The general point I’m trying at is just sending a newbie straight off the deep end instead of letting them in easy to start off with and letting them move on to greater challenges on their own when they feel like they’re ready for it, is going to hurt the cause of presenting Linux as a viable Windows or Mac alternative, way more than it’ll help it.

Just pointing someone just ditching Windows or Mac for the first time with no terminal experience at all, straight to Arch, Gentoo, or even Slackware, is only going to fluster them and maybe even piss them off, which the last thing you want to do when introducing someone to a new platform, is alienate them in any way as opposed to welcoming them in, which pointing them straight to a more challenging distro instead of letting them on easy with a more beginner-friendly one and letting them move on to a more challenging one when they’re ready for it, will definitely alienate potential new users.

Think of introducing someone to a new OS platform for the first time, as if you’re teaching someone how to draw for the first time, for example, ideally you’d pick fun and simple exercises to teach them the basics before going into the deeper intricacies of the subject matter at a later date if they continue to be interested in the subject matter, pointing a new Linux user to something like Debian or OpenSUSE, or even Mint so they can learn the basics of the OS platform before moving on to a more advanced distro like Arch or Slackware, is the IT equivalent of that.

I’m of the opinion that if you’re a newbie to Linux and want to use a more GUI-centric distro, then be my guest, telling someone to jump straight into something like Arch when they’re just ditching Windows for the first time is more likely to just turn them off Linux forever.

That said, as said newbie gets more comfortable with the terminal, Arch is there if they want more of a challenge, and even then with archinstall, the main difficult part is effectively nullified, although for more advanced, long-term users, fully manual installation is still there on the Arch ISO as an option, but I’d be more likely to point them to something like Debian or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to start with as those are generally more beginner-friendly than Arch is.

Nothing’s stopping you from nuking your Windows install and installing some Linux distro though, at least on a normal PC. Surface products tend to be more locked to Windows though. I haven’t ran Windows as a main OS in years and don’t plan on going back, and Windows has gotten so user-hostile lately that I don’t even trust it enough to dual-boot it anymore, LTSC included.

(so far LTSC has dodged most of MS’ worst atrocities but it’s only a matter of time before that version starts getting compromised in some way too, so I don’t trust Windows outside of a VM, period, anymore, at least if I virtualize it, whatever stunts it may pull are isolated to that VM and won’t affect the host generally)

Blender at least has gotten to the point where an indie flick made with it actually won some Oscars and other big awards, so that pretty much put it on the map as a viable Maya or 3DSMax alternative, so there’s that.

No it’s not, multiplayer games with anticheat that hard-locks you into Windows and productivity software with DRM that hard-locks you into Windows is still a thing, if that were to stop being a thing, then Windows’ dominance on the desktop might finally be threatened, but until then, sadly, no.

That applies for PeerTube, Matrix, Pixelfed, and Mastodon as well.

I’d argue Lemmy and other decentralized platforms are the last bastion for free speech instead of Reddit though.

Like, since Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon, PeerTube, and Matrix are decentralized, that naturally shields them from censorship somewhat compared to centralized platforms where you’re ultimately at the mercy of whoever runs that platform.

I’m not and never was banned from there, however I left on my own accord after this happened, as if all their other enshittification didn’t reinforce that decision.

And my Reddit account is now gone, I nuked it.

Even for Doom3, both vanilla and BFG, and RTCW, Steam versions included, Lutris allows you to install native community ports for those pretty easily too.

The current American regime is a good reason for them to not only move to whatever the data storage equivalent of a tax haven is, but also move fully to Tor/I2P to cover their tracks against any enemy powers, assuming Trump and Musk don’t figure out how to deanonymize Tor and I2P.

There’s not really a whole lot of options unless you like Manjaro mobile, Fedora mobile, Arch mobile, or Ubuntu Touch that I’m aware of.

One more reason to use Lemmy.

Framework’s doing a pretty good job standing out for laptops anyways, with their user-repairability focus.

Then it’ll support Rockbox. I would recommend flash-retrofitting it for long-term reliability if it hasn’t been retrofitted already, though, the spinning rust is a known weak point on older iPods.

Even on older kernels, if anything hardware like GPUs will benefit more from running newer drivers than a newer kernel, ie. AMD cards from GCN1 up to present-day RDNA3 are actively being supported by Mesa and the dev branch generally tends to have more optimizations especially for newer cards but also older ones as well, than the latest stable branch.

The EL distros - CentOS Stream, Alma, and Rocky, all have a package which allows you to install a manufacturer repo that lets you install the latest AMD drivers from, for example, and CentOS Stream 10 and Alma 10 are both on the 6.12 kernel now.

Like I said, it’s rare especially for games, it’s more common in productivity software though…

cough Adobe… cough

The current standard DRM for the games industry, Denuvo, will work in Proton.

There might be some cases even for single-player games where DRM platform-locks you into Windows but that’s rare from my understanding.

You’ll need an original iPod, iPod Mini, or iPod Video or Classic for Rockbox compatibility. iPod Touch is just an iPhone without the phone, so it’s locked into iOS, but the original iPod, and iPod Mini, Video, and Classic all support Rockbox.

I presume any generation of iPod Shuffle or Nano is also locked into Apple firmware.

As I pointed out, if you have an older iPod, eg. like an iPod Video or Classic, or any other player that supports it, Rockbox is a thing you can flash onto it.