If you like fedora as a base, you can install the Gnome version of fedora and install the Pop Shell. It has autotiling that you can turn on and off while you get used to it if you want. Its what I run on Nobara and it works perfectly fine for me.

https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/

Id say quite a few Twilight Zone episodes had endings that were better than the mystery. But of course, there were just as many episodes where the opposite was true.

In the song the Sk8r boy is the hero who triumphs in the end so i think it makes sense.

Indeed they are, but every single site wants my email and birthday before I can view content now. I don’t knock them for trying to make money from ads but I don’t need them selling my email address on the side too.

Maybe not that much more complicated, but it does give a less experienced user a lot more opportunities to make a mistake that could result in data loss or just a computer that suddenly decides not to boot Linux anymore since a Windows update broke grub.

The most important thing to do is backup your data to an external drive. Unless you are planning on dual booting (much more complicated) you will be wiping out the entire drive that has windows on it when you install Linux.

This guide goes through the whole installation process.

I agree with you.

And youre right that the article doesnt focus on the algorithmic hate factory which to me is the main difference between social media and traditional media. For instance, and this is just anecdotal, my grandma who had nothing besides an analog telephone and broadcast tv became just as polarized and angry as someone with social media just by reading and watching Fox news (and eventually OAN and Newsmax) all day. I cant imagine that Facebook would have made it any worse.

The algorithm is probably accelerating the polarization pipeline, but i guess my point was that social media isnt necessarily doing anything new or distinct. Its doing the same thing Rush Limbaugh was doing on the radio 25 years ago, its just on a new frontier.

The 24 hour news cycle was already throwing sensational controversial stories up and speculating wildly if not outright lying about to hold on to eyeballs. The longer you watch, the more commercials you see. Etc etc.

I would love to see a study of social media vs traditional media to see whether the mean time to full polarization changes and if so, how significantly.

Good Ted talk!

Nope not really. People were already mad but its a lot easier to get mad publicly on the internet than in person. But Im sure the same people could get just as angry watching biased news channels but they cant start arguments with anyone in that context.

And also, don’t forget Betteridges Law of Headlines.

I haven’t done any work for the military but i can say that all the legacy systems I’ve worked on were because the specific software they need was written only for Windows 98 and the developer or company that created it is long gone. Keeping it going is a chore but switching to literally anything else is out of the question.

I could see for military applications that having the known quantity of a working piece of software that isn’t changing anymore and can be swapped as an entire unit is an advantage, especially if it doesn’t touch the internet in any capacity. But eventually you run out of people who know what to do if any changes need to be made.

There are several things like that in Fedora, which is already a good reason not to recommend it to first timers. They most likely won’t know or care about nonfree codecs, they will just see a broken machine. Linux Mint understands that as a use case and has a “magic make it work” checkbox during install.

That all being said, I run Nobara and love it, but i wouldn’t recommend it for new people.

I don’t have a ton of faith in tplink to continue to support omada over the long term. They’ve also been somewhat slow to fix security problems in the past. For the same price as the omada ap you can get unifi u6 lites.

You can still run your own controller and i can vouch thaf a couple of them can cover an entire moderately sized house. I run 2 at home with pfsense on an ewaste tier dell optiplex and have for years without trouble.

I’ve never messed with opnsense but I assume it works just as well.

Also what type of connection are you getting from your ISP? If its a fiber connection you may be able to buy an SFP network card and replace the modem altogether.

They would most likely still have to disable secure boot.

That would lower the barrier to entry significantly. It doesn’t address the issues with the bios but someone mildly adventurous would have a much easier time going forward.

I think something like that would have to be sponsored by and maintained by a big distro though. I’m afraid if it was a community effort the amount of bikeshedding would stop it before it even began.

Linux pre installed is the only way for most people to use it I’m afraid.

Fedora does btrfs snapshots on boot also, which is such a great feature that I’m surprised Microsoft hasn’t copied it for Windows.

This is definitely the case. And by the time someone is willing to experiment with their PC its so old that the experience with Linux is hampered by the older hardware.

Definitely. I can genuinely say that the autotiling in PopOS completely changed my workflow for the better.

Absolutely. If Linux was pre installed that’s what people would use. Its the switching to Linux from something else that proves so complicated.

Mostly just so they know which boot device to pick.

Admittedly that’s probably not necessary or the least of someone’s issues.

God i wish. And most everyone here could install a new operating system in about 20 minutes. But nobody else is going to because the learning curve for a regular user to install an os is basically perpendicular. Even if they had a linux installer already on a flash drive.

Oh just boot into the bios and find the option to boot for a flash drive and then boom installed.

Which requires a user to know, What a bios is

What booting means

What boot options mean

What the model of their flash drive is

What button on their keyboard they need to press to get to the bios

What secure boot is

Where they need to go to turn off secure boot

How and where to back up their important files

What a disk partition is

How to reverse the changes made to the bios so that it doesn’t boot to usb by default.

And that’s assuming they know why they want a different OS, why they care and that they know about Linux in the first place.

Most people dont and never will. All you can do is install Linux for the ones you like the most and say a prayer to your favorite deity for the rest.