upper case O and a zero in the number.
Ill10O
Can you clearly tell all these characters apart in your editor font?
I am all about Fira Code, myself
Well you can do that today. Find a tree out in the middle of nowhere and sit under it without any electronic devices. Then you are oblivious to all that stuff.
There is much wisdom buried in what seems like a simple comment here.
Even if you aren’t in the middle of nowhere, you can find or create your oasis.
He slew two white whales in the same building!
Looking at it like a team sport is pretty silly, yeah, but I’m still willing to use Steam just the same. No billionaire or successful corporation is “my” people, but doing business with the ones that are decent to their customers seems fine.
Gaming generally involves paying money for proprietary software anyway, so that’s not a realm where the existence of any DRM is a showstopper for me personally. Any per-game DRM with heinous kernel-level shit such that it won’t run on Linux at all, that stuff is fine to just not exist in my world.
The performance of Jellyfin is so much better in my experience. That and the FOSS benefits won me over quickly, and I have had a lifetime Plex pass for years.
The downside is that you have to do a little IT work if you want to share with family in an easy (for them) way and use https. For sure, it’s a thing, but for me as a non web dev it was worth it.
Now I can give family and friends a URL, login, password, and one or more app suggestions depending on their device and type of media. And all of them seem to have snappy performance while not showing my people ads or hitting them up for paid services.
Throw something like Mint on their old laptops and they may not need new ones at all!
Unless they don’t have current ones, then ignore me, lol.
It’s like that is the hippo’s Slayer form from Baldur’s Gate 2.
But they have a Bruce-Banner-esque secret… they are always the Slayer.
As I get older I have found that making my world smaller and focusing on the things I genuinely care about (and not the things I’m “supposed to” care about as a “good” man/American/worker etc) results in me being happier and more satisfied with life.
Lemmy is my close little corner of the internet. I hope that the fediverse grows ands takes over for the good of other people, but if it stays in this niche for another decade I’ll be happy because I already love it for what it is.
If you are the “computer person” in your family, you probably have experience screwing with, breaking, and fixing whatever OSes you have used over the years.
The refreshing difference with Linux is that the software and the people who created it are not trying to prevent you from doing what you want with your computer.
I use mint on two different machines with Nvidia GPUs. One is a several year old desktop with a 1080 and the other is a two year old Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia GPU in addition to the Intel one on the processor.
Now granted I don’t play a ton of games right now, and when I do they usually aren’t cutting edge, but I don’t recall many problems so far. I use NVENC for Jellyfin and editing videos more often, and that has been pretty smooth. The one issue I had was related to that though. Kdenlive (flatpak) updated and could no longer export videos because it was looking for a newer version of something my mint-supplied nvidia driver wasn’t yet updated to have.
Trying to install a newer driver manually was a whole damn thing though, so I rolled back the kdenlive flatpak to the one that worked.
I learned the command line on Sun Solaris Unix in the 90s, after messing with DOS first. At work I have a terminal open all the time, though I’ll use GUI versions of some things too.
I use mint btw.
I like the concept of destroying the biosphere by shredding the entire fucking planet, lol.
Using a calculator I referenced further down in the thread, a back hole with a 0.5m radius so that the event horizon would fit within the cubic meter would have a mass of over 56 earths. We’d be proper fucked!
According to a random black hole calculator I found, a black hole with a 0.5m radius would be over 56 earth masses and the temperature would only be 0.000364 K. So, still orders of magnitude less than the cosmic microwave background.
I know smaller black holes evaporate faster, but even that little thing (according to the calculator) would have a lifetime of a gargantuan multiple of the age of the universe. Like roughly a number followed by 45 zeros, times the age of the universe.
The calculator: https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiation-calculator
Jellyfin was more work on my end so that family could connect with https, but for me to set them up it’s literally just “here is the URL, login, and password.”
Every developer I’ve met who uses Windows always had a tongue in cheek sort of “well it kind of sucks in some ways but it’s what I’m used to, one day maybe I’ll get off my ass and change OS”.
This used to be me, kind of. I’ve been an engineer for over 20 years, with the last couple being full time “developer.”
But I finally made that switch at work over a year ago (booting into Linux instead of using a VM) and at home a few months ago. This probably goes without saying, but I am never going back! It’s one thing to know there are options out there that people like you prefer, but it’s another entirely to get used to the better option then try the enshittified one again.
Plurday is when me and the boys go to the clurb.
I had a Celeron 300A running at 500mhz
Ah, Celerons and the heyday of overclocking. I think I had a 266@400, 300A@500, and a dual socket motherboard with two 350s@550 or something like that. Experimental multithreading in Quake 3! I was in college and constantly working on my computer.
For all you “kids these days,” imagine you got a new high end CPU that had a max boost clock of 6GHz. You go into the BIOS and say “How about we make that 9Ghz instead?” The CPU is just like “bet” and runs at that speed kicking ass for years without issue.
My joke in my household is that no clean flat surfaces can exist.
My medicated ADHD ass is still plenty messy, but my non-medicated wife will put any item down in any place when she’s done with it or it’s in her way. Then it disappears from existence for an hour or a month or so. Unless it’s outside or in a room we don’t use daily… then the possible range expands a lot.
As an American I think I have a good way for the fediverse to gain momentum as people flee fascist US tech companies.
achem….
“Europe! Canada! Fucking HELP! We broke everything again!”
Seriously though, while government-run and “official” instances may not be a fit for many of us here, it could make huge strides with mainstream users. Maybe getting a large percentage of people invite onboard in a small country or two could be the seed that gets it to spread.