Obligatory FUTO keyboard recommendation. I liked Swiftkey - but not enough to defend the idea of an online keyboard.

I can see the use case, and that some people might find this useful (not to mention many agencies and ad companies). But enough was enough, for me at least. Linux Mint rocks. Can’t see myself going back to Windows.

After seeing this thread, and the Linux wallpaper engine repo, I think I’m gonna boot into Windows and record wallpapers I like as videos, then set them as backgrounds in linux. I’m gonna be on x11 until cinnamon updates to waylan

Recall

I just finished doing this a few minutes ago and I had better luck. I left my drives plugged in. Booted to mint USB. Made sure I knew which drive was the empty one using the Disks app. Ran the installer and chose the option to erase disk instead of alongside. Set my BIOS to boot from new disk, and grub let’s me choose between windows and Linux.

My laptop on the other hand, was not a good time. It shipped using the raid controller, so mint couldn’t see the second drive. And windows freaked out at the change of disk controller and I couldn’t recover. 2 operating system installs for the price of one 🫠

There are dozens of us

Mint cinnamon 21, then upgraded to 22.

I wasnt thrilled about upgrading to win11 - it adds an irritating layer of stuff that I didnt want or need. The ads and telemetry bugged me too. I was probably going to reluctantly upgrade at some point though.

But then recall was announced and I realised how much worse it could get. Been really happy with the switch to Linux.

Just did a timeshift then upgraded and it went perfectly. Had to disable a ppa but the upgrader even did that for me.

I only recently came over from Windows and am very impressed - most Windows upgrades go less smoothly than this.

I think this is the use case for Kodi, if you have local media. If you also want multiple device sync without hassle, then Plex, but this is an online account. I hear good things about Jellyfin, which is a FOSS alternative to Plex.

I… Don’t? But I’ve used it since 3.11. It’s incredibly usable software, when it works. Switched recently because even I have my limits - that win11 recall even made it as an idea at the table is enough to make me jump ship. The ads in win10 pushed me to the limit, but recall is insane unless they’re literally gonna give away free hardware and software. I paid for that damn computer and bought a license - wtf. It’s not Microsofts hardware to datamine or put ads on. Paid for things with ads in them that also keylog and screen scrape and datamine can fuck all the way off.

Saw the netbsd video posted on lemmy recently and dude said he was offended at the lack autonomy he had over his own hardware in ms and I kind of get it now.

I’ve been a lifelong ms admin, and always stuck to their desktop environments because they “just worked”. Often use Linux on containers, devices (handhelds, rpi etc) and webapp servers.

That win11 recall stuff though is a step too far. So I looked at which distro was likely to be easiest to use and just as you say - mint is the overwhelming consensus. And now it’s my daily driver. I needed to learn a few new tricks, but the mint forums are filled with windows refugees so finding forum posts is easy (e.g. I thought had a problem with my “task bar” not my “panel” but since others called it the same thing I found what I was looking for).

My biggest reason for staying on windows was that I could search for something and almost always find an answer - that’s become worse over the years IMO (often get these useless forums posts when they’re basically advising the user to reinstall with five paragraphs of pasted/generated text). The mint forums are genuinely friendly and helpful, and searching them is as useful as searching for win stuff used to be.

I don’t know if “this is the year” but I can’t imagine I’m the only one who has had enough of the MS ecosystem. My experience has been great so far, and I hope there are others who give it a go.