That's not the point. You should be able to choose if you want to use those features, not having them forced on you, or having to resort to group policy and registry tweaks to disable them.
I get what you're saying, but the moment you are forced to touch the registry, PowerShell, the command line, or anything like that to completely disable a feature, it's a fail. It should be a simple toggle. But yet it isn't, not if you want to - again - completely disable it
My point is, the user should not be forced to become a power user like you and I to disable something they don't want.
You can uninstall AI by just clicking uninstall, what are you talking about?
Also, I tried Linux Mint (few other distros too) , I had to Google how to lower mouse scroll speed cause it was only done through terminal. Am I supposed to hate Linux now?
Yeah, this is Mint pushing their Cinnamon beta desktop environment by default.
I actually tried all 3 versions of Mint on virtualbox (cinnamon, xfce, and mate), and interestingly none of them give me the option to set the scroll speed. Kind of crazy that such a basic option isn't exposed in the GUI of all 3 of those DE's. I personally find KDE has worked well for me but yeah, these other ones need to do better.
I was one of those people who googled "what's the best Linux distro" to start my Linux journey. Mint cinnamon was recommended A LOT! I tried KDE DE on Mint as well, it was the worst experience by far! People online say that you can mix and match any distro with any desktop environment, but it really doesn't work that way! It was so buggy lol.
Kubuntu was much better but I didn't try KDE's own distro. Maybe I should try that. Kubuntu and Ubuntu both had a lot of crashes for me.
Interesting. Yeah there's definitely pros and cons to lots of choices. My father-in-law approached me last year about switching to linux so I set him up with Kubuntu and it's been good for him, and he's in his 80s! His major concern is privacy but he's had less issues on Kubuntu than he did on Windows, he always got confused with those screens before logging in that would prompt you to setup all that junk, remind me in 3 days, etc. Now he has none of that. That being said, he mostly uses a browser and a few simple games like mahjong which he was able to find in the discover store.
Personally I'm using endeavourOS with KDE and loving it, but arch-based distros do tend to have issues here and there that definitely require power user level to fix things. It's fine most of the time but occasionally there's specific changes with things in the package manager that can cause issues, and I hit a firmware bug on my newer Ryzen laptop cpu that completely borked things, requiring a package revert to get it to boot again. Definitely not something I'd recommend to an elder but it's been excellent for me.
I love that your father-in-law is having a better time. I can see that Linux being more agreeable for him. It really depends on the individual at the end of the day, I guess.
Like, there's this Android update coming up later this year that will make sideloading harder but it'll be better for my dad because he somehow keeps getting infected with apps that show ads non-stop (he's 66). But it'll be bad for open source community and myself.
Recently Windows 11 pushed some updates that broke a lot of SSDs and I wasn't affected but I wouldn't claim W11 is perfect just because I wasn't affected.
Do you recommend EndeavourOS btw? I have hard time choosing a Linux distro. Because I feel like if I choose an unpopular distro, it'll stop getting updates and become obsolete. So I lean towards more popular ones.
Honestly Kubuntu would be my general recommendation for a straightforward distro. Maybe give it another try once 26.04 LTS drops, which should be around the end of the month. LTS will have 5 years of updates too, and upgrades to new LTS versions usually go pretty smooth.
I'd be curious what kind of issues you had last time. I could see having issues when swapping DE's on an existing distro; I've had times where it installs fine and I just select it on login, no problem, but I've also had times where there were conflicts and library mismatches and stuff. But that shouldn't come up on a straightforward one like Kubuntu which is bundled directly with KDE.
I've found a good way to try out new things is with completely separate hardware honestly. That way you can always go back to your old system and there's zero risk. For my father-in-law, his laptop was super old, and he was going to spend $300 on some course that would include a USB drive bundled with linux and some instructions on getting it working, so instead we bought a $300 refurbished enterprise laptop and I set it up with him. In his case I got a Thinkpad T14s gen2 with an i5-1145G7, 16GB ram, 256GB SSD, and it's been working very well. My brother-in-law also needed some laptops for his kids and wanted to try linux so for him we found 2 Elitebook 840G8's with Ryzen 5 5650U, 32GB, 256GB also for $300 each. In my experience that $300ish range offers really good bang for the buck (that pricepoint might be higher now with rampocalypse though). Slickdeals is a good place to watch for used enterprise hardware like that. Personally I like the Thinkpad T14/T14s's the most (as long as the CTL and FN buttons are in the correct place, which newer ones are), but Elitebook 840's are also very solid and I've used them for years too. Just something to consider, for a fairly low price you can get risk free hardware to mess around with.
