So… did they find any new interesting digits there or just the usual 0 to 9?

The amounts of copium that Windows users are willing to swallow to avoid changing are reaching stratospheric levels. Inertia is one hell of a drug.

“To err is human, but it takes a computer to really fuck things up”

First time using Microsoft products, is it?

Don’t switch based on hype.

Put your chosen distro on a USB pen and boot from that. Try to do the activities you usually do, see if it works for you.

If you feel comfortable, make the switch. If you have any doubts, get a second disk and install Linux in it so you can have a fall back plan.

My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.

I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.

I just have to do a system update every year or so.

She’s now 87.

I’ll have a look at those, thanks.

If you played around with local small LLMs you know that it still needs a few hundred megs at least.

I don’t really care about the space, I just don’t want it in my systems.

I know that. Nobody is forcing me to use it.

But now I’ll have a browser with a large, useless, disabled binary blob attached. Do I want this in my system?

I recommend creating 3 partitions. One for UEFI, one for /boot and one for LVM.

Inside the LVM you can assign volumes with complete flexibility. You can expand and shrink volumes. You can leave space unallocated and allocate it when the need presents itself. You can combine multiple disks in a single volume. You can do RAID over LVM or the other way around.

Or you can go with ZFS or BTRFS, they have subvolumes and other nice features built in.

What you don’t have is to be stuck with fixed layout partitions anymore.

It blows my mind that we had multiple modern ways to setup volumes in Linux (LVM, ZFS, BTRFS) for decades, yet people keep using partitions like it’s 1990.

I have been running Firefox since before 1.0. I was using it when it was called Firebird. I was using it when it was called Netscape Navigator. I always supported it, even when performance was lagging behind IE or Chrome. I don’t know if I can go on much longer if Mozilla keeps trying to shove AI crap down my throat. Sad.

It’s fun to discover new distros, but in the long run it is more important to keep my workstation working.

I keep an old laptop around for trying other distros.

You brought back traumatic memories I had successfully repressed.

Bye then. Best of luck out there, friend.

A one time pad, I think it called.

That’s how it was done in the old days to save a few cycles in Z80 assembly. XOR A instead of LD A, 0.

As a Wolfenstein 3D player that checks every square centimeter of every wall for secret passages, I feel this pain.

Teams is kind of awesome of what you want to do is exchange emojis and funny gifs with your co-workers. Not so much if you want to work.

I miss the days when applications were coded like applications, not like web sites. The ammount of clutter that goes behind the scenes to get a simple OK button on screen these days must be mind numbing.

Copy+paste is still a pain in the ass in Microsoft Teams. Why don’t you work on that instead?