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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2915 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So I finally talked my wife into letting me put Linux Mint on her 10 year old laptop. She's been complaining about it for years. First I swapped out the HDD for an SSD because Windows 10 at some point stopped pretending people might still be running their OS off an HDD and it just ground to a halt. Then I upgraded it from 8 GB of ram to 16 GB of ram because Chrome is a gluttonous whore. Still, the complaints persisted, and I could see why. Random Windows processes were constantly eating up nearly 100% of her CPU. I'd play whack-a-mole with them, but every few months updates would further enshittify her experience. Right before I went to install Linux, I saw some Windows Telemetry service was monopolizing 100% of her CPU. So I kept telling her she didn't have a laptop problem, she had a Windows problem.

Had a few hiccups. It didn't want to boot off the USB on the first try, but the second was fine. Then the wifi didn't work, because it used a proprietary driver. Luckily I wired my office with ethernet, so I plugged in at my desk and downloaded that using Mint's driver manager. Unfortunately it wasn't signed, so I had to turn off secure boot for it to load. After that the printer didn't work. Mint thought it found a driverless printer on the network, but that was a lie. Installing the drivers using a script off Brother's support page worked wonders. Then it broke when I installed the VPN because it broke network discovery. Not a problem, just a config setting away. Last I loaded Brave onto it, and imported all her passwords and bookmarks.

Near as I can tell, after she opens a browser she can't tell the difference. I haven't heard any more complaints about her laptop being slow so far. Finger's crossed I won't be shelling out a grand for a new laptop any time soon.

I got my wife the cheapest base model M1 MacBook from Walmart. Done with this crap. Only have time to tinker with my NAS.

I've got my wife pretty bought-in on super cheap Chromebooks for 'laptop-like' stuff. She genuinely lives in a browser and isn't ever doing computationally expensive stuff, so it works pretty well. There's maybe one or two things that would make me weakly prefer for her to have a Mint laptop, but given our shared preference for super cheap, small form factor, low power (low heat), long battery life, etc., I think chromebooks get the job done well enough.

For the main desktop, which I ask to do a lot more stuff, I have it dual-booting Win10 and Mint at the moment. There are a few niche things I'm still figuring out, but the main one is Excel. We have a fair amount of stuff in Excel, and it appears that things don't translate directly into Libre... especially any of the books with significant VBA macros. A cursory amount of research tells me that it's actually annoying to get Excel working in Linux, so I might be staring down having to just re-write everything and having a clean break in compatibility for prior years' info. I've still only done cursory research into it, partly because I don't want to think about having to redo it all.

I keep a windows VM for things like that. Defeats the purpose of Linux only slightly.

This is what I do - run Windows in a VM. I have a few games that don't run in Linux. If you never let Windows access the Internet, a lot of the annoyances are mitigated.

Yeah, I guess. I was looking at WINE/such first, and my "cursory amount of research" was basically just asking an LLM, which IIRC told me that they had problems with Excel. I should revisit doing it with a VM. Biggest challenge will be making a workflow that is wife-approved, since she needs to use it, too.

I've generally had good experiences replacing waifu computers with Linux. They pretty much never have a problem, though they just use webapps. The most they struggle with is file management since a lot more Linux apps will drop stuff in Home and they don't know to check there if Documents and Desktop don't have it.

Unfortunately it wasn't signed, so I had to turn off secure boot for it to load.

I would think you could just self-sign the printer driver and tell Linux to trust that signature but it might be too annoying.

I would think you could just self-sign the printer driver and tell Linux to trust that signature but it might be too annoying.

If it were my computer, and I cared enough, it was a thing I could research. I saw it was presented as a more secure solution that just turning off secure boot. But turning off secure boot was the thing I knew how to do immediately, and thus was much easier and faster. Maybe one day.

I mean, I ran into this problem with nvidia drivers. They failed to update with signatures trusted by Ubuntu. Then I tried to self-sign it and failed. Then I just gave up and disabled secure boot.

I just wish we could turn back the clock and have all desktops run Windows 7... That was the peak of personal computing.

Latest Windows 11 insanity:

Windows locks the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. An application puts some UI buttons at the bottom of its window. The app automatically resizes its window to hide the buttons behind the taskbar if you try to make it full size.

I wouldn't mind using Windows 11 if they made it a feature-complete and reliable operating system. I don't think that'll happen before they kill Windows 10.

(Fun (unverified) Fact: If you pay extra, you can get delayed access to the latest Windows features, because being on the general upgrade path is a good way to crash your computer.)

I thought XP was pretty much the pinnacle of personal computing, before I switched to OSX.

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