I still don't know why Linux Mint didn't work on my previous main desktop. Video performance was so bad that even basic desktop stuff was slow and stuttered, and then it randomly locked up (requiring a hard shutdown - even the reset button didn't work).

In case nobody has been able to tell from my earlier posts, my attempts to move away from Windows 10 have been a total disaster. I'm ready to abandon modern hardware, get a computer from the dump that doesn't meet the Windows 11 CPU requirement, and run Lubuntu on it. The latest LTS version should finally have the compositor enabled by default, which will fix the screen tearing problems it has had since switching from LXDE to LXQt.

Windows 11 is really stupid. Who thought that Explorer needs to recommend files for you to open? Of course, the worst problem is the big tech corporate dystopia of the LLM-powered surveillance state and all of the regular people (unaffiliated with those corporations) who get angry at me for saying something.

yesterday i updated mint 22.1 XFCE in my T60 (its even more annoying than windows with the updates), restarted and then proceeded to login loop, it reaches the desktop, shows some icons and then goes back to the login screen

i wasted 2 hours trying to fix this from the console. In 1 year i tried to update mint 3 times, the 3 times something broke .

Guess what Linux? i coming back to 10 LTSC because i value my time and i have better things to do than thinkering with things that are fixed in Windows since XP. At least now i can suspend the computer and login with the fingerprint.

Also, the amount of things that i still have to do from the console and that should be in a GUI makes me mad.

This was my last effort on trying to adopt Linux in a looong time, im happy with a fine tuned 11 and 10 LTSC for those who cant run it. Well see in 5 or 10 years.

rant /off

Namrok wrote on Yesterday, 17:06:

Well, I finally talked my wife into letting me put Linux Mint on her 10 year old laptop. There is nothing wrong it, in fact I upgraded the memory from 8 GB to 16 GB and upgraded the HDD to an SSD to cope with the continuing enshittification of Windows 10. I've been on Linux Mint since the beginning of the year, and all my wife does is use the internet on it. When I went to log into Windows to begin backing up files, I noticed some telemetry service was using 100% of the CPU. See, it's shit like this...

She keeps complaining that her laptop has "gotten slow", and I keep telling her she doesn't have a laptop problem, she has a windows problem. Fingers crossed this goes alright.

So, this went relatively well. Took forever to boot off the USB, the first time I tried I think it failed somewhere along the way. Second time it worked fine. Got everything installed and no wifi. Turned out it used a proprietary driver I had to download using Mint's driver manager. So I plug it into the network the old fashioned way, get it installed... and still nothing. The driver wasn't properly signed. So I had to turn off secure boot to get the wifi to work. Not a huge deal.

Printer was next. Linux thought it discovered it and had drivers ready, but that was a lie. Had to install the drivers using a script downloaded from Brother's support page. After that it went pretty smooth. Until I installed NordVPN, which broke network discovery. That was an easy enough setting to fix, and it helps that I jumped through most of these hoops on my own PC when I switched earlier in the year. Didn't have to wrestle with the wifi however.

Imported all her saved passwords and bookmarks out of Chrome and into Brave, and honestly she barely notices the difference. The web looks the same as it ever did, the laptop appears to perform better, so she's happy. When I checked the resource monitor it was using about 1 GB of ram idling versus Win 10's 4+ GB, and it's CPU was idling around 15-20% versus Win 10's being pegged at 100% because of random cloud processes.

Could it have been possible to "fix" Windows? Maybe. But I'm just so exhausted fighting the enshittification of Windows, having to turn off features it keeps turning back on, uninstalling things, having it constantly override my decisions with new updates. Good riddance.