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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2093 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'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.

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