EnsignWashout

C: Cheddar?

O: No. We don't get much call for it.

C: But it's the single most popular cheese in the world!

O: Not around here, sir.

Makes me suspect they have some lawyers on staff who were able to read America's laws -b which read to a lay-lerson as 'we absolutely always spy on everything you host on our soil'.

It’s for people who aren’t tech literate.

My experience installing Linux for tech illiterate parents and grandparents was lovely.

They never noticed they're not on Windows. They just wanted their two desktop icons - web and email.

Edit: Funny related story - they (grandparents) always rebooted with the power button after Linux told them it had updated - which was almost never necessary. I always just told them "good job", when they mentioned it, though.

when they run into HW issues they post on fourms and reddit like its personal tech support

For folks reading along, we absolutely are your personal tech support. Most of us owe way more than that to our mentors, and can never pay our mentors back, we can only pay it forward to folks like you.

Ask away!

It's often the ones we most suspected.

a picture of Reagan with quotes of how Russia is the enemy, and tariffs are bad for everybody.

That's particularly good.

and to my surprise everything seems good! (knock on wood)

After a few aborted attempts to switch to Linux, over the years, that has been exactly the vibe of my latest journey.

"So this all just works now?" has been my repeated surprised thought.

Standard disclaimer: I don't have any hardware by Nvidia. Not by choice, I was just feeling broke when Nvidia got hot.

Couldn't you also make a throwaway ms account?

I could, but them I'm up a creek later if I need to use any recovery functionality, as it all ties back to that MS cloud account.

It's certainly possible to get working, disable all of the cloud saves and telemetry, and then just save the MS account in a password vault for later.

But all of that is much more work than clicking "next" a few times in the Linux Mint installer. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1993 called and wants the inferior FOSS software you last tried back. Haha.

I find that Linux apps for basic stuff are now well ahead of their Windows counterparts.

It's getting hard to find quality free software that is Windows native, and not just a recompile of a Mac or Linux tool.

I'm happy to pay for software too, but the paid stuff has all been shit, for awhile, in my weird experiences. (Weird, in that I'm not doing music or video editing or non-developer power user stuff. I've heard mileage may vary with those.)

Sorry, I left off the sarcasm tag. I'm not confident that this will help anything.

I too have average self esteem and a hoodie. We are starting a very chill movement.

Haha!

But...yeah. This is how I make friends in real life, though.

Edit: Now I am checking timestamps to see if my needlessly using the word "cromulent" in another thread comment might have helped inspire this delight...

Edit 2: Just a coincidence. And evidence that I live this meme, too.