It depends.

A 2-5 year-old laptop, you want to web browse, maybe watch some videos, use google docs or open office, you probably never need a terminal

If it’s a really new laptop or you want to get the most out of video drivers and push it harder, you’ll probably need to be ready for some light terminal crap. Gets a little janky if you have a dual-video-card setup. Nothing hard to handle, but if you’re not looking to have to handle anything…

I think the numnber of available packages is better on the Debian side. Mint or Kubuntu run newer hotter stuff, debian runs older more stable stuff.

Ying and Yang. You don’t give us what we want, we don’t buy into it.

We’ll buy POS chinese laptops before we rent a desktop from them.

I don’t understand, we had this in the 90’s and it didn’t work then. No company or user wanted their whole desktop to be offsite.

It’s the blanket name for their security architecture. The thing that makes sure your kernel is blessed, tries teo tell if you’re rooted, then sets a fuse flag if anything is off. It also provides a secure, encrypted profile for your phone that bifurcates apps, data, blocks screenshots. The data from the flag is available to apps to tell that your phone is potentially insecure. For the most part, they only block Samsung banking/pay apps and make your secure partition inaccessible.

My next phone will be something degoogled. hopefully something linux.

I’ve already wiped an old disconnected android phone for use with my drone/cameras that require a mobile device.

That means they were making money by people running their os.

If they spend the money on re-engineering their devices not to allow it, there was a cost advantage to selling your data.

2023/4 was steam but it was also before Microsoft started losing their mind thinking forcing people into AI would just blow over.

I expect 2026 will have a couple more percent as a load of people are trying to escape and some of them will make it.

why is the acceleration still slow?

1. There’s no marketing

2. Fear. Linux used to be a lot more complicated. It has a reputation. Windows is still far better at getting you to a gui if you really fuck it up. Checkpoints on updates and safe mode save a lot of peoples bacon.

3. Game performance is still markedly slower, and anti-cheat titles are unplayable.

Games are getting better, ease to install is getting better. Title availability is slowly getting better, but a lot of it is electron, so the titles themselves are getting worse. Wine/Proton is amazing and improving every day.

They want the key, verifiably off the box, in clear text. Any usb stick. any sd card. Not great, but not any barrier that’s worse than needing to setup a microsoft account.

it’s default in that it’s the top item on the list, but I can’t actually fault them much here, that dialog is crystal clear and you have to log into a Microsoft account to save it there. They don’t really push you very hard to put the key into their cloud.

I fault them more for not using zero-knowledge encryption to protect the user’s key.

Grey area, user chose to store the private bitlocker key to their online Microsoft acct, it’s optional. It’s still a dirtbag move, but probably less illegal.

Yup, I know just where that happens. It’s probably a joy to work in your IT. They probably have a keyboard macro for “no”

Not accounting for any interesting custom choices you made under the hood, the default file browser for both os’s use libfuse3 for MTP. My point is, it shouldn’t have crashed, there are open issues in libfuse3 for possible crashes, so you might just have hit one at the wrong time, but at that, it REALLY shouldn’t have f’d over your journaling filesystem enough to keep you from logging in. A breaking read/write to fuse should not have been able to f your journal over beyond a simple automatic recovery. Most of the design choices in Linux over the last decade have been made specifically to prevent that kind of thing from happening on a healthy system. One can argue that one distro is more stable than another because they take, or refuse to take newer packages, but for your specific issue, they use the same piece of software under the hood.

The wipe and new OS might have just moved the problems to a less visible area.

My primary anger with Wayland is the security issues that broke AHK that they’re just now considering. There’s been lots of finger pointing over the years, but now that most OS’s are ditching X11 support all together, we’re going to see a lot more compatibility coming in the next year or two.

I like to know when a package arrives, and when someone has stolen it.

Doorbell cams are just too convenient. You already have power there. There’s footage and audio.

Of course, I’m technically inclined…

Ubiquiti offers a product that will do that out of the box

1. You need to host a controller for it. It needs the Protect platform to interface with. You can host that for free.
2. The hardware is fine.
3. The included app is marginal
4. it supports onifv and can be added to blue-iris or frigate.

It would be kinda cool if you could submit dashcam footage of people cutting people off and blowing down the road at 3x the speed and have their insurance company see it though.

There’s probably already 10-15 linux computers in your car.

You could, but you’re better off just making an insert for a tablet. It has music, GPS, cell service optional, easily replacable.

So, OnStar, for decades now, has had cellular activity whether you were paying for it or not. They just used to be careful about not selling data. But even if the user didn’t pay and the manufacturer didn’t sell, those models are trackable by ISP.

It’s too much to say the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but he’s on of the handful actually speaking up and the one with the most chips on the table.

And everyone telling dear reader to change distros is doing it from a position of ignorance.

Even the least reliable of those distros should not be seeing anything but the keymap issue. MTP crash, unable to login afterward, That reeks of ram/disk issues.

Time->TLS errors aren’t handled well anywhere.

As critical as they are to 2fa and TLS, you’d think every OS out there would poke around a few time servers and scream bloody murder if the time was off.

Honestly, I think we, as a society, have leaned a little too hard into time as a precise critical failure point. It’s fine for things like GPS that actually require it. but our clocks don’t need to be precisely the same to tell how recent a request and response are and we can certainly make better hashing algos