Technology

I feel this so much it hurts.

Some people are TERRIFIED of devices.

They look at the UI like it's the cockpit of a fighter plane, with a thousand buttons, some of which make things explode.

Unless they know exactly what to do, they won't even try anything.

Nevermind that UIs are usually designed to allow a user to figure them out by just prodding at everything and seeing what it does.

Just use KDE?

It is just KDE though. Its just a plasma skin. But what you get by installing Wubuntu instead of a proper distro, and then applying a skin, is supporting a developer with a history of bad security practices and poor behavior. Not to mention the potential copyright issues. This whole project will probably die when Microsoft realises that someone is using their name and trademarks to sell a competing project.

If you don't mind me asking, what sort of servers/clients do you work with?

While it might seem interesting for your usecase, please be careful which specific distro you use, especially when it comes to "windows-like" distros. Wubuntu (previously LinuxFX) has terrible security for your payment info, and the developers have made a ton of questionable decisions.

Oh man, I feel that pain. But here's where I'm at: after so many decades of really trying, really trying to get them to learn what a file system is and how computers, y'know, work, I'm done.

Obviously I don't do that work for pay, but when I did I went with the assumption that people were just ignorant, not stupid. Now I think they're just incurious - which is a kind of stupidity. And since the vast majority of their lives are now controlled, monitored, or involve these systems they can't be bothered to learn - yeah, sucks to be them.

Lemmy needs a best comment section like reddit had

Ooh, I'm a brain dead idiot, are your clients hiring?

~Worked fine for my grandparents. The switch for them was about as annoying as switching windows versions

And it greatly reduced the spyware cleanup visits

I did the exact same thing. IceWM with XP skin, Firefox with an extension that changed the name in the title bar to internet explorer + a IE theme. Then Thunderbird with an outlook theme. For years they used it like this and no longer did I have to clean out viruses or remove IEs additional toolbars that plagued that era.

Occasionally I would run some updates and that was it.

I have an older friend that has no idea that his laptop uses Windows. He just wants to be able to browse Craigslist for cars and junk. Seems like he has to get a new laptop every two years because his "old one got too slow". I should do something like this for him. He'd never know the difference.

Lindows II: electric boogaloo.

This is not the first, btw.

Windows 10 installs are GROWING while Windows 11 are actually shrinking.

As someone whose been in the industry a long time I promise you that is not going to last. Starting in January the number of Windows 11 installations will start rising quickly while Windows 10s starts dropping off just as fast. With W10 going EoL in October anyone in a regulated industry will be forced to switch to a supported OS.

Yes I'm aware that you can hop to W10 LTSC for $30 but that is absolutely not going to change much since PC hardware from 2019/2020 is at or near EoL, both physically and from an accounting perspective, so it needs replacing anyway and that new hardware will come with Windows 11.

.tar.gz or .zip?

I've never understood this. You go through all the trouble of switching OSes, presumably because you don't like something about it, and then proceed to make it look exactly like what you had?

I personally don't care what my desktop looks like, I hide as much of the desktop stuff so there's more space on screen for what I actually care about. I used GNOME for a year or so because he had a better Wayland implementation, and now I'm on KDE because I wanted to try out Plasma 6 (spoiler, it fixed my Wayland problems) and as long as I can use a key combo to type an app name to launch, I don't have a strong preference between them. I really don't care much between the two, I don't see much of the desktop anyway. I used to use a tiling WM, but I got tired of random apps messing stuff up and then Wayland scrambled the entire ecosystem up, so I bailed.

I admit I did install a "Windows XP" theme when I first switched to Linux, and again when the "aero" theme came out, but I only left it on for a couple days, and mostly to troll friends.

I'm glad the choice exists, I guess I just don't understand it.

They do, and they are super cute. This thing, instead...

Why not?