You could just do a live install on a USB, and you don’t even have to install to your machine to try it out. Debian has live installs available for both KDE and Gnome and should be perfectly fine for just checking out the DE (and most distros have a live option, check to see if your preferred distro does), just know that it will be slow and you won’t see that in a proper installation.

Edit: just saw further down thread, Mint can do a live USB but you’ll probably just want Cinnamon with that. Bazzite does not have a live boot, and from my cursory glance at possibly running both DEs it seemed to be a bit more of a headache on Bazzite than other distros. Trying Gnome on a Debian live install will at least tell you if you like Gnome.

Ooh, I’m a brain dead idiot, are your clients hiring?

Sure, but 10 was worse than 7, especially current 10. Six months ago or so, I booted up an e-waste laptop I had that was still running a very old version of 10 and seeing it running next to current Windows 10… it’s gotten so bad. I’ve never actually used 11, 10 got so bad I jumped ship early.

They’re cheaper, and they seem to have been pushed heavily to kids in school though loaner laptops. Some decent percentage of new college students already know how to use ChromeOS and they’re broke college students…

Apple kinda did something similar when I was a kid, they gave a bunch of iMacs to my elementary school, and because they came from families that could afford it, they just kept using Apple products.

Bunsenlabs Linux (a successor to Crunchbang) still has it by default and their forums have some current conversations about it, maybe check there?

We really need a Linux circlejerk community for this type of thing.

I know KDE has a page looking for contributors, including translators, I don’t know how much they need more Italian translators though.

https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved

Try KDE Connect if you’ve got an android phone, it’s pretty cool. I had to tweak the notification settings on my phone to get it to work the way I wanted, but ymmv, I’m just saying this because I’m usually happy with the KDE default settings (at least the Bazzite KDE default, I’m not sure how much the Bazzite team has changed their DEs).

Google killed off their own cached pages last month and they’re now using IA as a replacement. Free linking is definitely important, but this is Google we’re talking about, and them using IA to save money - this feels a lot more exploitative if Google isn’t funding them in some way.

It’ll pass, but it’ll pass like a kidney stone.

Also don’t forget places like Free Geek - I’m glad to see my local one collaborating with YouTubers to get the word out but I’d like to see them do some more local outreach in the runup to W10 EOL (their computers often run Linux but encouraging people to switch to Linux is not their fight, imo). The donation might even be tax deductable.

Yeah, depending on how widespread this is, it’s probably worse than staingate.

I bought a 2014 MacBook Pro earlier this year, I got a good deal on it partly because it’s got severe delamination issues. With dark mode, it doesn’t really bother me enough to spend several hours with a bottle of Listerine to fix it yet.

Should I be worried? I was distro hopping for a bit and put together a Ventoy drive to make that easier, and I used it to boot the install iso for the distro I ultimately decided on for my gaming laptop. It seemed highly recommended and I didn’t know about the Ventoy bros at that point.

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I’m going to disagree with you on the “is Mac better than Windows” front - I think there’s good arguments either way though. At least with a Mac, the end user is still, mostly, who they are designing for. On Windows the end user is becoming the product.

Yeah but that broke GRUB and had a pretty specific error message associated with it. I don’t think problems with grub look like what OP is describing (although I don’t know enough to say for sure).

Anecdotally, I’m running a Fedora Atomic-based OS alongside Windows and that Windows update didn’t cause any problems for me.

🤓 https://www.protondb.com/

Got an extra USB stick and an old laptop kicking around you’re okay with wiping? Ideally 4GB RAM but 2GB would be okay. Start with Linux Mint and follow their installation guide - verifying the ISO image in Windows is probably the toughest part.

Or make absolutely certain you’re on the official Mint website, torrent it and don’t bother checking, I’m not your mother. “Who the f**k checks those anyway?” (Mint hasn’t been hacked since, but it’s part of why they’re pushing verifying, they know that their users have been targeted before. Also if something goes wrong with the download the install will fail and you’ll waste more time than if you just checked.)

If you don’t have a spare computer, a live USB can let you try Linux without making changes to your computer, but it’s going to be slow - a proper install is going to be a much nicer experience. If you’re okay without persistence (ie you can’t change anything or install additional programs for the next time you boot into it), just follow the Linux Mint website’s installation guide and stop before the actual install step. For persistence, try this method instead, but you really don’t want to use it long term, USB sticks aren’t designed for this.

Once you’ve tried it live and you think you like the desktop environment, but if you’re not sure you’re ready to fully commit, if your computer has an extra slot for an SSD you could buy a second one and dual boot, that’s what I did. (Dual booting on the same drive is doable but more of a headache, and even on a different drive Windows doesn’t always play nicely.)

Bazzite, it’s based on immutable Fedora. But it made sense for my use case because it’s one of the more consistent at working out of the box with Nvidia graphics cards and I wanted the gaming stuff, but Plasma should be more or less the same everywhere. I’m not sure which version of Plasma it’s running but Bazzite is generally pretty up to date with everything but I can’t check right now.

Windows 10 is being supported until next October, you’ve got more than a month. That said, I’ve been on Linux for just over a month and I’m so much happier with it. I really like KDE Plasma as a desktop environment. I made the leap because I was unhappy with Windows, but at this point I genuinely prefer Linux.