I’ve been almost-ready to ditch Windows for years. Now’s the time.
My new neighbor is an old-school nerd. He hosts install parties at our local leftist third space.
He’s going to help me switch to… not sure yet. Probably Mint. I can’t wait. It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.
Yay.
our local leftist third space.
You have no idea how jealous I am.
Sometimes I look at my life and I feel jealous of myself. Tbh I deliberately moved here (the boonies, and a leftist / alt-culture hotspot of grassroot community living), and it has its cons, but… Next week a wool felter is taking me foraging wild plants to teach me basket weaving, then I’m teaching her the basics of fermenting food (for booze, taste, or preservation), while my 10yo kid is 500km away for her country-wide robotics competition. I’m happily trapped in a caricature.
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Central France. You coming?
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So, in a week or so?
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As an American you can easily get into any country making decent salary (by European standards) as an English teacher. Try Poland, they accept basically anyone unless you’re Muslim
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Mince alors! If been to France multiple times, went to Burgundy last, and je parle in petit peu francais as well. You went full Braiding Sweetgrass and I really envy you! We moved to the county in west Germany and it’s all conservatives here. Not that they are actually conserving anything, though.
Und ich spreche Deutsch! Been to Bavaria (I know) a few times as a kid / teen, my grandmother taught highschool German for decades, and my dad reads Goethe for fun. German was the language I actually loved. Never use it nowadays though, and it’s so rusty I can’t do anything with it anymore. And my traitor kid just picked Italian as her 2nd foreign language. She sucks.
I thought it said “nerd space” not “third space” and I was like what’s that??!!
I need one though.
What’s a “third space”? 🫣
It’s a term from city planing. Essentialy places that are not your place of work or someone’s home.
Here is a more in depth explainer by NotJustBikes: https://youtu.be/VvdQ381K5xg
Thanks! I had no idea that was a term. I suggest we upgrade those places to “second place”
Critically somewhere that doesn’t cost money to simply exist in.
Why not both? 🤓
Do you live in a city? If you do, there is something of the sort in most cities; you just need to know the right people or look in the right places.
If not, yeah, rough, you could try travelling in to a city though.
Before anyone says anything, no my city is not huge, no I am not in the US. The political left is active pretty much everywhere on earth, sometimes more or less underground depending on the conditions, but they’ll have some sort of spaces for themselves.
Mint is a good choice. It just works.
Yo, so first of all, congrats on being able to ditch Windows! Second of all, I got hype-convinced to make the switch a few days ago and I have LOVED it. Moving from Windows to Mint (at least so far) was a breeze. There’s a tiny bit more thought overhead that goes into fixing things sometimes, but if I’m really honest about that, I had a lot of that with Windows, too, I just have decades of fixing Windows experience.
Nice move.
Feel free to check back and share your experience.
The only thing stopping a mass exodus is that there is no single version of Linux that is just dominating. I know that defeats the purpose of Linux, but that is what the dumb masses (such as myself) want. We want easy, and we don’t want to be special. If I have a problem I want a thousand others with the same problem, not my own little unique problem that I have to take hours away from my day to fix.
I’d say the stopping thing is a few multiplayer PvP games with anticheat, also some software that won’t work in Wine (adobe products, corel products, microsoft products).
Yes, I know alternatives exist (Krita, Inkscape, LibreOffice). No, they are not 100% drop-in replacements. I for myself love working in LibreOffice Writer, but when you work in a place where everyone except you uses MS Word and expects DOCX files, you can’t “just” switch to linux without issue.
The fediverse has the same issue
Awesome to hear!
+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.
It’s my #1 “just works” distro
I know you’re getting a million suggestions and to be clear- nothing is wrong with Mint, but I recommend Fedora Kinoite as a first distro if you’re coming from Windows. KDE is going to be more familiar and the way the backend is designed makes it basically impossible to meaningfully break.
Bazzite or Zorin too
Definitely Bazzite, I also love Zorin but IMO that’s more an “Install on your dad’s laptop” OS than something for someone who knows how to install an OS.
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Hah! I definitely didn’t mean any shade at Zorin! I used it for a while too. I ultimately moved to Fedora Kinoite and now Bazzite for the exact reasons you described, the immutability makes it even harder to break than Zorin.
It’s great we have so many good options these days.
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"It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.
Yay. " Yay indeed. Just started my Cinnamon journey. Old Win7 laptop - never going back, to Apple either.
i quite like the out-of-the-box experience of debian13 running gnome, but i had to do quite a bit of tinkering to get my nvidia card running. it is running now, and i basically feel like i have a brand new computer.
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Rural France, as far from the 20 biggest cities as geographically possible, a hard-left hotspot for the last few centuries. Tbh we have like 10 local leftist third places (a co-op bar/live shows place, a freecycle place, two boardgame/rpg bars, a pay-what-you-can (good) restaurant with ultra-local food, a community hall for crafts, homework, WFH, and random meetings,two community theaters.)
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It really is. Of course, we still live in a wider context of corporate capitalism, and it sucks here as it does in the whole country. They’re gutting public transit, school budgets, and healthcare. Our local representatives are hard-right assholes, because the old farts vote more than us.
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Fantastic love to see it. No recommendations as you will find what suits your zen, Mint is loved by many
I comment to add a cheers for bailing on Amazon & not paying for streaming services. Did so also years ago, its a great feeling. Good luck!
You’re going to start switching on saturday, and keep switching the following week, and… it’s a process 😁 Have fun !
Good luck!
Oh so now I’m committed I need luck all of a sudden?
Have fun! Whatever you do, if you run into an issue you can’t solve, stick with it. You’ll learn and become better over time.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for about 3 years now and it’s been great. Had some hiccups here and there but they were solved with some searching.
Sounds like you’re in good hands. Enjoy the ride, plenty to learn and to feel good about understanding :)
