Yeah okay, that makes a lot of sense and isn’t as extreme as I thought the original post to be. I suppose that for me, I used to push Linux way too hard on my friends and when I saw what I was doing, I hard pivoted away from pushing it to hardly even mentioning it unless it comes up in conversation.

But clearly there’s a very agreeable and respectful middle ground where you can bring it up as a legitimate tool to solve a very real problem for people putting up with the woes of Windows 11.

That’s a fair way of doing it I think, and I think you’re right in that I did have a negative bias towards “converting” as I tended to imagine something more extreme akin to a cult.

Convert 30 people to a free operating system

This is a detraction from the point of this post, but I wanted to express my feelings on this anyway.

I don’t feel great about that suggestion because Linux (anecdotally) has a serious problem of fanboyism and the community is notorious for driving people away from Linux because they’re too pushy. I feel that veganism has the same issue.

Sure, you might do this in a more constructive way like up cycling or refurbishing old machines to run Linux and donating them out to people in need, thus introducing them to the world of Linux and normalising an alternative OS - but is that “converting” them?

If you are converting people, then you must have them also ditch Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android with Play Services. That, to me, is unreasonable and not the approach the Linux community should be taking.

For me, I tend to show, not tell. I’ll use Linux casually as I would any other system, and if anyone asks me about it or expresses interest, I’ll answer their questions honestly. If they do want to move to Linux, I’ll help them where I can, but I wait for them to want to do it.

I’d say in this context it means just kidding, but could be a well done play on words

No, this is victim blaming - Samsung does something very anti-privacy and anti-consumer and you blame the user because of the way they use their phone? You are detracting responsibility from the company that has started doing this.

Can confirm. Study laptops are on Linux Mint Debian Edition, gaming PC is on CachyOS currently but it changes all the time, had Bazzite on it beforehand

I imagine you could filter it with uBlock right?

I was so sad when my Nexus 7 gave up the ghost (quite literally fizzled and nothing more) but I got a solid 10 years out of it.

I loved how easy they were to work on, the NFC, the unlockable bootloader, the ROM support, headphone jack of course. We didn’t know how good we had it then.

I just had a quick play around with it, HEIC converter is something I didn’t know I needed (I have a large backup from my iPhone which has HEICs), and I like the .eml parser just to name a couple.

I’ll be adding this to my server for sure. Thanks for sharing

I totally agree, they’re mad little machines. I’m only selling mine because I can’t stand the combined touchpad/track point setup Lenovo did in that generation and I quickly replaced it with an X260. Both of them are capable of damn good battery life (I get about 5-6 hours from my X260)

I’ve been planning on selling a couple older laptops (Latitude E6420 and ThinkPad X240) and this is a fantastic idea. The former laptop doesn’t even have Windows 10 drivers (that I know of)

Agreed, and to be fair I still stop in at niche subreddits I used to follow to see what’s new, but never logged in.

While I love my ThinkPad T480, there’s a bit of me that feels bad for having that replace my Latitude E6420 that still had life left in it on LMDE, especially as I upgraded the processor to a quad core i7-2630QM from the i5-2520M it had.

That being said, the ThinkPad has been better for my back than the 2.5kg Latitude.

This is the actual reason for me too. I’m making a point to never visit that website again.

There’s exceptions like when searching for troubleshooting help and a relevant result happens to be on Reddit, but otherwise I avoid it as much as possible.