Root

This one. I’ve bought several over the years, they’re great and often available at your local electronics store, if you prefer that.

I’ve been running Linux on my laptop for a few years now (started with Mint, on Manjaro now). I have our HTPC set up with Mint, and the family is good with it. When my kids are old enough for their own, I’ll probably keep them going with Mint as well, we’ll see.

My wife’s laptop still has Windows, but I’ll likely move her over if she gets a new PC at some point.

All it takes is a little hypnosis and a bunch of LSD.

Yeah, does anyone else remember the menu bars that would show up and disappear depending on what you were doing? Those were awful–the ribbon method of context-specific tabs is better (IMO).

I already have to do this. My office wants everyone to use the MS authenticator app, won’t run on LineageOS. Even if it did, I wouldn’t install it, but still.

Ended up making them purchase a hardware security key for me instead.

Exiled Kingdoms - it’s a labor-of-love project inspired by classic 90s RPGs. I’ve played through it a few times, it’s solid.

Capitalism. Specifically, the stock market. IPOs make good companies into bad companies.

Being owned by stockholders effectively removes any amount of “human” in the company’s choices and direction. There becomes a single goal, to which everything else is sacrificed: make stock prices go up in the short term. The C-suite execs will say all sorts of other shit, but any appearance of accountability or altruism is solely geared to making more money at any cost. Any leadership with a soul will be forced to either give up trying to be “good”, or they leave.

Tried installing Windows 11. After a few hours screwing around trying to find the right drivers for everything, I tried a live USB of Mint. Everything worked great out of the box.

Also, the ads, and Microsoft’s insistence on forcing user accounts.

It was updated this year. They moved on from the mini-CD limit (50MB?) to a regular CD (700MB). Spiritual successor, newer target.

And won’t survive things like… getting sprayed with water.

Approaching infinite volume, by the looks of them

They’re more different than people might expect. I like both, but they’re very different experiences.

700cm

I’ll throw Alpine Linux into the mix. Not sure how well it supports older hardware, but it’s really small.

They obviously don’t have the features that Rufus has, but I’ve ended up using the default USB image writers that come pre-installed (found them on both Mint and Manjaro, probably available on others). If you’re just looking to write an ISO, check to see if you already have one.

People have been running GUIs on much less for decades–though if you’re trying to use something out-of-the-box, anything modern will certainly not do well. But there’s tons of RPi stuff that runs on meager specs.

I’d have expected people would use these things for similar projects as SBCs.

While I understand the author’s frustration with the developers not giving as much weight to the (non-contributing) community, the fact is that the developers get to make the final call on this, and they get to use whatever criteria they like.

And there’s no definitive answer to whether a name change would be a net positive or negative–a handful of complaints vs brand dilution is a subjective call. And for the number of users, I get the impression that it’s not as big of a deal to most people as it is to the author.

You can make most distros work like most others, with enough tweaking. The main difference at this point isn’t what you can do with them, but how they’re set up by default, which typically reflects their thing (e.g., Debian is super stable vs Arch giving access to the latest and greatest).

To be honest, I think the homogenization is a net positive. I doubt we’d have the diverse driver support that makes Linux a viable desktop OS if we didn’t have lots of similarities. And it’s a natural thing–it turns out that most people want computers to do a relatively similar variety of things, so all the major distros end up moving a similar direction. And with open source, when one distro implements a really nice feature, it makes sense everyone else would port it as well.