so Linux got power-leveled by Valve in recent years to now be an entirely viable platform for gaming, which is certainly an interesting future to be living in after the main thing you'd hear about it in the late naughts and early 2010's was "oh yeah sure Photoshop and Office may work well in WINE, but i'm a gamer and barely any games work besides WoW"
but now i'm feeling pretty bad for creatives (visual artists, authors, journalists, programmers, anything) who are going to imminently be forced to reckon with the dissonance resulting from the combination of:
- angry about everything they do already being fed into GPT models without their consent, and Microsoft getting exponentially more forceful about baking that and other cybercrud into Windows on every level
- annoyed at people telling them to switch to Linux (perhaps they've even tried before, but, say, their tablet didn't have pressure sensitivity when they ran their ClipStudioPaintToolSai CS6 on wine, and Krita and GNU IMP didn't work for them)
- staying on Windows 10 without becoming a ransomware/etc. liability isn't an option past its EoL in 2025
- trying to rough it on Windows 11+ will mean playing whack-a-mole with opt-out settings and whatever new de-bloat scripts appear (and fixing whatever they break) for the rest of time
- getting a Mac would be all the cost of overpriced hardware and the pain of migration (if their tools even exist there) just to push the rot of capital into a different corner for a while
(for whatever it's worth, my professional opinion for anyone who wants to try Linux but is feeling lost at sea amid all this is to imagine an edited version of that Verge article about buying whatever Brother printer is on sale, but it's about putting whatever the latest Fedora Plasma Desktop is on a flash drive and booting it. i don't even use Fedora any more or like RedHat much at all; it's just the pragmatic choice for newcomers in current year. yes, moreso than Debian derivatives. a discussion of why would be far too exhausting and miss the point of this post. but if you (and the nerdiest person you know that's gonna be helping you with it) have a strong preference, then as Debians/Ubuntus go, you could do much worse than Mint -- which apparently even includes a built-in tutorial nowadays.)
