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In honor of @WhiningCoil's epic rant about Microsoft products, can we talk about "personal stacks"?
I'm about ready to jump multiple ships. Right now, we have one Windows 10 desktop chugging along, some chromebooks for just hanging out and browsing (or bringing up recipes for cooking or whatever), and android phones.1 I'm still okay with the phones. Like WhiningCoil said, Windows has gotten worse and worse, and our current desktop hardware is in the "will they, won't they?" land of whether Microsoft will even allow it to upgrade to Win11, not to mention whether I even want it. It seems like every week, I'm learning about yet another "feature" they've added that I just have to go turn off (and then put on my long list of stuff to turn off for the next time I have to bring to life a new windows machine... or reset this one (yes, I just had to reset it not long ago, because it went utterly bonkers with forgetting to let me have proper privileges)). Sunsetting of security updates (as insane as they've become) might push me over the edge.
As for the chromebooks, anyone else looking to jump ship because of Manifest V3? Maybe I need to suck it up and just try out uBlock Origin Lite for a while, see how it goes. But we've been having other issues, too. Since getting the chromebooks, we've done a lot of simple coordination stuff with google sheets, but they've been really glitchy lately; about half the time, when I navigate to an open sheets tab, the entire display is all scrambled. I have to switch tabs and switch back, and then most of the time it'll work. I don't recall seeing this behavior when I go to sheets in Chrome on my non-ChromeOS devices. On top of that, there's an issue with internet connectivity randomly dropping (still can't figure out if it's fundamentally a hardware limitation/problem or something going on in ChromeOS). For several years, these have been amazing, cheap devices that just worked for a lot of our poking around day to day, but the annoyances are building up.
I have been seriously considering just tossing both Windows and ChromeOS. Apple is too expensive; I genuinely like having super cheap chromebooks that are small (even the smallest MacBook Air is pretty big for just throwing around), have real keyboards, can be abused, and just thrown away and cheaply replaced if I break one (I could blow through at least five cheap chromebooks for the cost of one MacBook Air). Soooo... I'm thinking maybe just Linux everywhere?! Probably the biggest barrier I have to that is the Wife Approval Factor. I'm definitely her "Tech Department", and it would basically be on me to retrain her and work through her annoyance at having to learn new tech things.
Any thoughts? Has anyone else taken a similar plunge, especially with a less-techy wife involved? What are y'all currently running?
1 - Of course, we also have work computers, which will always be Windows for the rest of time. Nothing we can do about it, but there's not really any problem with the extremely small number of things that we need to have cross the work/personal barrier.
The wife approval factor makes this hard, and I suspect it means that you are going to be limited to either Windows or MacOS for computer choices. Apple devices are way too expensive for what you get (don't @ me, Apple fanboys), but Apple at least hasn't turned to shit (yet) and they do care about making a good experience for customers.
If you're willing to brave the storm of wife disapproval, Linux is viable. I've been running it for a few years now and generally it just works. The only times it doesn't work tend to involve older games, which probably won't be a factor for your wife at least. But if she's anything like my wife, she will be put off by it and really want to go back to something she knows better. Only you can say if it's worth working through that one.
What I have going for me on the wife approval factor is that she's been using a Chromebook for the last few years. She was definitely annoyed at first, just because she had to learn new stuff. But once she learned, she grew to mostly like it... until the latest issues started popping up. It's a balance between feeling bad, saying, "So, uh, how about you learn another new thing?" and trying to package it as, "Yes, you'll need to learn a little bit, but this is a solution to your recent frustrations!"
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