I see Linux being more and more widely adopted in Europe, for one. I imagine there will either be an ‘EU standardized’ distro forked to prevent any issues of interoperability between government systems. Hopefully, such a widespread adoption for PCs encourages more development for Linux from software devs.

The latter part of your points is what really scares me as well. It’s only a matter of time until “protecting the children” becomes “defining what adult content is” and policing gender, sexuality, and politically inconvenient ideas under the guise of morality.

Call me a cynic, but I absolutely do not believe that companies “know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end”. I don’t believe they give a fuck at all. In fact, if somehow a case made it to court and the court laid the blame at the foot of, say, Facebook, or whatever company, for a child being harmed, they still wouldn’t care because the money they make simply existing as is so wildly outstrips any fine they could possibly be levied that it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything differently.

There is real damage being done now and no one seems to care enough to stop it. Why go through all this negative PR about privacy violations if you can just keep doing the same thing?

Now, I can’t claim to know what the “real reason” these laws are being passed is, but if I had to hazard a guess, it would be because it gives more accurate data on users to sell and it is cheaper to advertise to your users when they directly tell you their age. Now, you can freely show pornographic ads, gambling ads, whatever, to your adults without ever having to worry about buying user data to know who will receive it. If a kid sees porn, well, you shouldn’t have let them on an adult account.

My main issue often boils down to the amount of people still on Windows. The huge market there pulls developer attention that way so much that often my choice in software is narrowed down to “the one that has a Linux build”. And sometimes that isn’t even the case and now I need to find a way to simulate Windows for this piece of Software to work in some capacity.

Now, that’s not all that often that this is true, but when it is, it’s annoying.

Oh shoot, I’m an idiot. Tuxedo is what I was looking at. 😅 Thank you for the link!

Yeah, unfortunately I’m stuck with laptops for now. I’ve had to move at a minimum once a year for the last six years or so, so I basically don’t keep anything I can’t put into a pair of hiking bags to lug around with me.

Without getting into specifics, I am ideally taking a temporary job that will give me a fair amount of disposable income, but I’m committed for a year with an option to do a second year.

It’s kind of a rare opportunity for me and I’m not even certain I’ll get it, but if I do, then the price of an upgrade doesn’t really matter to me much, within reason. It’s essentially going to be my only valuable item for the foreseeable future, for work, play, hobbies, all of it, so I don’t mind putting extra money into this to make sure it works well and lives a good, long time. I mean, I’m not gonna throw 4 grand at a laptop, but some of these other pricey ones at like System76 and Framework aren’t off the table for me at this point.

Wow, really? I was just looking at these and they are super interesting. You’re not wrong about that up front cost, though, yikes. What is it that makes them so seemingly modular? Is it proprietary stuff? Or is it just the focus of how it’s constructed? I’d be super leery about getting locked into ‘their ecosystem’ if they suddenly went under or something.

Oof, thanks for the heads up. I honestly think I have a pretty good list of components to double check at this point and it’s driving me away from anything bleeding edge. Whatever I end up getting, it’ll be something that’s new-ish right now, but I’ll be buying it a year from now.

I did check out System76 and even if the price is a bit high, it would be kind of nice to support a company in the EU. That alone has a bit of appeal. I haven’t seen Framework before, though. I’ll look them up, thanks for the tip!

Yeah, tell me about it on the price. I’m tempted to just bite the bullet on low framerates to see if prices come down, but this upgrade is already close to a year out anyway, so who knows. Maybe it goes up? Maybe society collapses, haha.

I’ve never ended up upgrading RAM in a laptop, though. Is soldered versus not soldered really that huge of a deal? I mean, outside of what you mentioned here regarding the price.

Oh wow, that’s actually super helpful! Thanks!

Thanks for the tips! I’ll make sure I’m checking individual components for compatibility long before I hover the buy button. Another user mentioned buying a year old as well, so I’ll probably also take that advice. And thanks for the heads up about fake comparison sites and such!

I’m a pretty big fan of Lenovo so far. My experience with their hardware has been pretty much complaint-free. It’s what I’m using right now with Mint, as well. GPU is definitely part of my current issue, the other is RAM, and the last is SSD space.

GPU is just getting old, I certainly don’t have the RAM I need, and I sprung for the 500gb model because at the time this was primarily a game dev machine that only ever played Kerbal Space Program, haha.

My go-to is FFXIV, but I run it with a pretty large number of mods, which is what is hard to keep up with on my current laptop. Between that and just not being able to play any modern game, (in particular, I wanted to be able to play the new Silent Hill F), it’s definitely more of a want, but it’s a pretty strong want. 😅

My current laptop is about 6 years old, and it’s getting to the point where my frame rate during raids is dipping below 60 frames quite frequently, even with the minimum settings, which is what got me looking at upgrading.

I’ll look at Linux pre-installed vendors, though, I hadn’t thought about that. And the year old tech is a super good tip also, thanks!

My go-to is FFXIV, but I run it fairly heavily modded as do most of the group I play with, so I don’t have a super firm set of minimum specs since it fluctuates pretty heavily.

Besides that, every now and then, a modern game comes out that I’d like to play on Steam, like Silent Hill F, which is just completely beyond my laptop at this point.

A gaming laptop. My current one is fine for most everything else at this point. I don’t game super hard, but when I play my go-to game or try out something new, I wanna at least not be bouncing between 30-45 FPS.

Coming from the indie dev scene a while back, as an indie dev, you are typically burning every single hour in your day making a game, begging for money to get the game to market, pitching your game to publishers, or screaming into the void that is social media in hopes anyone will click your link. You simply do not have time or effort to spare. It’s a hugely saturated market and the currency is public attention.

So, you tend to cast the widest net possible in hopes you get some kind of traction, which means marketing to Windows users. I’m sure plenty of devs would vastly prefer to be on and build for Linux, but the fact of the matter is the marketshare is smaller and Proton exists.

Yo, so first of all, congrats on being able to ditch Windows! Second of all, I got hype-convinced to make the switch a few days ago and I have LOVED it. Moving from Windows to Mint (at least so far) was a breeze. There’s a tiny bit more thought overhead that goes into fixing things sometimes, but if I’m really honest about that, I had a lot of that with Windows, too, I just have decades of fixing Windows experience.

The Algorithm™

Not joking, there is a not insignificant portion of the population spurred to click videos based on thumbnails like these.

I actually just spent the better part of this afternoon doing just that! I messed around with Mint and it basically ran perfectly fine. Literally no issues at all (besides some of me not understanding how things worked). All my critical stuff works perfectly well, with the sole exception being a game I run where mods are pretty heavily windows-based. I did find a decent Linux community around that, though, and they seem to be running things pretty well, too.

I know I shouldn’t dual boot with a partition, but that’s what I’m gonna do to see if I can make it a couple weeks without anything major going wrong. I tried the live boot disk, but at the moment all I have is an external HDD and it makes some things insanely slow, so partitioning is the move for now. I’ll drop Windows in a couple weeks, though.

Edit: I’ll probably also try out some other distros once I’ve got Mint set up as well, just to be sure I’m not missing out on something else that will work. For now, I just want easy to use and easy to learn.