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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1021 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 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.

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