BladeFederation

When ECC no longer costs a mortgage, I will look into upgrading.

Admitting their mistakes makes me want to read their articles more. If only Microsoft could bring themselves to do the same.

Your technical knowledge as described is unironically far beyond the average user so I’d say you’re probably good. Depends on what you want to do though. You can occasionally have problems if you need to do something specific or are married to software that doesn’t exist on Linux. Word processing is down pat. You won’t have the app version of Microsoft Office, but there are open source alternatives like LibreOffice that are compatible with Office file types. For formatting, you may have to download some Microsoft owned fonts since they’re technically proprietary and not bundled with Linux/your office suite. In browser, Microsoft 365 and Google Docs works no differently than normal.

As someone else mentioned, you can test almost any distro on a live USB. There is also this site where you can remote in and test the general look and feel for free. You won’t have an internet connection though:

https://distrosea.com/

Which is why you buy a Windows machine, then put Linux on it. You said there’s no reason to buy a Windows machine. Even if you abandon Windows forever, there’s still a reason to buy it. There are use cases that Apple silicon is not good for, like gaming. And having competition is good.

Kind of a weird example to say that people won’t online shop too. That’s far more common for all types of people than walking into a store is these days.

Average people still game. And Linux is improving rapidly. Apple isn’t.

You known what, good job Apple. You’ve been winning me over lately. I’m not sure I’d exactly recommend this route to people, the 8 GB RAM is rough even with macOS being more efficient with it. But in the RAM-pocalypse we’ll take what we can get, and the rest is fire for budget range.

Sure there is, so you can put Linux on it!

That is so true, and can’t be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn’t even a great deal, though I was fine with it.

Now the budget market is…pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It’s GRIM out there.

Hell yeah

“What could be worse than MICROSOFT overseeing open source software? Wait no! It was a rhetorical question!”

It’s supposed to be for Android 16 kn general once the feature is fully baked

It works fine enough. It’s not going to replace my desktop PC any time soon but it helps a lot for anything involving word processing/documents, as well as gaming on TVs and monitors.

CryptPad is encrypted Google Docs/Office 365. Proton has been expanding their offering for this, but it’s not as good in my opinion.

That’s why I like it actually. It forces me to interact with the community, it’s more organic that way, and I need to eventually move in with my life instead of doom scroll. I get to the end and go “well that’s the end of the internet for a day or two”

Let’s gooooooo