this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ubuntu 10.10 was my first linux. Though 11.04 was released soon after my switch.

My first experience with 10.10 was as a virtual machine on my school issued Dell Latitude D505 laptop with Windows XP, a dual core 32-bit processor and 512 megs of RAM. And boy, let me tell you, it ran like shit. But I knew that it was because I was virtualizing it and didn't hold that against it.

I can't remember what it was called, but I eventually installed this OS on my flash drive that was meant to be eco-friendly for old devices. It had a very green wallpaper. And just used that instead of ever booting into windows by changing the boot order and leaving the flash drive plugged in at all times.

Edit: I remember now. It was called Watt OS.

[–] alexalbedo@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I ran my first distro in 2009 and had to switch back to PC when I got to college. Finally got around to switching back over earlier this year when my computer wasn’t eligible to upgrade to windows 11. It’s wild how much easier it is to get things up and running now, my 70 year old dad could probably do it and that was not the case the first time around.

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[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

I'm helping!

Just put Mint on my 2-in-1! So far so good, except my volume buttons don't work, and I have to manually toggle the on screen keyboard for text entry if I detatch the keyboard cover.

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[–] itisileclerk@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (7 children)

I still use windows because of Visual Studio. I used to use Mac OSX because of XCode and I honestly don't understand people today who still use Windows or Mac for anything other than Development.

If there was an alternative to Visual Studio for Linux I wouldn't think twice.

[–] realitista@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

People who use windows or Mac for anything but development do so for the same reasons as you, they are locked into some features. For example, at home I need a local music library manager with local sync to my phone music app and smart playlists. Mac is still the only platform with this.

At work I need MS exchange integration and all the features of native office. Even the Mac version isn't good enough for my workflow.

My only hope would be to turn to emulators or something like that, but at that point I'm not really running Linux anyway. I'm just running something else in a container inside Linux.

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[–] RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

The only thing I really miss about visual studio is the automatic profiler. Everything else just felt archaic, bloated, slow, and unintuitive. Adding one line in cmake often does the same thing as clicking through five submenus which never once got updated since 2012.

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[–] LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I couldn't find it is in the article, is this new purchases, or how is this measured. If a computer ships with windows and I install mint on it, how do they know where that tally goes?

[–] Bluewing@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting "OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!" to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it's a major, major victory for all the distros.

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