I think I made the mistake of pushing my grandfather away from Linux. He’s retired but does some professional photography; he’s used Photoshop for years, but said he’s open to leaving Adobe.

One day recently, he told me he heard about “this Linux thing” and asked me if it would be a good fit and run Windows applications well. I told him his main issue was probably Photoshop, and that even switching, he’d still need some stable, consistent way to open past PSD files. In retrospect, maybe I should have looked more closely at his use case to see the complexity of his edits and if they might have worked well in another program that runs on Linux.

I think for the MS Office thing, it depends on what it’s being used for. If it’s just creating a fresh document or editing a simple existing docx, LibreOffice it totally fine; I’ve heavily exclusively used LibreOffice Writer during my time in college and been okay, as I’m either just writing in MLA or using a provided Word file that I can then just save as an ODT after initial conversion and export as a PDF when it comes time to turn it in.

However, from what I can tell, if you’re working in an organization that extensively uses MS Office, files may need to survive multiple openings and edits between multiple editors, and multiple cycles of translating between document representations can lead to degraded documents and just make your work life absolutely miserable. Thus, LibreOffice isn’t an option, though I hear there are more MS-compatible suites that are usable on Linux, though not all of them FOSS.

This is why I’ve so far left my mother alone about Linux; maybe if I saw some evidence that her workflow would be more amenable to LibreOffice than I think it is, I’d reconsider.

I usually format my external drives to exFAT since it’s fully supported R/W on all major operating systems, in the slim chance I have to use macOS.

Still, no need for the OP to reformat their drive; NTFS tends to work just fine.

I agree with other people that you should futz around with your GPU drivers and different Wayland compositors first, but also, if you ever had to reinstall, there is such thing as saving your dotfiles to significantly reduce setup time.

I don’t do that because I’m lazy, but it certainly is a thing

For reference, sharing your local IP address is a little like saying “I’m in room 223” (local IP address) and not saying what building (network) you’re in. Someone can’t walk into 223 in a different building and get to the same room you’re in.

Honestly, even if someone knew what network you were on, a local IP address wouldn’t be that useful because even if they successfully got on your network, as long as you have a properly-configured firewall and no vulnerable network-exposed services on your system, they can’t really do anything.

Honestly, while it’s still not a bright idea to tempt fate like that, even sharing your public IP isn’t that bad for the same reasons if it’s a competent home user; the worst that can happen on a properly-configured network is that someone tries and fails to exploit vulnerabilities that aren’t there and MAYBE drum up your internet bill. Also, for most ISPs, your public IP changes pretty often anyway, usually something like every few days to a week, due to changing DHCP leases.

I thought the same thing.

I mostly agree with the idea of using stable distros.

However, I will add that if you hate the default Debian installer and are willing to dig a bit through the website, they do have live USBs for each DE with a Calamares installer that I love. I really wish they would promote those more.

Honestly, they need to redo the whole Debian site.

Also, I find it funny you include 2018 in your range; I think that most things from 2018 could probably run almost any full modern distro competently, and that the better quality devices from 2015-2017 also wouldn’t struggle too much.

Debian with XFCE. It’s very stable with very little bloat compared to Ubuntu.

KDE might not run horribly, but XFCE was always snappy for me when I ran it on a similarly-aged, sinmilar performance Fujitsu Lifebook.

I’ve never even owned a Mac; I know about it because I’ve Hackintoshed a few times, so I’m familiar with OpenCore.

Really? I thought the last version for those was Monterrey and that that went EOL in 2024.

That reminds me; the other day a client walked up to the help desk I work at with a 2015 MBP still running El Capitan.

I’m confused. How did you save your parent’s Masters in Business Administration? /s

(Sorry. I can’t help but think that every time someone acronym’s Macbook Air.)

OCLP?

I will point out that the card support for ROCm has improved; AMD explicitly supports most RDNA3 or later consumer GPUs, and I think support might go back to RDNA2, maybe RDNA1.

Supposedly it’s technically possible to use Polaris, but it’s very broken at this point.

The Arch Wiki is probably the sungle most useful documentation for any Linux user; I don’t even use Arch and it’s still extremely helpful.

I could see the benefits of using Arch just so almost every function my system has is near-perfectly documented in Arch Wiki.

As for the distro itself, it has the newest packages, and often good repos with interesting packages that Debian and others may lack. It also expects you to choose and install the components you want, whereas the Debian installer will usually just install defaults; you can use Debootstrap for a minimal Debian install, but that’s not as well supported for installing Debian due to the way tools as set up on the install medium.

The reason I choose Debian over Arch is because if I don’t use a device for several months and have to install updates (like my school laptop over the summer), Debian Stable is more likely to survive that than Arch; I’ve destroyed several Arch VMs by trying to update them after not using them for months. I’m sure I could have salvaged them if I tried, but I’d rather just make a new VM.

It looks like NetBSD and OpenBSD might be good OSs for 32-bit; the next FreeBSD version is dropping support. I don’t use any BSDs, but I think a BSD is probably the best-supported modern Unix operating system for this kind of hardware as the last of the major distros drop i386.

Linux distro support is really thinning out for x86_32, so for this use case; I’m sure the distros still exist, but they’re often niche projects. Gentoo may do the trick if you want to; I can’t tell if they compile their newfangled precompiled packages for i386 though, so if they don’t, you’ll probably have to set up a cross compiling setup from a more powerful x86_64 machine, which you’d need to use every time you update.

Wasn’t necessarily suggesting 11 LTSC; just my personal choice.

Not really.

Ampere’s for servers; if you have the cash to blow, you can get a fancy workstation, but not a laptop. It’s really a shame; I think Ampere might be able to do well in the consumer CPU market if they wanted to face Qualcomm (and assuming they can get their single core performance up). A lot of their hardware seems to follow standards pretty well.

Graviton is only used internally inside Amazon and not sold to customers.

The only semi-decent ARM laptops you can get right now are Snapdragon ones, some of which kind of support Linux but with a lot of caveats and obnoxious quarks.

I have to have Windows for my university’s test-taking spyware, so I just have a barebones 11 LTSC installed on a secondary drive.

I just looked it up, and it seems a lot of the pre-Apple Silicon MacBook had swappable airport cards that used a completely standard mini PCIE slot. From a cursory google search, it looks completely possible to swap in something like an Intel Wi-Fi card that is supported natively by the kernel.

A mini-PCIE Wi-Fi modem can be had for not too expensive, around the $30 range; in fact, if you have a good stack of old Wintel laptops, one of those might have a card that works well. In fact, I did that with my sister‘s laptop (although she was using Windowd) – her Realtek Wi-Fi card was causing endless misery, so I ripped the Intel modem out of an ultra book from circa 2016 and put it in her laptop. No more issues.

Exactly. Luckily, back in high school, my IB History class spent a good couple months just learning about authoritarian rulers and their tactics.

I especially like pulling out Pinochet because he’s a clear and relatively recent example of right wing authoritarianism, manipulation of existing religious structures, and US government support of authoritarian regimes that help contextualize its trend towards authoritarianism.