and calling IT help desks.

It always amazes me how much people shit talk social engineering, when it's been a power house for hackers since the beginning.

The human (or I guess AI now) element is always the weakest link

Wait, calling IT Help Desks isn’t social engineering now?

Sounds like the tagline for a really crap movie. How far we've fallen from two people on one keyboard.

Gen Z knows how to use Windows?

Tbf, some of the best hackers were social engineering their way into the backend just by calling up certain support numbers in the 80s

Okay look, I'm old, I'm inadequate, and I'm drunk. But I'm also a millennial, and I was a flight instructor at the age of 23. I pray to whatever god actually exists instead of Jesus for the unceremonious deletion of every soul that doesn't give young folks a chance to learn, grow and actualize themselves. Because I am so inordinately sick of being written off due to the year in which my parents fucked that I've got room on the docket to be pissed off when you do it to cohorts other than mine.

It is our responsibility to teach the kids, to let them learn, to let them fuck up in order to learn some more, so that they can become the actual adults someday. And it hurts my mind, soul and dick that I'm apparently the only human on earth not excessively lead-addled to realize that. And bitch I've washed my hands in 100LL. It's blue and feels cold at any temperature.

If there's one thing I'm going to teach you commie retards before I'm banned outright from this platform, it's that you treat your students with at least the benefit of the doubt if you can't manage genuine respect. Believe it or not, they're real people living real lives that are different than your own. Things that are obvious to you aren't to them because their lives led them to be curious about a different set of things than you did. And if you find yourself in the role of "teacher", almost always your path led you to expertise sooner than your students. Sooner. Not Younger. I can tell you that, having served as a flight instructor at 23 mostly teaching men in their 50's.

You think you're the senior in a field? You think it's your job to reign superior over your juniors? Think again. Because it's your job to sit in the right seat as a kid twice your age sits in the Captain's seat and fails to use the rudder correctly, because falling off a bike is how you learn how to ride. You have to let them slam the plane into the runway, because how the hell else are they going to learn?

Anyone with more experience expressing contempt for those with less experience for having shown up later: FUCK YOUR FUNERAL. Die unmourned.

I've been using Linux for more than 10 years and I had no idea this was a thing lol.

But yeah after reading up on it I don't see the issue with giving someone this id (though I also don't see any reason why someone would need it). It's just a file on disk that can be changed at will with a kernel parameter.

You've got two things going on:

1. If you are trying to switch, a virtual machine is a bad way to start and it's the hard way. What you really want is to use Rufus or something (easy Google) to make you a bootable USB and you just boot in and play around. It MAY require you to change boot order in BIOS if you plug it in and reboot and nothing happens, but that's an easy fix
2. You want to ask for help. You only get "beat up" if it looks like you did nothing first and you are asking people to do it for you. Pretty much every place you go if you can say, "I want to do X, it doesn't work so I tried Y and Z." Nobody will say shit to you. Also, on Lemmy if you say you're new, people like me and the other guy who replied will probably offer to just DM us directly (which for me you can).

As much as I hate to endorse an AI (and I'm going to get hella down voted for it)..it's one of the few actual good uses for it...

You can ask plain questions, copy\paste error codes, and it will actually walk you through fixing problems like a non-judgy person would. ;-)

Perplexity is my go-to when I'm troubleshooting something I can't figure out.

"How do I open and edit a word document in Linux?" Is a perfectly acceptable question to ask, things like that.used it when I was building this server to work through some concepts I wasn't familiar with.

Get a small SSD that you can install Linux on and go from there. Starting with a virtual machine is definitely the hard way.

Bazzite is the most stable and noob friendly distro I’ve tried. I’ve installed both Bazzite and Windows in the past year and the Bazzite install process was far easier.

https://bazzite.gg/

Throwaway culture exists with software but without the waste that comes with physical things. If one distro doesn't work, try a different one. It's only bits. The only thing wasted is your time.

Also, even though people claim to be happy to answer your questions, I think there's a strong likelihood that if you said what issue you had, nobody would be able to solve the problem due to how complex any modern operating system is, and due to not having direct access to the machine to troubleshoot. Seriously, they're so big and complicated that they're approximately black boxes. The easiest way for you to resolve the problem is to try something different until it works.

PM me and I'll help, no punching.

What was the specific issue?

Nah you're beautiful for trying. Puts you way ahead of people who complain and do nothing.

Anyone who makes you feel bad for not knowing how to use an OS you've never used before is a jerk and their opinion can be disregarded. Yeah for sure do a web search of your issue before asking on line, but you're new, its normal to have lots of questions.

Anyway consider this your open invitation to DM with any Linux question you may have, the dumber the better. :)

Just ask here! Lemmy is full of us Linux nerds!

Do you have any external storage? You do not want an NTFS formatted drive for food backup if you're going to switch; just recently, the NTFS support has finally improved, bit I still wouldn't trust it. Exfat, or any other fat filesystem, should work fine.

But, my advice? Just backup everything important, and then just follow a tutorial for installing Linux (probably Mint Cinnamon, unless you game a lot - in which case you might give Bazzite a try).

Make sure you have a USB windows installer ready before; if you have to, you can just go back to windows that way.

Cinnamon is a desktop not a distro. Fedora as much as I hate Red Hat is a pretty solid distro.

Mint was my first Linux distro away from Windows. Command line stuff is essentially optional if you're just using the computer for web browsing, gaming through Steam, basic desktop usage, etc. No regrets, fuck Microsoft.

I'll say that I only touch command line when I want to on nobara (I hear bazzite is the same). In general the days of command line being necessary are over

Those driver tools are often bundled with malware and do a poor job validating what they download is safe and correct. They are often associated with services that crawls the internet for downloads and tries to match the hardware id.

Generally, drivers are available from the motherboard or device manufacturer page. That said it's rarely the solution and for your gpu (amd or Nvidia) they already have their own tool for keeping you up to date.

But with Linux most of that is taken care of for you by either the kernel itself or your distro's maintainer.

Most games work fine on Linux and may only require small tweaks. You can check the games you're interested in playing on protondb. http://www.protondb.com/

The notable exceptions are games with aggressive anticheat software. Such as but not limited to (EA games, PubG, Fortnite, GTA5)

If you're looking for something "easy" look into Kubuntu LTS.

You just need to think outside of the box. Instead of thinking. Instead of: "Can I convert my windows programs to linux?" Think: "Is there a free linux alternarive?". 99℅ of the time the awnser is yes and most of the time they are even better. I made the mistake of seeing linux as a windows replacement and forced my self to get the same shit running on my linux distro. Then I changed my way of thining and it completely made the transition so much easier. Yes it will take a little time to get the thinks the way you want. But with a little investment you will have a machine that YOU control. And not the other way around. I had to boot up my windows partition the otherday to copy some leftover documents. And it felt so fucking alien to me... And Ive been a windows user since 95. But It has been a long time since my computer actually felt like mine again.

It's always a good idea to back up your important files before a big change like switching operating systems, and your old software won't work. But drivers haven't been an issue for me in years. Mint is probably a super easy distribution for the switch. You can load it on a USB and give it a try before committing to the full install.

Steam works on Linux BTW. Actually a lot of my games run better on Linux than windows

One of the bots could write one maybe

Don't delete your OS then. Just buy a small SSD to put Linux on and go from there.