Lemmy.world was my first instance, it was a nice place while it was below 1k users, then it started to grow fast and degenerate until it's become a complete cesspool from all points of view, not just bigotry.

I fled (I'm cis).

I didn't either, not even once in years of playing on Steam.

Many years ago at work, when PCs started to spread, I taught a 60 years old lady how to use one. She never saw a PC before yet she learned pretty well, and I saw much younger people not learning.

Being willing to learn doesn't depend on age, it's a mindset, either you have it or you don't, and if you do have it, it will last your entire life.

OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise

I've been working for big enterprises for many years, SUSE is used in enterprise environment to run SAP systems because it's recommended by SAP, OpenSuse has nothing to do with that.

LMDE (Mint Cinnamon)

True, it's the desktop manager that can make a difference but you can install any DE on any distro.

What are corporate users using?

Windows on PCs, Linux is used mostly only on servers (RedHat/SuSe), hardware brands are usually HP, Dell and Lenovo.

I think that is my standard

Why? Do you expect companies to ask you to use your own PC for work instead of providing the tools you need? Be wary of those who do, using whatever personal PC for company work can lead to data breaches and that's a very serious problem.

World of Warcraft has its own anticheat that works on Linux no problem, if Blizzard can do it why Riot can't? It's not that WoW has more players than LOL so it could be justified, it's actually the opposite.

You can argue that copyright law should be revised.

It already has been, there is a ruling that allows an exemption to copyright law for the specific use of preservation by libraries and museums.

Maybe they could do more about it but what's already there is way way better than nothing.

It's not only the game industry unfortunately, it's every industry everywhere.

It's public trading - and all the financial speculations around it - that ruins companies, forcing them to earn more and spend less year after year, and when they have nothing else left to cut, they start cutting the workforce, with all the bad repercussions Swen described, like loss of institutional knowledge for example.

It's a financial model that's totally unsustainable, noone can grow indefinitely, they should change the way companies are valued, not looking at quarterly profits but a number of other parameters like respect for the environment for example, security, financial stability, things like that.

It won't happen tho so the only option today to be a good company is avoiding public trading, not many entrepreneurs are smart enough, or unselfish enough, to do it.

she didn’t really want to switch to Win 11

On which computer? Her own?

Does not the company provide a PC with the tools needed? If yes, she has no right to decide what goes on it, the company does and she should respect that, doing what you want on a company PC can get you in serious trouble, way more serious than finding out you're using a pirated version of Office.

If the company expects her to use her own PC, they should at least provide the needed software licenses, Office365 can be used on the web, no need to install anything and it can be used on Linux no problem.

BUT the serious problem remains of having company data on her own PC, the best thing to do in such a case would be creating a VM, encrypting the file system and keeping all company data contained inside the VM.

Tho in such a case I would change company, no serious company today would expect employees to keep company data freely on whatever personal PC, that could lead to data breaches, I would never want to be involved in case like that, tho I live in EU, we have very strict laws about data integrity and privacy, dunno about other countries.

I didn't add which GPU I have but I saw you asking in other posts so: currently NVIDIA 4070 with proprietary drivers.

I've been using NVIDIA on my Linux desktop for over a decade, it always worked very well tho you have to install proprietary drivers (opensource ones are not good enough if you use software that requires performance), Linux MX has a script (menu item) to install them, very easy.

In all this time, only a couple of times I had serious problems with a kernel update (something that can happen with any distro), but Linux MX always keeps boot entries for the last 3 kernels so when it happened I just booted with a previous one and waited a few days for devs to fix it (no tinkering on my part required).

NVIDIA cards have problems on laptops, those I only buy Intel, but a dedicated card on desktop is good.

Yeah Lutris has fantastic scripts that do everything for you, also the Steam store is really good even if you don't buy from them, checking that a game is verified for Steam Deck is a guarantee it will work on any other Linux PC.

Debain (alt Linux Mint DE) Pro: The most stable OS I’ve used, with a wide range of software support both officially in the distros package manager, or from developers own website. I am most familiar with this OS and APT Cons: Ancient packages which may cause issues with Davinci Resolve and Video Games

I don't use Davinci Resolve but I do play videogames, I build my own desktop for it and I use Linux MX (Debian), it's rock solid.

"Ancient packages" are not a problem with backports, there are also flatpacks if some backports are not enough for you, or DEB packages directly from software developers (I manually install a couple of those).

The only games you will have problems with are those implementing invasive DRM, but that's not a "Debian" problem, Linux in general doesn't support that kind of DRM (not yet at least), tho I personally don't mind since I think DRM is stupid and I've always tried to avoid it.

Thank you for what you do! :)

only the “free” product was downloaded and their sales folks essentially accused us of lying about using it for corporate use

According to Virtualbox site:

This VirtualBox Extension Pack Personal Use and Evaluation License governs your access to and use of the VirtualBox Extension Pack. It does not apply to the VirtualBox base package and/or its source code, which are licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License “GPL”

Extension Packs are also free to download, are you sure a pack wasn't downloaded as well? Oracle salesmen would have no ground otherwise (Virtualbox itself is GPL 2)

That was on the kernel 6.1.0-18, I had it too, fixed several days ago, but in OP picture the kernel is 6.1.0-17, that one wasn't affected.

Distro Hopping seems to be such a big part of the “Linux experience.”

It's not, it's just a way to find the distro that suits you best.

If you're already satisfied with what you have, there's no reason to change and you're not missing out on anything. If you're ever curious about other distros, install Virtualbox and try them in a VM.

I stopped distro hopping years ago when I started using Linux MX (Debian based), I'm so happy with it that I have no intention to change ever again.

The only other distro I really like is LMDE (Mint based on Debian instead of Ubuntu), so I put that one on my laptop (MX on my gaming desktop).

What CA are you getting your certificates from?

If Let's Encrypt, have you checked their alternative methods to certbot?

I think it depends on what you want to accomplish.

I agree Distrobox is perfect for any case you want to use software your distro doesn't support (you basically setup the target distro into a docker container), or for developers wanting to use different versions of software/libraries without risking breaking the host OS with tons of different packages that might conflict with each other, but I wouldn't say it can also completely replace the use of VMs.

For example, using a VM is the only way for me to use Linux on my company PC (Windows), it's easy to get permission to install Virtualbox/Vmware since VMs are isolated from your host and you can cut them out from the company network, it's an opposite use case than what you would use containers for.

VMs are fantastic to learn, trying the setup of a different distro if you're distro hopping or simulating multiple machines interacting with each other, you can't do that with containers.