Keep in mind that if it is a serious security issue many projects have a way of reporting them separately from other bug reports so the issues can be patched before being published.

Oh wow, I’m curious how they detect spoofed hardware.

I do the same but I recommend starting with dual boot and most people are stubborn and still don’t. Two of my friends are interested, one is waiting until they get a new machine. With the other Bitlocker got in the way the first time but now on an older laptop we’re going to try arch (it was their request) so I’m excited to give that a try. They are mostly interested because of security reasons, while the other is annoyed with the windows c compilers. It just shows how many reasons there are to use Linux and how difficult it can be in other cases.

There’s no way to completely avoid cheaters and I really don’t get why there’s so many windows games that want Kernelmode access. You could still read the memory and emulate inputs based on that or draw something on the screen. It’s probably just causing the cheaters who want to download something and win to get more viruses (which most probably deserve assuming the viruses aren’t too bad), while the game company gets closer to being indistinguishable from a virus itself.

Seriously you’re recommending Reddit to a Lemmy user?

In the case that mint is the problem perhaps a different distro that is still stable and has a large user base would be good as it makes it easier to get support. I think that’s also why those distros aren’t recommended to newbies. I started with Ubuntu which worked fine. I think I could’ve started with most gnome/KDE distros though if they were similarly stable (preferably more). I think having the settings available in a gui was important for my first time.

I have fedora on my laptop personally. Upsides vs windows: More than 5 FPS on the desktop. Boots 95% of the time (the 5% are usually in summer when it likes to overheat if it’s vents aren’t completely unobstructed), starts in 1 minute rather than five and uses 1-1.5gib of ram leaving me 1.5-2gib (+4gib swap) for apps rather than the 0.5gib or so on windows.

I was ok with windows but frustrated with it’s ads and updates. Even back then I liked OSS which I later found out was mostly FOSS and I tried out Linux dual boot on my new computer, I’ve probably spent 60h on that windows installation and at this point I only have it to change the settings on a usb device that doesn’t seem to have Linux support, which I’m considering writing something small for if I figure out how those things work.

Most of those 60h were in the first year and then a couple of hours between Ubuntu and endeavouros, making sure I had my backups even if I couldn’t boot into Linux.

Honestly with the exception of trying out Nvidia drivers until they worked nicely (took 3 tries the first time back when I was on Ubuntu because it had nouveau as default and I miss read the first time) everything worked fine with wine or proton (or was just Linux compatible in the first place) and often I had better performance too.

Now on endeavouros I do more tinkering but I still don’t have any problems except on my Wayland machine which experiences stutter in a few games but I’m guessing that will be fixed later this year with the new drivers and Wayland protocol changes.

Please stop reminding me that 2017 was 7 years ago.

Minecraft runs fine for me, surely FIFA runs fine with proton (protondb says 2019 -2022 work)? I don’t even get why people use Roblox from what I’ve heard so I have no idea about that.

I have no idea what is going on with that laptop.

Aren’t Roblox and old Minecraft rather efficient? FIFA 17 sounds like it’s from 2017. To me it sounds like mostly old games so without the specs of the laptop which don’t sound good with 256gb of storage I can’t really judge whether 10fps in newer Minecraft versions isn’t perhaps to be expected. Minecraft has always run the best on my machine (compared to most steam games which are more finicky when it comes to drivers. Btw for me fixing drivers it’s usually just switching between the ones on flatpak and arch whenever it doesn’t work and worst case I do a downgrade until it’s fixed.)

Would it be worth testing the vanilla Minecraft launcher to see if that’s the problem, perhaps compare the launch options if it’s not possible? (I completely get not liking what Microsoft is doing with the launcher and I’m looking for an alternative at this point as well.)

It’s possible that the laptop has an old/niche graphics card with bad driver support, which will probably be worse to try to fix on windows, unless they already know how to use the manufacturers likely gui based weird custom installer already (I think that’s how Nvidia does it and of course it has ads).

Personally my experience on windows has been a nightmare with it breaking itself more often than Linux (while being used a fraction of the time or probably slightly more if I count the time spent on my old laptop which had slightly fewer issues). Luckily I don’t have to use it but I do have a windows install in dual boot which takes 3x longer to start, shows me ads, requires me to plug the mouse in after booting for it to work.

Searxng throws together results from different engines as far as I know.

Not sure how a federated search engine would work though.

Edit: hash0772 (is there a correct way address someone’s username on Lemmy?) already mentioned this but it’s generally best to use an existing instance, there’s also some on tor. (they obviously still only search the clearnet)

At least FOSS doesn’t try this. At least not as part of the program (I think there’s some childish behaviour from devs but generally it doesn’t make it to the code).

Lemmy is foss which is the only reason I’m here. I assume it being one of the only foss social media platforms is what draws a lot of other foss enthusiasts here too.

There’d better not be any ads.

Lemmy is free and open source (AGPL), the ad money would only go to the person offering your client not the people hosting your instance. If your client has any ads I’d recommend switching. I use Jerboa (Android, play store) and the official web app hosted by my instance.

There’s lots of LGBTQ+ and FOSS (I wonder why lol). Star Trek and science are also becoming rather common (or it just took me a while to find the right communities). I also get the feeling that the age bracket is larger than on other platforms and people seem to be nicer too (at least compared to the month or so I spent looking through Reddit before finding Lemmy).

Following is more about the kinds of post than users. (I don’t want to waste your time if that’s not what you meant by “common things people see”) There’s also some videogame and pornography communities (I’m sure there’s combinations too) so I do set my client to blur nsfw images and I block video game communities for games I don’t play/don’t want spoilers from.

Lots of webcomics also seem to be (automatically?) uploaded to their respective communities.

That could get rather annoying. Imagine if when you installed your distro everything was compiled from source (I apologise if you use Gentoo or LFS), it would take a lot longer.

Also people could still just upload a binary to various package managers (assuming the source is available).

Fair enough but have you tried running GCC on windows? Or perhaps videogames on Mac (according to non Linux users that I know both of those are a real pain)

To be fair I had some trouble running some apps on Wayland at first but now it’s only a couple of games (which run fine on X11)

Why though? I’ve failed to run windows 10 on an old laptop and windows 11 won’t even officially support something without TPM 2 and just seems to want to commit suicide on my machine (and take any other bootloader to the grave with it). Macos gets updates for a few years until it doesn’t and then software won’t run on the older/newer versions. I personally don’t know of any software that wouldn’t run when I updated to Linux kernel version 6 (likely some drivers that aren’t maintained though) and I’m also running Linux on my old Pentium 4 with no problems except overheating in summer which is probably because it needs to be cleaned.