I wouldn’t say it’s better in terms of features or polish. In that regard it still has quite a ways to go. However it is certainly better in terms of freeing yourself from Google and being in control of your own photo library. I’ve been using it since late last year and for my needs it’s honestly been great!

Meh, I just use Google Docs. Libre office is also usable in a pinch, but it’s a little… clunky.

There are a not insignificant number of people in the Linux community who feel that the more user friendly focused distros are for “beginners” and the distros that less so are for “experts” and there is a lot of elitism and gatekeeping that goes along with that sentiment. In reality they’re all running the Linux kernel so they’re all equally valid options. Use what works best for you and ignore the chuds who try to tell you otherwise.

It’s literally not though. For anyone dipping their toes into Linux for the first time Ubuntu is by far and large the best place for them to start. Cononical has made a continuous concerted effort over all these years to make Linux more accessible to the layperson and it certainly shows in Ubuntu’s user friendly-ness. It might not be the right choice for someone with more knowledge of the inner-workings of Linux, or maybe not the right choice for someone who is concerned with the issues around SNAP, but the average user and especially a new Linux user does not care about these things.

Honestly, it’s way more convoluted and frustrating than it has any right to be. The only tools I found were cursor-toolbox which allows you to convert SVG templates to the correct set of PNGs and xcursorgen which converts the PNGs to actual cursor files. It took me several tries just get a working cursor set. Then I spent much much longer actually drawing and tweaking my theme using inkscape. It was certainly rewarding to get it working though. Now I smile every time I see the little “busy” animation.

I’m in the same boat so I started getting my “tweaking” fix by making my own themes. Just got my first cursor theme working and it’s awesome!

I just recently went through some linux printer woes. When my toner cartridge got down below 25% documents spooled from my Linux machine would fail with an out of toner error. Files from windows and the diagnostic pages from the printer itself printed just fine. Turned out I had been using a slightly incorrect print driver on my Linux machine this entire time. After a TON of digging I managed to find the correct driver and was able to print again. Only wasted most of a morning figuring it out. Lol!

I dicked around with the VM route for a while and could never really get it working 100% to my liking. There was always a trade-off. I ended up just getting a second PC and tucking it in a cabinet out of sight. When I need Windows I just use remote desktop to connect to it.

I’d laugh if this wasn’t affecting me directly.

Meanwhile Windows regularly gets hung up for several minutes on the “shutting down…” screen for no fucking reason. Only happens when I’m in a hurry too.

That’s it exactly. Most consumer camera gear uses H.264/H.265 for video and AAC for audio in an MP4 container and the free version of Davinci Resolve just doesn’t support that on Linux. (But does on Windows)

Unfortunately the free version on Linux doesn’t support H.264/H.265 and even the paid version doesn’t support AAC so using Resolve requires you to transcode if you’re using any normal consumer camera.

Do your friend a favor and install Windows back on his laptop for him.

Worth noting that the free version of Davinci Resolve doesn’t support H.264/H.265 under Linux. You will need to use another format or pay for the full version. ($295)

I’ve had good luck with the fingerprint scanners in various HP business laptops and fprint. The one on my old Dell laptop was straight-up unsupported though.

I was just about to give up on it the other day after using Mint for the last 6 months because I was having weird instability issues. Anytime I would play a game it would freeze within 15 mins. Turns out XMP had somehow gotten turned on in UEFI settings. Must have done it by accident the last time I was in there. Anyways, disabled it and all my issues disappeared. I would have been pissed if I wiped Linux and reinstalled Windows only to still have issues.

They have their uses. In particular they’re useful for easily getting applications your system repositories don’t have or getting more up to date version of applications. Downsides are certainly the space all the redundant dependencies take up and the sandboxing can be a PITA especially if you have an application that needs to run another application. Overall I think they’re the best “third party” package system available but they’re not great.

App Images do suck, but I don’t think flatpak is much better. It’s more of a lesser of two evils situation. Snap isn’t even in the conversation.

I don’t even shut my computer down anymore. Just lock it and let the monitors go to sleep. Reboot as necessary for updates. Been doing this since like 2004 without any issues. Currently on Linux Mint.

I use Debian headless for my media server and mint cinnamon on the desktop. I don’t care for anything vaguely Gnome 3.