In my experience there is a pretty noticeable difference, but it probably has more to do with my specific setup. I was running Debian 13 with Gnome previously, and kept noticing weird performance hiccups in Final Fantasy 16. So I gave Cachy a try with Plasma, and the performance was a night and day difference.

I probably could have tinkered with things and gotten the same results in Debian, but the point is that I didn’t have to.

True, but Mint is close enough to Ubuntu that what solutions work for Ubuntu will likely work for Mint as well with little or no modifications.

I’ve been meaning to give PikaOS a try cause I’m generally a Debian preferrer, but one thing we really need is a Mint that’s been given the Cachy-style treatment. Most new users right now are doing it for the games, so combining the most user-friendly distro with gaming optimizations would be pretty much ideal.

It’s too bad Ubuntu went to shit, because there is one thing that’s nice about choosing it as your first distro: their version numbers are the date, which makes it really easy to remember exactly when you first started using Linux distros. April 2010 in my case.

But no, just go with Mint these days. Everything good about Ubuntu, none of the bad.

I’m having my own issues with an old laptop with an nvidia card, but on Fedora. Upgraded from 43 to 44 recently. I love how relatively pain-free Fedora updates and upgrades are, especially for being a somewhat bleeding edge distro.

But after the last upgrade I’m having an issue now where closing the lid to put it into sleep mode causes it to wake to a black screen. I’ve just been having to shut down every time I step away.

Never getting Nvidia again.

If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work for you. Plenty of other distros are fine too, and some more appropriate for certain use cases than others.

So are you immediately trying to pull the conversation away from ethics, because you know Microsoft has no leg to stand on in this regard? Who cares that the founder of MS is heavily implicated in the Epstein files if you (supposedly) save a little time, right? Or I guess it doesn’t matter that that same company is actively providing surveillance tech support to Israel in their genocide of Palestine? That they censor their employees emails from speaking about the very atrocity they’re complicit in? Or that the same surveillance infrastructure is being used at home in service of an authoritarian regime?

That’s not even getting into all the gritty details of all the little annoyances and rights abuses - which have been accurately predicted by free software advocates for decades now - that inevitably stem from proprietary tech companies like Microslop, which collectively we are now calling enshittification.

But even ignoring the massive pile of shits about Microsoft and Windows to address your argument in a vacuum, does Windows respect your time? Really? Does Windows respect your time when it forces you to go online and sign up for an online account, and login to that account to enable their at-home spyware, just to install their operating system? Does it respect your time when you have to go through a potentially hours-long painful update procedure on a fresh install? How about when the OS runs awfully sluggish even on great hardware? Does MS respect your time when you have to go out of your way to research and install multiple tools and scripts to try in vain to gut all the spyware, AI garbage, adware, and bloat, and run 3rd party system tools to suppress other elements of the OS just to make the damn thing halfway usable and have the illusion of being something that can be trusted?

Even on your own little point, where is this superior documentation you speak of? Because every time I’ve run into a problem on Windows, their support pages have only ever given me the most generic troubleshooting answers that have been completely unhelpful. Please show me documentation that comes even close to the thoroughness and quality of the Arch Wiki.

Assuming any of what you said is even in good faith, and that you’re not just a shill or simp, here’s what you need to consider: Windows is something that most people have been using all their lives. When you’ve been operating something that long, it feels easier. You’re more able to ignore the pain points because habits are already deeply settled, and you know your way around. That’s the biggest reason Linux feels like such a hassle at first - learning new things takes time, and is always frustrating. I know this experientially because at one time I struggled to use Linux systems too, but now I have the reverse problem. I’ve been using Linux long enough, and Windows has devolved and changed enough, that on the rare occasion I try to use that piece of shitware, it is the most frustrating thing in the world. Windows 7 was something I was used to. But Windows 10 and 11 are new and unfamiliar to me, and consequently feel damn near unusably bad.

Does Linux have things it needs to improve? Of course, but at least it’s something worth improving. You’re trying to compare imperfect, yet a remarkable collection of software, to something that is literally just malware at this point. If anything, virus scanners should be adding Windows to their definitions lists.

Has it been a while since you used it? I know the nonfree firmware thing used to trip people up if they weren’t already aware of it, but that’s a nonissue now. Debian isn’t any harder to install than any other graphical distro.

What I tell people: “When you get used to using an operating system that respects your rights, you don’t wanna go back.”

Having grown up with a Mac before OS X came out, I liked that I could make XFCE look a bit more like OS 9, but I haven’t been able to find a suitable equivalent for kde yet.

I might give a Windows 7 theme a try. As much as I hate Microsoft, I’ve been feeling unusually nostalgic for 7. That one was kind of peak for gaming.

