cabbage

Yeah, I think you’re right, and I think that’s exactly why it’s a blind spot for me.

On several occasions I’ve also lent an old laptop to friends when theirs broke, and all of them ended up using Linux for months no questions asked. They later went back to Windows because of the Word grammar check, but other than that it just worked for them.

But of course, if you can’t get your drivers to work it’ll be a completely different experience.

If you’re ok Arch I guess it at least signals a willingness to learn! I would never dare to go there haha.

Yeah. I’ve double checked that my last few laptops worked well with Linux before buying them. But I don’t buy very flashy technology, so it was never really any question.

My printer is from Brother, and it’s just plug and play. At work it’s all web print and has been since I started working for pay, really.

A test could be to start by using Libre software on Windows.

Switch to LibbreOffice or some other alternative instead of Word. Gimp, Inkscape, and Krita for graphical stuff. Whatever proprietary software you use, check if it exists for Linux; if not, see if you can find an alternative you’re happy with.

For the people I know, Word is the biggest deal breaker.

Dumb user here. I completely disagree with this.

I was using Ubuntu for a few years, now I’m on Fedora. I don’t really know how to do anything. For my needs it’s just very easy.

Maybe my needs just aren’t sophisticated enough for me to encounter all those problems I’m supposed to be having. But I’ve been using it for years and my experience is that it really just works.

Well, it’s expensive technology to develop, and there’s no other business model behind it than surveillance. So I think it’s fair to expect the surveillance part of it to be difficult to neutralise.

A Fairphone with /e/OS would do.

I don’t currently run /e/OS on mine - for now I’ve just disabled the Google app instead. But it’s a solid option, and last time I used it my banking apps and everything worked with no problem.

One option might be to use Mycroft, the FOSS speech assistant. If I understand correctly you’d have to install support for playing local music - I found one such plugin, but it hasn’t been updated in a few years so who knows if it’ll work.

If anything the George Carlin-imitating AI serves to highlight that the brilliance of Carlin was in his thinking, not in his shtick of delivering cynical jokes in his signature fashion. The AI captures the cynicism and the voice and at least in part the delivery, yet it just left me bored. Carlin on the other hand I can listen to again and again.

I guess it’s like training a moral philosophy bot. Sure, you could train an AI on everything Immanuel Kant has ever written and it would be capable of delivering an endless series of platitudes that sound like something Kant could have written, but it’s not going to become a Kantian philosopher, and you’ll be better off just reading Kant.