I install Linux on many machines each year, and I can’t even remember the last time I had a problematic installation. Your experience sounds quite unusual. Are you using some obscure distro?

Half of the time when I press the Windows key Windows does nothing at all, or pops up an empty box where the Start menu should be and leaves me wondering whether it will eventually fill the box with things. When I finally get to click an icon, half the time nothing happens, or maybe the menu disappears and then nothing happens. But programs are so slow to launch that you don’t know for sure nothing happened, so you have to wait half a minute before trying again. Then 2 instances of your app launch together. And then there’s the constant focus stealing in Windows, still unfixed after decades.

I really don’t get how people can prefer that interface to basically any of the Linux ones. They’re all faster and more functional than Windows. I do understand the issue with specialist photo, video or music software though. I still need to keep a Windows machine (physical or virtual) handy for the Affinity suite, Ableton Live, and legacy projects in Visual Studio. But my daily computing experience has been so much smoother, faster and more relaxing since I switched to Linux, and I think most ordinary users would actually have an easier time with something like Linux Mint than with Windows.

It’s the first rolling distro I have tried, and I’ve been running it for about 3 years now without any real problems. I think maybe twice there have been updates that cause issues, out of hundreds of updates per week. It’s surprisingly solid, and everything’s up to date.

Not everyone would want hundreds of updates per week of course, but it’s up to the user to decide how often to install updates. Unlike Windows, the updates don’t intrude, and they are fast.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed helps because you can create a btrfs snapshot at any moment and then roll back to it if you get in trouble. And it does this automatically whenever you update the packages.

The other type I see is people who complain that Linux isn’t usable, and it gradually turns out that the only thing they’d consider usable is an OS exactly like Windows.

Windows feels less stable today than it has been for a long time. I spend so long, on every Windows computer, waiting for windows that have turned white and say “not responding” in the title bar. I use Linux for almost everything, partly out of principle, but largely because the Windows experience is so slow and frustrating these days. For the most part, the friendlier Linux distros do a better job of just working.

I don’t think you can call landlines from it though.

I only used Skype for one thing: cheap calls from Canada to international landlines with no time limit and without having to pay a monthly subscription. Can anyone recommend a good alternative? A lot of the options out there look a bit scammy.

If it’s any consolation, my Dell XPS 13 with Windows 11 and a healthy battery gets about 40 minutes’ battery life and throttles due to heat when plugged in. It’s quite useless. Dell cares more about them looking slick than being actually useful. I also have an older XPS 13 with Tumbleweed and it runs cooler and lasts a bit longer, though battery life is still nothing special.

Linux as your main OS with a Windows VM for work is a pretty decent arrangement. Windows works without activation so you don’t have to pay MS anything.

Your taxes, straight into the pockets of Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.

Large chunks of the EU are hurtling rightwards too, unfortunately.

True. Not everyone needs to chase the latest stuff, apart from security patches.

Recently I’ve used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, PopOS! and Ubuntu, as well as Mint, and all of these have comparable graphical software managers. Which ones are you thinking of that don’t?

Mint is not really for tinkerers. It’s a distro designed to work out of the box without the need to tweak anything, and it does that well. The downsides are that it’s not always the most up to date, and it bundles a lot so it’s not a slim distro.

It has locked me out for attaching a USB device once or twice. Seems a bit extreme.

I have stopped encrypting my drives, because if anything goes wrong and the system won’t boot it makes recovery more difficult. It’s a dual boot machine with Windows 11, and I had a lot of awkwardness with Bitlocker that led to me deciding to abandon encryption in both OSs. I save sensitive files to encrypted volumes in VeraCrypt.

The notes there say that everything works except that the canvas flickers. Sounds minor but probably makes it unusable. Probably best to install it in a Windows VM if you need it. The Affinity stuff is very good.

I don’t understand your comment. Steganography in computing is about hiding messages inside other media, but this doesn’t in itself achieve any kind of encryption. The current discussion is about encryption, and whether it should have backdoors (the answer is no). Even if you hide your message in an image or video file, you still face the question of how to encrypt it. So steganography seems orthogonal to the debate about encryption.

I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents’ peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent’s minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn’t practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.