Linux

I recently tried this for the first time for my grandad on an old dying laptop of his which was struggling to run at any speed.

During the install it had already messed with the hard drive partitions in order to run the live environment, which is a big no-no for me.

The whole point of the live environment is it shouldn't change the system until you try to install!

It also meant I no longer had a free partition to install to anymore so I couldn't even get through the installer since I also couldn't resize etc. because the partition was in use.

Been using Debian/Ubuntu based Linux for about 20 years and never seen this issue until Pop! OS

Pop is sick and absolutely shines on laptop.

Bought a lemur pro 9 a few years ago and have it as a daily driver since. Pop OS works great for the most part but, as other people have mentioned, PopShop is slow/buggy and I often just resort to apt instead. My spouse plays a lot of PC games so when she got sick of Windows I migrated her over, and she's had very few problems. Every once in awhile a game won't run but usually that gets figured out in a few weeks by the Proton community.

A few content creation linux apps only officially support Redhat, so getting them to run is a bit of a pain but that would be the case with any Debian based distro. So overall I haven't seen the need to distro hop to Mint or something similar.

The UI seemed like it wasted a lot of space. I hope that Cosmic is better in that regard.

Pop! Is a solid Ubuntu-based distro. I use it on my MSI gaming PC and my System76 laptop.

The S76 (Lemur Pro) laptop is nice, but it isn't excellent, especially not for the price. I'm happy with it, but I probably won't buy another one unless they make significant improvements to the screen and chassis.

For some reason, referring to a computer or VM that runs Linux as a "Linux box" triggers me.

I’ve had Linux pop OS on a USB and ran it for about a year and a half total before switching on and off to windows. I think it’s one of the few OSes that actually work on all my devices even obscure thinkpads. I’d still use it today however -

My issues with Linux as a whole stem from absolutely trash antivirus and auditing perspective. Windows suffers this in many ways but I think they’re a live service rather than a static service. I’ll give an example, we’re getting bitlocker encryption with backup support keys etc in case a user gets locked out of a device on all devices very soon in W11h24 I believe, as a default. Pop OS comes with disk encryption but if I forgot my password or what have you, or even want to make a USB encryption key to unlock the device if I forgot it, I’d be in trouble. There’s an element of user friendliness that OSX and Windows have, that Linux just doesn’t have. I get scared running these open source applications when we’re essentially in a Cold War and I need to depend on them for my business. Especially if the apps are developed in JavaScript there’s so many dependencies I can’t verify. I can use portmaster and some log trailing to sift it but something about it feels like I am still not secure.