Similar situation. Arduino made microcontrollers accessible to the masses like raspberry made low cost computing accessible.

The Linux-libre Wikipedia entry sums it up pretty well:

“According to the Free Software Foundation Latin America, Linux-libre is a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses.[7] In the Linux kernel, they are mostly used for proprietary firmware images. While generally redistributable, binary blobs do not give the user the freedom to audit, modify, or, consequently, redistribute their modified versions. The GNU Project keeps Linux-libre in synchronization with the mainline Linux kernel.[8]”

Basically; some stuff in the kernel is either not free or not open but is included for convenience.

You can’t use them as a phone though. And dumb phones that do somehow support tethering don’t do so at modern speeds.

I want a dumb phone that acts as a hotspot for my tablet and other devices.

Yeah, people are just going to keep using it, they just won’t get updates. That means they will be vulnerable to any exploits that come along afterward but most people don’t care. M$ shot everyone in the foot when they decided to limit windows 11 compatibility.

When windows 7 came out I knew people who stuck with windows xp until they bought a new computer with 10 or 11 on it. The market will get a slight bump from EoL but it isn’t going to force everyone with windows 10 to run out and buy a new computer immediately.

You would think so but that didn’t work

Yeah, POP has its nvidia version that comes with it installed. I was using that til I switched to AMD and just reinstalled the OS instead of dealing with removing the nvidia stuff.

Im 100% with you. If I were going to set one up it would probably be XMPP. However I havent dug into the features of each to do a proper analysis on which would suit my needs because I have no need for a chat service right now.

Its newer.

Spoken like a true League of Legends player

I didn’t know that. I usually recommend LXDE because I have used it for a really long time. LXQt is also a great option, I haven’t used it in a few years but I remember it being nice and lite.

I have Pinta, it’s ok but lacks a lot of the plugins I used and hasn’t been too stable. The graphics editing thing is something that will,just take time for me to rework my workflows. Gimp is great, I’m just not used to it.

It was Fortnite and Fall Guys, I’m not really missing them.

5 in use. Main Gaming PC, Laptop, Game server pc, media server PC, and another for testing things out. Whenever a family member upgrades I get the old one so most of these are pretty old.

I have gimp and other graphics tools, I also have a LOT of hours of use in the ones I mentioned so there are things I know how to do quickly in those programs but not in their counterparts.

I second Debian with LXDE. I run it on much older hardware with no issue.

I’ve used Linux on every PC except my gaming PC for years. This year I made the final leap because of decisions like this from Microsoft.

Very few games have failed to work, the ones that have are all from Epic and they fail because of their shitty anticheat software. The only other things I feel the lack of are paint.net and the Affinity apps.

You have to go a bit further and remove any package manager and customized utilities. Probably remove a bunch of scripts and aliases from the command environment as well.

While others are saying “no one cares about your personal photos” personal info is not the target of backdoor attacks like this. It’s more likely an attempt to get access to lots of processing power for a crypto mine or botnet.

It’s best practice to have the minimum packages required to run whatever service you are running, don’t add other stuff that you won’t be using. Using a distro that is “outdated” like Debian stable can help since the packages have had more time out in the wild to be tested.

I am sure that the xz incident has raised a lot of alarms across many projects.

Most problems I run into with Linux are caused by me doing weird things. Linux doesn’t prevent you from messing with things you don’t understand but if you just want to use it as a standard desktop then you shouldn’t have many issues aside from finding replacement applications for things you are used to using.

If you decide to start tinkering, just keep a backup of your home directory since it contains all your settings and files.

Last time I did it was 2008 or 2009, the only game I played much was World of Warcraft and it ran great under WINE at the time. I don’t remember exactly why I switched back to windows back then but it was probably games. I know I needed it when I got my VR headset back in 2016 but it’s been a while since I sold that. I don’t know if Steam VR works on Linux or not, I want to have a headset again.