- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
Reasons to switch:
- It’s waaaaay cheaper
- A new laptop costs a lot of money. Repair cafes will often help you for free. Software updates are also free, forever. You can of course show your support for both with donations!
- No ads, no spying
- Windows comes with lots of ads and spyware nowadays, slowing down your computer and increasing your energy bill.
- Good for the planet
- Production of a computer accounts for 75+% of carbon emissions over its lifecycle. Keeping a functioning device longer is a hugely effective way to reduce emissions.
- Community support
- If you have any issues with your computer, the local repair cafe and independent computer shop are there for you. You can find community support in online forums, too.
- User control
- You are in control of the software, not companies. Use your computer how you want, for as long as you want.
Hexbear-related reasons to switch:
- Still can use hexbear
- Hexbear requires a web browser (firefox) to use.
- Don’t have to pay for it.
- You’ll receive updates and features for your operating system free of any personal charge to you till the end of time. You can donate directly to volunteers and workers to make your computer better (better yet non computer related things)
- using Windows for Windows’s sake or Apple for Apple’s sake is liberalism and supports USA/piSSrael
- TBH they copied from us (KDE, GNOME) anyway. Their innovation is being a monopoly and advertising to you.
- Makes you smarter (it’s like reading theory but with computers)
- Using Linux makes you big brain because you’ll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you’d have to waste your soul on.
- Using Linux makes you big brain because you’ll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you’d have to waste your soul on.
This still happens, but it is limited pretty much exclusively to when you buy exotic hardware that was literally released yesterday (not completely impossible if you are choosing a brand new laptop to install Linux on), that no Linux users have had the chance to even test yet. Drivers get tweaked, new device IDs get added to udev so the correct driver can be assigned to the device, and there is a delay before these bleeding edge changes appear in stable distributions.
Sometimes “gimmicky” features like individually addressable keyboard LEDs or treating two wireless video game controllers as one input device (i.e. Nintendo Joycons) take longer or are considered out-of-scope for kernel development (where device drivers are implemented).
I replaced my 12 year old laptop recently. The new one had been on the market for about 6 months, and for the first week or two the amdgpu driver would crash intermittently (though the fact that the GPU driver can crash and just gracefully land me back at the login prompt with no required reboot is pretty awesome, all things considered). The problem fixed itself just by updating. This was on Fedora, where updates get moved along relatively quickly.
That said, I didn’t even bother running Windows on it, so who knows? Maybe they have driver problems too :)