Last weekend I talked my wife into trying Linux on her desktop on an extra SSD I had, she loves it. Loves that she can customize everything, says it’s faster (especially boot time), we put it on her laptop last night
What distro did you go with? My friend is showing intrest in trying Linux but I’m not sure what to recommend him. I use more advanced distros myself but I want it to work well for him OOtB while also not requiring any tinkering. I’m think of either some ubuntu-flavour or fork, like Kubuntu or maybe Mint.
Mint is for sure a good place to start. I personally run EndeavourOS with Cinnamon desktop and it’s been more trouble-free than anything Ubuntu based I’ve used (shocking, I know).
Interesting! I used arch for about 2 years on my gaming rig and it worked fine but I was worried if he went with something based on Arch that he would eventually run into issues due to not properly maintaining it (avoiding partial upgrades for example). But I’m probably overthinking it. If he sticks to a GUI for installing and updating packages and avoid messing with the terminal initially it should be fine.
I will add EndeavourOS to a small list of recommendations (rolling vs point release) so he can decide for himself.
Mint and PopOS! are the ones I’ve heard thrown about for “Users First Distro” ever since Canonical decided to do… whatever the fuck it is they’re doing to Ubuntu proper.
I’m using Mint now, and have exactly one complaint: I don’t like the default Cinnamon Firefox icon so I changed it, but every time there’s an update to Firefox it changes back. All things considered, that’s nothing to worry about.
Maybe it’s because I disable things and go through the settings with a fine tooth comb after a fresh install but I never see this stuff. Not discounting others’ experiences either. Can’t imagine being inundated with this stuff like some are claiming they are.
I mean, yes, you can do that, but then that brings us to the question: why does the user have to do that, spend a lot of time changing settings to make an OS bearable? Imho, any OS should ship with sensible defaults that have the user in mind.
If there’s little to no need to go through the settings, you probably will miss a lot of them and never know.
Also, I think after a fresh install going through some settings to check out what you have, what you don’t have and what you can have is not something only power users should do, but that’s a power user’s opinion 😅
Thing is, most normal users do not care about the settings. They use the computer like a TV, turn it on and expect it to work.
Nothing is stopping power users from looking through the settings to find good things to tweak, of course, but setting weird defaults to make a user look at their settings is indefinitely worse than, say, an optional tour of the OS that greets the user on their first login.
Same. With Windows 10, everyone was like there are ads and shit in the Start menu and browser nagging and all that jazz - never ever seen any of them. After fresh install, I do my settings, let it sit for a while to do the Windows Update, delete (uninstall) all the unneccessary tiles from Start and that’s it, literally.
I didn’t feel like it was that much when I used windows either. But then I started dual booting linux, and I realized just how much I had been ignoring. I had just gotten used to closing every notification without reading it. It’s kind of cursed knowledge thing. It only takes like <10s a day, but once I noticed it it really bothered me.
Microsoft loves popups. It feels like it is at least a few times that MS office puts a pop up in front of some button that I’m going to click to tell me about a new feature that I won’t use. Admittedly, I don’t know how to tell users about new features in a better way, but annoying users can’t be right.
I remember an old anecdote from sometime around 2005, that Microsoft did a survey to see what features people wanted added to the Office suite, of the top 10 requested features, 8 were already in the products and the users didn’t know about them.
The whole suite was bloated with stuff most people didn’t need, or at least very rarely needed, but no one wanted to take time to take a class on Excel, or read patch notes, or whatever.
I assume it’s just a test they’re running on specific groups of people just to see how effective it is in getting people to switch. I’ve never had any of these types of things happen to me either, so, yeah.
I’m in the US and the only time I see mention of edge is when installing windows and then again when changing my default browser, which is kinda silly but not something I bother wasting mental energy to care about when it’s something that shows up once and then never again. I would love to see legislation in the US match what some of the European countries have but considering how things could be, it’s of least concern to me. I paid for Windows once in my life via an OEM license I ordered from a German retailer and I’ve had about 16 or so computers since then and all of those have either been custom built machines, used computers, or parted together boxes so if they want to bug me about installing their browser which effectively will recoup revenue based on data from me which varies from useless to misleading and probably becomes a net negative and moves them further from their goal. Then sure, I don’t mind clicking that “no thank you” button
They do, and it’s also mentioned in the article. While I agree, for many people the browser is effectively their os, and so we shouldn’t discount the weight of browser notifications simply because they’re not originating from the host os.
What’s your point, exactly? Let’s say we accept your premise that this is an unfair double-standard that Microsoft shouldn’t have to respect… have you considered the logical conclusion that this creates? That the public should just… blithely accept Google-style nag prompts baked into literally any piece of software or hardware, even when they hold a paid license? I don’t think a reasonable person would intentionally advocate for such a thing, so please help me understand what you really meant.
That’s neither my premise nor the logical conclusion of the premise you invented.
A reasonable person should interpret my comment to mean that Google does the same thing, and if you feel a certain way about Microsoft for doing this, you should feel the same way about Google.
Calibre performance is worst then the old Edge in term of loading time. The old Edge loads almost instantly. Plus the interface is more user friendly then Calibre.
And I feel like that happened really quickly. It doesn’t feel like that long ago that Edge was a nice, nimble browser. Not this bloated naggy beast it is now.
I find Edge better than Chrome at the very least. Granted, I don't use either as my main options, but between the two Edge seems more responsive and lighter than Chrome (and before anyone misunderstands, I know they both use the same engine, I'm referring to ... well, prior to Google, I would have referred to it as the chrome, but can't really do that now... the application around the engine).
I daily edge at work because I just wanted to and I like how it integrates with our domain. It’s fine, but I did have to spend some time turning off weird things like price trackers or whatever it was.
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