Last I checked it didnt play very nicely in real hardware, and required running it in a VM

Idk about the lack of repairability, those things are really easy and cheap to fix in my experience. They are at least no less repairable than 95% of laptops on the market.

I couldn't bear to make e-waste, so I repaired two c.~2012 era chromebooks earlier this year. The end result was equal parts rewarding experience and a complete was of my time xD. Those sandy bridge cpus are sloooow

It may be a bold of me to say, but I hold the controversial opinion that I don't really give a shit which computer OS you use. If you can use a mouse and keyboard to navigate a desktop environment then you are ahead of the curve at this point.

I wasn't trying to give you advice, I was describing the situation in general.

Think about all the people with computers that don't know about Linux.

Yeah I guess I left that part out! It’s funny because like so many things in Linux, you have all the power but you often don’t need to use it because the same problems just aren’t there.

You get to decide when to apply the updates, but they are so quick and unobtrusive that I choose to apply them immediately!

Debian user here. All people have a doorkey. Some people have an alarm system as well. Infosec is about ' what do you have and what do you know '. So in principle TPM is a defencible argument. You should absolutely bail from MS products for different reasons. Like privacy. Your PC isn't yours anymore. Your NPU will reduce THEIR costs. Etc.

Don't enter Linux thinking its a drop in replacement. Go slow and do 'ships in the night'. Move data over to the new ship. Start embracing OSS on windows, it'll be familiar when you finally bail.
G luck.

Chromebooks and Apple products hitting EoL for sure.

I'm grateful to Microsoft for Windows 11 providing me a bunch of free machines to stick in my basement and put Linux on.

The writer clearly understands that something isn’t adding up with Microsoft’s claims about TPM, but nowhere do they address the accusations that Microsoft plans to use it as DRM (and potentially spying).

Similarly, only supporting certain CPU’s is suspect as hell. Between all this and Recall, it really feels like the driving design focus behind Windows 11 was to build the best spying machine they could.

TPM is the wedge to put a cryptoprocessor in your computer so program can finally operate under the tyrannical scrutiny of users and the pirates using ghidra !

If a distribution didn't come with any default software, it would be unusable out of the box by the average user. If you want that, choose something like Arch or Gentoo or LFS.

The point of FOSS is freedom and choice. You can choose a distribution that aligns with your needs, and once it's running, you can e.g. replace Firefox with Chrome or use Nautilus instead of Thunar. Try uninstalling IE/Edge or Explorer on Windows for a direct comparison.

Depends on what. The most common thing i see is that the kids mess with either the keyboard and or the screen, which you're basically forced to scavenge another broken Chromebook for because the replacement parts are pretty much like half the cost of the chromebook

If it's something simple then yea I agree, but kids are menaces against their chromebook so damage usually ends up being on the extreme side.

I remember suse and Debian where ahead of the curve back then. Package managers really changed the game when they started showing up around then. I will admit I’m probably a little too cynical. But I had to run windows through college for various software, and until recently playing most games on Linux was quite the challenge. Steam has truly cracked the code. So I’m dipping my toes back into Linux for daily use. I’ve been running my truenas server for a few years now and run several Linux VM’s so I’m not starting from scratch.

Little Brother is a novel about a future dystopia where copyright laws have been allowed free rein to destroy people's lives.

It's legislated that only "secure" hardware is allowed, but hardware is by definition fixed, which means that every time a vulnerability is found - which is inevitable - there is a hardware recall. So the black market is full of hardware which is proven to have jailbreaking vulnerabilities.

Just a glimpse of where all this "trusted", "secure" computing might lead.

As a short video I saw many years ago explained on the concept: "trust always depends on mutuality, and they already decided not to trust you, so why should you trust them?"

Edit: holy shit, it's 15 years old, and "anti rrusted computing video dutch voice over" (turns out the guy is German actually) was enough to find it:

Trusted Computing. LAFKON.

(www.lafkon.net)

Yeah sorry should have listed that, they do require a NixOS installation.

Pick a DE for the installer, and if you want to change DE the installer will guide you through the process.

Then it will leave you with a config file and some man pages, it's a bit much at first but spend some time with it. In my eyes easily one of the better distros out there.

I was pretty lucky in university as most of my profs were either using cross platform stuff or Linux exclusive software. I had a single class that wanted me using windows stuff and I just dropped that one.

Awesome that you're getting back into it, it's definitely the best it's ever been (and you're right that Steam cracked the code). It sounds like you probably know what you're doing if you're running Linux VMs and stuff, but feel free to shoot me a PM if you run into any questions or issues I might be able to point you in the right direction for.