Friend!

It's been a long road, getting from there to here.

It's glorious, isn't it?

Only thing I’m having a little trouble getting away from is are some office products and email hosting.

Once Gmail has the equivalent of shared inboxes, I’ll switch to them for my business hosting.

In case people here are not aware, I can create free email address with my domain name for receiving only.

This is great because I don’t really need to send mail for each account I receive mail at, but with Gmail you have to pay for each one as far as I know.

I’ve experienced something similar. I’ve been telling everyone who will listen how great Linux is for years. It wasn’t until windows 11 that they started listening in big numbers.

About a year and a half ago I got a laptop to prepare for moving countries. Figured "I'll probably distro hop a bit see what I like so let's start pretty plain with Arch". I've uh never distro hopped, Arch my beloved, great daily driver does exactly what I tell it to

you know what's funny, is that my noise cancelling headphones started to have serious problems when I 'upgraded' to windows 11. it would pick up the noise cancelling mics and decide they were the primary, not my standalone dedicated microphone.

in the process, it would also downgrade the sound quality for some fucking reason. no matter how many ways I disabled them, it would either re-enable them or I'd find a new way to try.

with Linux? just works.

"will my headphones work?"

It was Linux the one you had to check if basic peripherals would work.

Now it is windows the one that gives issues with headphones, the one in charge of the equipment at my office is fed up with all of the complaints related to windows and headphones (the ones provided by the employer and the personal ones).

Last Friday windows decided to stop working with the laptop’s webcam, and it was stuck as in use despite even turning off the camera in setttings.

I use a focusrite scarlet 2i2 2nd gen audio interface for my microphone. The driver hasn't been updated for a few years now but even when it was recent, I had issues with my mic quality randomly breaking, making me sound like a robot to my friends. I have had zero issues since switching to linux without even installing any special software for it.

The only thing I kind of miss is that windows allowed me to mix down both mic inputs to a single mono channel whereas on linux both inputs are presented as separate mono channels. I suppose I could fix it with some 3rd party tools but I did not miss it too much so far.

What is the future like? knowing the slow cadence of debian you must be from the very far future.

Windows is great! Unless you value privacy...or RAM... or Bandwidth efficiency...or easy networking... or owning your system

Lately I often reminesce on the time SSD has become available. My previous laptop would take 5 minutes to fully open the system, and suddenly BAM! SSD and it was 30 seconds. I remember being blown away. How the fuck did we end up back here. How is it 5+ minutes to start a stupid OS again.

trying to disable the stock ticker (?WTF?)

Geeze I should have invested in "?WTF?🔺" years ago. Look how ?WTF?🔺 is everywhere now! Especially the tech industry. 😭

I think GN beat you to it

It's a little less terrible if you can use the LTSC IoT version.

I have an Ally as well and I doubt the night and day difference claims there. Unless something drastic has changed Linux is at best on parity with windows if you change the ACPI settings manually.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/rog-ally-windows-linux/

It's not a steam deck that was designed around linux.

Sure there is: Sometimes it doesn't boot. And nobody can deny that it's been great for driving linux adoption!

Of course there is. It's compatible with almost any software and hardware (if you ignore their arbitrary W11 "requirements" which you can in most cases) that you can get your hands on. Microsoft and Windows deserve most of the flack they're getting, but we should be honest.

Take Linux as a comparison. Compatibility is pretty good nowadays and is only getting better, especially with all the work going into Proton from both Valve and the community. But certain things are simply not supported which can make it either difficult or straight up impossible to get to work. Not that Linux is to blame for that, of course, but it is reality.

There's one thing Windows does that I miss. The big preview pane in file explorer.

It's not Millennium Edition?

Uh yeah there is. Which that my games and software run without issue on Windows whereas on Linux I have to constantly fiddle with shit to make it work. But no one's ever honest about that.