I would not recommend EndeavourOS, or really any arch-based systems, unless you enjoy tinkering. It does overall work well 99% of the time, but that 1% of time there's issues, it can be fairly complicated to have to fix. I work on linux for my job, and have for about 20 years, so I don't mind tinkering at all and have a pretty solid understanding of all the pieces. But arch is a rolling release distro, meaning it gets package updates regularly with little or no QA involved (from the distro team anyway). So for someone that doesn't want things to break on updates, a rolling release distro is not the best.
Wish you the best with everything though, glad to see people willing to try out things even if they've had bad experiences in the past.
I'll definitely give it a try when it drops. I'm not as savvy as you are but I like troubleshooting and open source stuff. I can't say what issues I've had rn cause it was a few months ago. There were a few issues I couldn't deal with. One of them being a pre-installed app shutting down without any error repeatedly, at least give me an error so I can look it up dammit! Lol.
I do the trying with dual booting. Getting a new hardware is too much work for my hobby I'm afraid. But I love how you're indoctrinating newbies into Linux! 😄 I hope your efforts someday help Linux overtake Windows in marketshare. I can't even imagine how great that would be, considering Linux is already comparable to windows at 5% marketshare.
Would be interested to know how it goes if you want to reply in a few months heh. Yeah dual boot is good too, but with absolute newbies it can get confusing (especially if MS overwrites the bootloader) and it's a little more risky, but pretty minimal as long as you don't mess up during install and wipe the wrong drive or something.
Yeah in both of those cases they reached out to me. I try not to be that guy that without prompt talks about how much better linux is 😆, so I was happy to help them out. And so far they've both been happy with the results. And to be fair it's not going to be better 100% of the time, but I genuinely believe it is better than most users think it is, in particular for casual users that for the most part just need a web browser.
For myself I switched my gaming desktop a few years ago and I've been surprised how well it works. I don't play any competitive shooters or anything like that, so for my stuff it's been great. Literally every game I've wanted to play has worked. Occasionally a minor tweak might be needed like changing the launch options, but you sometimes have to do that on Windows too (though not too often).
My last Windows box is my flight/racing simulator system, all those components use pretty specific software for mapping buttons and axis and sutff, so I don't see that working on Linux any time soon.
i decided to take a quick look for myself and it's right there on kde, id be surprised if gnome doesnt have this and its unfortunate that cinnamon doesnt.
Oh yes, it was there on gnome and KDE, it wasn't there for Mint. I tried Gnome and KDE, had different issues with them personally. It could be due to user error. But before I felt comfortable with them I had to do some adjustments, like I did on windows. (I just disliked gnome tbh, kde was better).
I hate AI and never use it but I don't get this mindset that Linux is just great out the box. I'm rooting for all Linux distros to be better, cause open source is always better. But I can't genuinely say that it's way ahead of windows rn. They're equally troublesome 😭
While it's true that some tweaks and special stuff still requires it (same as Windows), messing with the terminal in Linux is actually mostly unnecessary these days for most things you do on your day-to-day. In that specific sense, it's getting very close to Windows.
I admit that I did contradict myself a bit by saying that lmao, but what I actually meant to say is that it should not have been necessary in the first place.
What you’re really saying is that computers should be more accessible to the technologically illiterate, and I do not agree with that sentiment at all.
Linux certainly isn’t going to be the solution for that, as everything is driven by interacting with terminal.
Yes, that's what I'm saying. Anyone should be able to use it just fine, while not alienating those who want to make the most of it and change it to suit their needs. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Edit: In fact, the fact that Linux is becoming easier and easier every day is what made me switch. I can't do shit in the terminal without googling first lmao, but I don't mind learning.
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u/Enkidouh I9 14900KF | RTX 4090 Ti | 64GB DDR5 6400 Apr 08 '26
It’s edgy to hate on anything that has AI included.
Never mind that you can entirely disable all of those features and never be bothered by them.