I use Debian btw
My wife’s 2019 16" MPB is running pretty great. Probably got another 5 years of life left in it. She uses it to watch YouTube and play Sims 4.
My 2016 Acer Aspire V3-372T is hanging in there running Debian. 60 FPS YouTube videos are getting to be too much for it anymore. I may have to put the old girl to rest one of these days.
But hey, it does play Minetest pretty flawlessly.
My monitors are over a decade old and are still perfectly fine. I’ll upgrade to 1440p/144 Hz when I start seeing dead pixels or some other failure.
They have DVI ports and all my stuff is too new for DVI so I’m on the adapter diet lol
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Can confirm. I use Debian on a laptop and it’s great.
The only time I forced Linux on anyone was when I gave my youngest brother a free laptop a couple years ago. It’s the laptop I had in college in 2011. It has a Sandy Bridge mobile Core i7. It’s too slow to run modern Windows. I told him he’s free to install Windows, but I don’t have a license to give him. For checking emails and web surfing, though, it was enough, and running Linux wasn’t going to give him trouble with that. To my knowledge (and to his credit), he still runs Linux on it.
Mint and Kubuntu are great for newbies. Ubuntu is also great, but the community hates Ubuntu these days so be ready to get replies criticizing Ubuntu or your choice to use it. It still makes a lot of shit really easy.
I used Ubuntu for over 10 years. I loved it. But Canonical does have a lot of baggage. Plus, I wanted to go to the source. So that’s why I use Debian. I’d still advise a new user to go for Mint if they loved the Windows UI or Ubuntu if they hated it. If you use and love Mint, I don’t think anyone would criticize you for continuing to use it. If you use and love Ubuntu, I’d say Debian is a very easy next step.
There was a promotion around at the time where if you bought a Windows 7 laptop within a certain time frame, you could get $25 off your Windows 8 Pro license, which cost $40 on launch day.
And so on launch day, I paid $15 for my retail copy of Windows 8 Pro and installed it on my new PC.
Everyone shits on Win 8, but I had some shell extension that brought back the Win 7 start menu so I have somewhat fond memories of Win 8. I almost never had to deal with the Metro Start Screen.
My thing is I’ve got years of experience in Linux. I began using Ubuntu in 2012 because my laptop’s hard disk failed, the sticker with my product key had worn away, and I wasn’t paying $100 for another copy of Windows 7.
I’ve only been noncommittal about it this this long because of my Steam library. But with the Steam Deck and Proton being so damn good, and all my games working just as well on Linux as they did in Windows (many times, better), I just stopped using Windows altogether.
So there I was, staring at GNOME Disks for a couple hours. Knowing that like a bad relationship that was doing something for me, but also hurting me, it was best to break things off. And then I nuked that bitch lol
I finally deleted Windows 10 on Sunday. Ubuntu too. Now Debian is my only OS. I realized that every time I log into my Windows partition, it’s got a trillion updates to install because it’d been weeks since I last logged in. So why bother?
If I really need it for something again, I’ll just virtualize.
I’m under no illusion Ubuntu is perfect. But I PAID for my Windows licenses. And if I paid, I don’t want to see ads. I don’t care about Win 8’s penetrative pricing model or the $25 coupon. I don’t care that I paid for my licenses 10+ years ago. Don’t sell me ads on a product I paid for. And Windows serves up ads all the god damned time now. If there’s anything good to be said about Windows 8, it’s that it didn’t take every opportunity to sell me an Office 365 subscription ever second breath I took. I don’t actually remember the last time I saw an ad in Ubuntu, and I’ve been using it to varying degrees since 2011. I think we can at least agree Canonical is better than Microsoft, yeah?
All that said, I’ve had thoughts of switching to plain old Debian, especially now that I’d consider myself much more experienced and comfortable in Linux. But if I were recommending a distro to a new user, I am one million percent telling them Ubuntu or Mint, depending on how they feel about the Windows UI.
Good thing I use Ubuntu for >90% of my computing now.
I gave my brother my Sandy Bridge laptop that got me through college. New battery and charger and it’s all set. The 1366x768 resolution doesn’t render pages very nicely anymore, though.