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.
Yeah, I came in too aggressive, definitely.
But I dunno, it pisses me off when people (who have never used Linux) are so, so certain it’s impossibly difficult. Because it makes using Linux seem like a scary choice, when it’s really not that scary. Horror stories about weeks of driver hell just aren’t true, and haven’t been in literal decades and yet we still have people who will never try Linux because someone on the internet made a snarky comment about how hard it is.
So that’s the emotional place my comment was coming from. It was supposed to be basically a “please don’t talk like this about Linux, it’s false and you’re scaring people away”. But I didn’t express that well, especially because of my aggressiveness right out of the gate. The internet has been getting to me recently, I think I need to take some time off and touch some grass so I don’t immediately jump into every internet conversation with aggression.
Perfectly understandable and never stop advocating for Linux.
A lot of things where pretty straight forward when i moved over to Linux but with the piles of old stuff lying around. It has been a way better experience now (or like a year ago when I moved all the house computers over) than when I tried a Linux box around the 2010’s.
But there are a still few things that either don’t work with Linux through any means that I could find, behaved wildly differently for reasons that i can only speculate about, or there were so many different and contradictory explanations of installing/troubleshooting that it took way too long to figure things out. So the frustration and anxiety is real.