It sounds like you mean well, but I’ll try to break down the problems with your reasoning here.

You’ve moved from simple reasonable steps to wanting an overnight lifestyle change.

Not necessarily. What I condone is progress. If somebody says, “I can’t go vegan yet, but I’m going to go a few days a week without eating meat”, or maybe, “I think I need to start by going vegetarian,” then those are things I support. They demonstrate an active reduction in the quantity of animal products consumed, as well as the intent for further reductions in the future. Ideally this hypothetical person would have a fully animal-product free lifestyle as their goal.

Local farms with local butchers are leaps and bounds better than factory farming. If we can agree on that, what is the problem with someone moving to utilizing those services if that is as far as they are willing to go at the start?

I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate analogy, and I think I’ve got one. Rightwing Libertarians like to claim they support environmentalism, but if you look into the particulars of their platform, what they support is an overall expansion of fossil infrastructure, claiming that building new systems and upgrading old ones improves efficiency, and therefore these investments are good for the environment.

But it should be needless to say at this point that we have to get off of fossil fuel dependence, and make a real renewables transition. The former ultimately just deepens dependence on unsustainable systems and reinforces old habits.

It is the same pattern with so-called “happy farms.” To begin with, whenever these farms are actually investigated - abuses are still very much rampant. You can see an example of this in the documentary, Pignorant, by the well-known Youtuber Joey Carbstrong. Even if you’re not vegan, I highly recommend watching it cause it’s a great documentary and a riveting example of independent, undercover gonzo-style journalism.

I would also recommend watching the documentary Cowspiracy, because that one goes into depth on how the so-called “regenerative pasture farms”, which tend to overlap with happy farms, are actually not only completely infeasible in terms of scalability, but are probably overall worse for the environment due to the sheer land use that would be needed for them in a world where animal ag land use is already insane and unsustainable.

What needs to be understood here is that in actuality there is nothing extreme about being vegan. It’s not a purity thing. It is a moral baseline. It’s not “unbalanced”. It’s not any more at risk of nutritional deficiencies as any other diet if you do it right (in a nutshell, legumes, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables in equal measure, plus a b12 supplement is a solid foundation for the majority of people, and customizations can be made for other needs. The Daily Dozen is also a good foundation).

The hard part is just overcoming old habits, and breaking out of the sheer societal pressure and gaslighting to think you need to eat animal products. Once a plant-based lifestyle is firmly established, it doesn’t feel hard at all. In fact it makes a lot of things easier and feels outright liberating. For one simple example - not having to deal with raw mutilated body parts contaminating literally everything they touch anymore. I would go so far as to say plant-based cooking is easier and more convenient overall.

When you put everything together into the bigger picture - the moral horror that is inherent to treating other sentient beings and their secretions as commodities, the utterly devastating and unsustainable environmental impacts that result from it, the continuous and unavoidable pandemics that result from it, and even the impacts on personal health which include most of the western world’s biggest killers - it is not at all extreme to be vegan; it’s the dependence on animal agriculture that is truly extreme in the highest. It only requires removing the source of your conflict of interest to make that fact obvious.

The vegan life is the dietary and lifestyle equivalent of the energy transition. It needs to happen, and it is only the steps that lead in that direction that should be celebrated.

Do you make it a point to be wrong about as many things as you can?

There’s truth to your argument in a vacuum, but like they say, there is no humane way to butcher an animal. Ultimately they go to the same slaughterhouses, which if you go to the link I commented, are awful places for both the animals being slaughtered, and the people who routinely develop ptsd and are often in circumstances where they are all but forced to work at such places.

Plus there’s a reason factory farms are the way they are: that’s what’s necessary to keep up with the demand for animal products. So-called “happy farms” are not scalable.

It’s really not an improvement at all.

Wow, how long did it take you to type all this? I must have really struck a nerve when I called you out for being a psycho. Maybe consider not doing that, and you’re really not helping your case here.

Damn, doubling down, bold move. I appreciate the honesty, thanks for signaling to others that you are probably not a safe person to be around. 👍

In a thread about animal suffering, they posted an animation clearly depicting an end result of that suffering, which is obviously meant to mock the situation. Therefore, animal suffering is funny to them.

My best arguments are reserved for people who genuinely want to discuss things in good faith. Your sealioning is so formulaic I’m not even sure you’re a human.

Shit comments get shit comments. 🖖

Some of the science meat companies make more of an effort than others to reduce or eliminate their dependence on animals, though it’s still not a perfect situations. Have fun with the utilitarians you just invited though. 💩

Is animal torture funny to you?