If you’re already thinking of extracting/attempting to run a desktop version of Office, you may as well save yourself the effort if you can and give the free online version a try. You’ll be using a proprietary piece of software either way.

Servers are the one thing I’ve generally heard people agree that snaps are good for, so given its history it’s a bit of a strange thing to hear of Ubuntu being a better server distro than desktop distro nowadays.

I’m a centrist but I lean slightly right, and I’ve used Linux for 15 years. There are plenty of conservatives who use Linux for the privacy and security advantages it offers. At least one of the Linux YouTubers I watch is quite conservative. That said, Linux dev communities don’t tend to take kindly to conservative members voicing opinions while many allow left-wing opinions free rein, and some distro devs have openly stated they don’t want conservatives using their software. They should either allow political opinions from everyone or nobody, IMO. I’d say preferably just leave politics out of it altogether, FOSS should be open to be used by anyone regardless of politics or any other factors.

GNOME is more different from Windows, which means that users will have to put more effort in to get used to the UI, but it doesn’t have as many complicated settings or customizability for EVERYTHING that Plasma does, so it can be less confusing in that sense. I switched to primarily using Plasma a couple years ago and I’m probably with Plasma to stay, but personally I think GNOME might be better for Linux beginners. Though if you really want a beginner-friendly DE, go for Cinnamon.

Definitely, XP was by far the best version of Windows. (Telling that I switched to Linux in the Vista era).

Temple OS returns!

Temple OS returns!

Vista bricked my laptop after a year without a reliable way to recover. Made the switch over in 2009.

It’s the Lutris version shipped with 22.04, which by today’s standards is definitely ancient. Because I’m not generally a Flatpak fan for stuff that requires larger packages or dependencies, I went directly to the Lutris PPA. And because I’m running KDE Neon, I had to work around the annoying libpoppler dependency issue that’s always plagued Wine on Neon.

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.

In addition to the perception that you have to be “good at computers” (aka a programmer) to use Linux, in my experience a lot of Linux media outlets (websites, YT channels, podcasts, etc) tend to be heavy on advanced features and tools without much explanation in layman’s terms and tend to be geared towards an IT professional/hobbyist audience, which can reinforce that stereotype among those (like me) who are not.

IMO the title of “worst computer tech company” is essentially a tie between MS and Google right now, with the two constantly one-upping the other back and forth on stupid ideas and corporate practices.

Advertising costs money to produce, and the vast majority of paid Linux distro users, such as Red Hat, SUSE, etc., are business/enterprise users, who usually wouldn’t rely on advertising through TV, YouTube, and so on to find enterprise computing solutions. It would be a disconnect between the ad platform and the primary target market.

<Or are we just presuming we’re all immune from the bad guys targeting Windows?>

Yes, I find that does tend to be the attitude among most Linux articles/videos/etc I see on the subject. There’s some truth to it, in that from what I understand Linux is immune to much of it, but it’s not entirely true. Malware for Linux does exist, so IMO people should not be as complacent about malware as many seem to be, but the community based open-source nature of most Linux software helps mitigate it SOMEWHAT (NOT entirely, because it’s dependent on trusting the community to both want to defend against it and have the skill to do so). Unlike Windows malware defense (to a degree, Windows patches have gotten leagues better than in the past), the primary way Linux stops malware is removing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. It’s another reason you won’t see nearly as much Linux malware showing up as on Windows: it can’t spread if there’s no exploit to spread through. I do still run Clam and a firewall primarily for my own peace of mind because on my system aside from Clamd using a crap-ton of RAM they don’t really slow it down to a visible degree. Long story short, Linux malware is indeed much rarer than Windows malware, but it does exist and I’m not keen on Linux media people giving the impression that security isn’t something to watch for with Linux for the average user.

You never know, given the Deck has desktop mode. That said, still is a good thing with or without the Deck bolstering the numbers.

Was gonna ask if this stat included the Steam Deck, as that’s also accounting for the vast majority of Linux gaming numbers. Whether it does include the Deck or not, it’s a nice rise, but all the better if it doesn’t include the Deck. I wonder if the popularity of using Linux on the Raspberry Pi is helping too.

I remember Gens back in the day, really solid competitor to Fusion, but hasn’t been updated in a good decade. Last system I had it installed on was a laptop with 14.04, IIRC. I might still have a .deb of it on a hard drive somewhere, now I’m curious to see if it would work on a more modern OS/machine. On a similar note, anyone know if Gens was forked or anything like a successor cropped up anywhere?

I’ve been using it for the past year and can confirm, snap is an option but not forced on you like the *buntu family. It even comes with Flatpak and Flathub installed by default (and does not force that on you either). You have freedom of choice.

In addition, if you don’t want to go the rolling release route, there’s OpenSUSE Leap (which is transitioning to ALP), as well as at least one immutable option if that’s more your thing.

Is this Mozilla just essentially offering an alternative to the Firefox snap, or is there anything actually different in this package feature-wise compared to other packages (snap, flatpak, etc)?