There should be a legal requirement to call a targeted advertisement a targeted advertisement. Being allowed to call them “recommendations” only makes these assholes feel emboldened to push ads where people wouldn’t normally accept them. Microsoft is pulling that dirty trick as well.

As someone who recently switched to Linux and doesn’t like to tinker much and doesn’t have very deep knowledge of Linux, I’ll share my experience. Whether you ultimately try or not is up to you.

Your requirements for accessibility suggests you should look into a distro with KDE Plasma as many said already. It is an extremely flexible and customizable DE.

I personally started with Mint and ended up somewhat wedging KDE in it because I didn’t like how cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. It worked but was a little rough around the edges in that setup, as it should be expected with a distro running a DE it wasn’t meant to. If you don’t mess with the DE however I’ve found Mint to be super easy and approachable. But ultimately it might not be what you need.

After doing a lot of research and comparisons I then switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with native KDE plasma. A few things took a little extra tinkering and learning to get them to work but after that it became the setup I am happy to stick with for a long while.

I have no experience with them but KUbuntu and Fedora Plasma Spin might be also good alternatives to look for.

Running games is very easy through stream and still relatively easy with Bottles, which is rather easy and straightforward to lean to use. As long as you have the right video drivers installed. I have an NVidia card which made it a little more complicated but I made it work still. My understanding is that this shouldn’t be any issues with AMD cards right out of the box.

Ultimately it will require you to learn a little here and there whenever you come across something you don’t know. But as someone who only has an extremely shallow understanding of how the OS works and basic common console commands I have found no problem so complicated that I couldn’t handle with a quick web search.

Thanks for letting me know. Just blocked lemmy.ml from my feed.

Microsoft needs to be broken up.

Any company that can be so blatantly anti consumer and still makes boatloads of money is obviously abusing its dominant position on the market.

The sad part is that all of this is all self-inflicted in the name of “growth” for the shareholders. They absolutely could take 7, modernize it, call it “12” and release it as a lightweight, fast and more privacy-respecting OS. It would probably be far cheaper to make as well.

But that’s not what the Corporate elements of the company want. They see the OS as a platform to force feed to the users features that they can market as “lucrative” to the shareholders. Nobody else wants that. I predict that Windows 12 will have some sort of baked in “AI” that you can’t get rid of as a bare minimum.

But this is none of my concern. They’ve finally pushed me over the hump and now I’m 100% sold to Linux. It has gotten so much more approachable than it used to be. Especially with Mint.

Microsoft is dead to me.

Maybe if after a disastrous enough reception of Windows 11 they might make a Windows 12 that actually cares about being more palatable to the users, like they did with Windows 7 following the disaster that was Vista.

But I think they’ll most probably only move to meet us halfway like they did with Windows 10 following the other disaster that was 8. Where they replaced a major irritant with another and then slowly stacked more and more irritants with updates thereafter. They are too addicted to the revenue from data harvesting to give it up.

I was hesitant for a long while and ended up installing Linux Mint on an old SSD I had laying around this way there was no commitment.

Now I’m realizing I haven’t booted up my regular windows 10 drive ever since and am considering getting rid of it altogether.

On a side note I created a virtual machine on the Linux side that runs Windows 10 LTSC on it for a few other programs I sometimes need that would be very difficult or impossible to make work on Linux like Inventor, Office and Photoshop. It lives trapped in the box and isn’t allowed to connect to the internet. If I need to download something for it I download it on Linux and drag and drop it into the box. It’s like having a little pet Windows that you keep locked in a pen, so it works for you and only for you and it can’t escape to go into your house to spy on you and shit bloatware all over your carpet.

I have a Lexmark black and white laser printer which I’ve used lightly for years (went through one and a half paper packs so far) and it’s still going strong with the original toner cassette. And when I’ll need to replace it I know there are third party cassettes available on the market for it which are substantially cheaper than OEM. I bought it to replace a Brother inkjet printer which was just an ink/money pit despite being a Brother. Inkjet is absolute crap no matter the brand. HP makes it even worse with a ton of assholeish DRM layered on top.

Ultimately there are two big things to avoid: inkjet and HP. Look up a laser printer and make sure that there is third party cassette support for it before you buy. Brother is apparently good in laser but don’t necessarily limit yourself to that brand.

I’ve always wanted to know this from someone who beat the game for their first time as a grown adult:

I beat the game when I was 10-ish and the sad ending hit me so hard that even today hearing that end credit song makes me feel morose. I used to think it was because of what a masterpiece the game always was and how masterfully they’ve made that ending, but was it just because I was too young? How does that ending hit to an adult?

Well, if you don’t sleep you could work all of those 70 hours under 3 days

Change the small balloon for an “80” and the average will be correct.