AMD GPU + KDE Plasma with Wayland finally gets me close enough to the smoothness of Windows, especially the per-display settings for fractional scaling and high refresh rate were sorely lacking on Linux. It’s not perfect yet (and neither is Windows’ implementation) but it improved the Linux desktop experience a ton!
Seriously. I used Manjaro for a short period about 5 or 6 years ago but ran into so many issues with it. Vanilla Arch on the other hand is very forgiving in my experience. I have a second desktop PC with Arch installed and I only update that machine once every couple of months when I actually need to use it. In my four years of doing that I never had an update break my system.
YouTube Shorts doesn’t even work properly for me. At least half the videos, that are suggested to me, I’ve already seen multiple times before. Boring, as you said. I’ve found myself staying off of social media or news sites more in the last couple of weeks. News’ll make me depressive, social media bores me. Then again, more time for hobbies!
I just went the ol’ VPN route and got a YouTube Premium family subscription in Turkey. It’s about 2€/month for 5 people; peanuts essentially. I wish I could avoid giving money to Google entirely but I’m mostly using Apple devices to consume YouTube content and my four friends who share the subscription with me do as well. So yeah, that’s the trade-off I can live with.
The KDE desktop environment definitely plays a sound when you change the volume. I use my Logitech G Pro X wireless headset on Linux and Windows and just change the volume using the dial on the unit and it behaves the same way in both OS.
Though, to be fair, I do share some of the frustrations you mention. I’m mostly on Apple products apart from my two desktop PCs (one is Linux/Windows dual-boot, one is Linux only) which I own solely for gaming purposes and some hobbyist programming. I usually try to get non-Linux native applications running but if it proves to be too much of a hassle I simply boot into Windows or use my MacBook. I like to treat Linux as somewhat of a hobby and I totally understand that most people would rather have something that “just works”, especially when it comes to proprietary creative applications like the Adobe suite or DAWs. That being said, it’s extremely exciting to see the massive strides Linux on the desktop has made in the last couple of years. It has come a looooong way, honestly; especially for gaming. And I always support open-source projects/foundations - I’m donating to KDE/Arch/Wikipedia on a monthly basis - because I believe in the core values and advantages of FOSS and other community-driven foundations even though I’m far from a Richard Stallman.
The word “female” always carries some dismissive message for me. I don’t know about you - English isn’t my native language - but it feels like whenever someones uses that word to describe women (i.e. half of the people on this planet) it’s meant to de-humanize them. Like a female animal or something :(
My solution was to migrate to Windows 10/11 Enterprise. No ads, no nothing. The LTSC versions are even better but they’re a little too barebones for my use case. Keep in mind that those SKUs cannot be activated legally but as with anything: There are ways to circumvent that issue.
The article only seems to mention free consumer accounts, if I didn’t accidentally skip a section. Does anyone know how this will affect M365 subscribers (both consumer/enterprise)? I use Outlook every day at work and the lack of features in the web app make it basically unusable for me.