Puppy Linux, baby cuz I got that dawg in me!

You’re just wrong on literally every point dude.

1. Nope, I’ve installed Linux Mint for multiple people, several different apps, never touched the terminal. I even updated the kernel all through the GUI.
2. Basically the same on all the most popular distros. Searching “startup” or “autostart” in KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, and Gnome DEs all bring up an easy GUI app for getting programs to start automatically.
3. Same as #1. You don’t need to use the terminal to install most software, especially not anything popular. And guess what, you need the terminal to do hardcore stuff on Windows too. I know because I’ve worked for years in IT and have to use the Windows terminal for all kinds of random stuff, I literally had to use Powershell today.
4. This happens in Windows too. Just ask me how many times I’ve had to install old .NET frameworks or other random drivers/3rd party software to get some piece of software/hardware to work on Windows. Something that I thought would be a 10 minute install turns into an hour because of random shit not working right.
5. Bruh, I play Minecraft all the time. Hundreds and hundreds of hours. It’s one of the easiest games to play on Linux. And I play with tons of mods, texture packs, and shaders. I’ve been playing Minecraft on multiple Linux distros for 4 years, it runs great.
6. All major distros auto-mount external drives. I have a whole bag of thumb drives, external HDDs, and SSDs that I use in my day job. Never had a problem with them not being picked up and mounted by any of the Linux systems I work on.

I mean, don’t use it I guess, but stop spreading these obviously false claims, man. Have fun getting all your personal data farmed by a multi trillion dollar megacorp and fed into AI engines to churn out infinite heaps of sludge. Oh yeah, and all the endless popup ads in an OS that you already paid for…

Oh yeah I forgot, Bluetooth is banned on Linux… Bruh what are you even talking about? Lol

Can’t change your mind? I’ll just downvote you then :)

Same, it’s saved my butt so many times. Once in the middle of a tech conference, I was messing around in the terminal with my networking and borked something really bad.

I spent 5 minutes trying to get my networking back but couldn’t figure out what I had screwed up and ended up breaking it more.

I just went into Timeshift and restored to the beginning of that day and in a few minutes I was back up like nothing had happened.

I’ve liked Linux Mint for a long time, but it’s quickly becoming my goto distro for everything.

LMDE for my business laptop, Ubuntu-based Linux Mint boxes deployed at my workplace, Linux Mint VMs in my home lab.

Workhorse distro 100%

Use Timeshift, use Timeshift, use Timeshift.

“We never sell your data…for the first 5 minutes you are signed in.”

You…you almost made me start scream laughing in my workplace bathroom…

I had to desperately stifle it and pretend to be straining to poop, thanks a lot…

Cinnamon has become my, “I just need to get work done” DE.

I’m fine messing around with Plasma for my personal machines, but for my work laptop, LMDE with Cinnamon. Super stable, simple, it just works.

Needs a NSFW tag! Soooo sexy!

Eli5: Wayland is a new way for Linux to make things appear on your screen, things like windows, graphics, and even your whole desktop.

The old way was called Xorg. It has been around for a very long time, and works pretty well, but the code is veryyyy messy and many developers wanted a new and easier way to make things appear on your screen, so they made Wayland.

(It’s debatable how much easier Wayland actually is vs Xorg, but at this point most major distros are switching over to Wayland, so it’s a moot point)

You’re totally right, it was such a pain to upgrade my last graphics card in Linux. I just turned off the computer, switched the GPUs, and powered my compy back on, because the Linux kernel includes AMD’s drivers by default and requires nothing from the user to get them installed.

Gaming still sucks though, only 10,000+ games on Steam are supported right now, so barely any. Proton is super tough to use, you have to go into Steam settings and select “Use Steam Play” then restart Steam; well beyond the capabilities of most gamers.

And then there’s the issue of controllers on the Steam Deck. Literally the only controllers that have worked so far are all my Xbox controllers, my PS5 controllers, my friend’s Switch controllers, my Logitech controller, and my MadCatz controller. And I had to plug them in or link them via Bluetooth, it took almost 2 minutes to set up once, horribly inconvenient.

Some old ass Fedora Core distro.

I set up Linux Mint for my parents a few months ago. Never touched the terminal, everything was done in Mint’s UI; the initial installation, Timeshift setup, theme customizing, app installations for Spotify, OnlyOffice, VLC, and Chrome, automatic updates, printer and scanner setup.

Butter smooth so far.

Sorry for the slow reply. Yes, I mixed the chipset up with the socket lol.

The A380 is the same I’ve been looking at for my own home Media setup, should be plenty of encoding power for your use case.

Good luck!

If you’re on a budget, check out X99 socket Xeons. You can pick up Mobos and chips for super cheap. 10+ core hyper-threaded Xeons with solid clocks and a motherboard for 120-180 bucks total. Support 64 GB of RAM, more if you have a proper server board.

For transcoding, depending on the codec, dedicated GPU is best.

I’m not sure about Plex, but I know on Jellyfin, the new Intel Arc GPUs are really great for encoding, not too expensive for the lower end cards either, and low profile options for smaller rack cases.

I look at it like this: the percentage of most people directly using FOSS vs proprietary software is 0%.

If I can get them to use even one piece of FOSS software, that increases the percentage, which is a win for FOSS.

I moved my parents onto Linux Mint a few months ago. They still use Spotify, Gmail, Chrome, Outlook, Onedrive, etc. But they are doing that through Linux, and I got them to switch their office suite from MS Office to OnlyOffice.

So instead of them being 100% on proprietary software, they are now using Linux, which protects them from malware and Microsofts spyware and bs, and makes them aware slightly of FOSS and how good it can be.

That is a net win as far as I can see. FOSS usage just increased slightly, and proprietary decreased, no other tradeoffs were made.

Agreed. Classic story that has been repeated several times over the years. Ecosystem is everything.

Microsoft’s Windows phones were fantastic. They had super nice hardware, high refresh rate screens, better cameras on their flagship models than iPhones at the time.

They were sleek, fast, the Windows tile UI actually worked great on a phone touchscreen. But it didn’t matter to most consumers because they didn’t have apps. MS had their own business apps…and that was about it. Didn’t matter that every other aspect of the phones were great, people couldn’t do what they wanted to on the Windows phones, so they didn’t buy them.

I would love to see something like Proton but for .apks instead of Windows executables. If it were as easy to install and run android apps on a mobile Linux OS as it is now to install and play Windows games on Linux, we would be in a great place to see a proper Linux phone.

For general system stats, I like btop. It runs in the terminal, so you can monitor it through SSH remotely. It also is much more readable than some of the other older top process monitors.

Docker desktop is a nice GUI interface for local docker container management, Portainer if you want something more enterprise grade.