Ah, I just noticed your reply now! I’d say Mint’s about as easy to install as the other major installations. If you don’t care about dual booting, you can just let the installer use the entire hard disk, and that greatly simplifies everything. If you decide to go back to Windows you’ll have to go through that process, of course, but usually you make recovery media early on in your system’s life, and you could boot from that to get back to a factory state.

If you’re new to Linux: Mint. Use Mint, with Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you’re hardware is older. It works just how you’d expect.

There’s many other distros for other purposes. Bazzite has a lot of people who like it for games. If you really want to control EVERYTHING about your machine there’s Arch. If you want bleeding edge software and don’t mind/can fix the occasional problem caused by rolling releases then I suggest Manjaro.

But most Windows refugees will be looking for something familiar that works and stays out of their face, and for that the simple answer is Mint.

As someone who doesn’t generally play with children’s toys, i still say the answer is never.

As Randall Munroe said way back in XKCD #150, we’re the grownups now, and we get to decide what that means. Life is too short not to spend as much of it as you can doing what you want. So long as it doesn’t interfere with others, go wild.

I don’t have unpopular UI opinions, but I do have opinions that I don’t see people echo much, yet.

One of the worst things about UI in 2025 is that almost everything most people use on a computer relies on it, more than ever, and yet it’s also at its worst point since the days before mouse driven interfaces. Companies used to be much stricter about their interfaces, how they worked and looked. Now there are tons of bespoke interfaces where everyone decides for themselves how they work, and assumptions made by one program work the opposite way in a different one.

Switches have become way to obvious to what “on” and “off” is. Even when they state something like an option is enabled or not in text, it often isn’t clear whether it’s saying this is what the state is now, or this is what it will be when clicked.

Icons have become way too vague and arbitrary as to what they mean. The Hamburger menu was bad enough, but some of the icons have gotten way too abstract. At least the floppy disk for saving was a convention.

Web pages likewise could use a lot more consistency and visibility. The new Digg, for instance, hides its user block function behind a light-gray three-dots button on a white background. The only options on that menu are to Report or Block that user! Why is it three dots, and why is it so hard to see?

Microsoft’s “Ribbon” interface remains a terrible idea. At least with menu bars you know all the functions are there, somewhere, all represented by text. With the Ribbon, everything’s a toolbar button, and with many of them being different sizes it’s harder to scan through them to find the option you’re looking for.

24 is the highest number.

24 is the highest number.

Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYyS0L0uJ7A

Do you know how hard it is to shop for bras when you’re a giant spider?

Thank you for your service!

There is absolutely no excuse. It’s not like he was an unknown quantity. No amount of disdain is too great for these people.

If only she had come to this realization NINE YEARS AGO

Fox Mulder has his own candy.

So… to move to Texas, a New Yorker has to bring along another New Yorker?

I think it’s useful, when introducing people to Linux, not to just call it “Linux.” Because, thinking they’re all the same, they might go and install Arch or something.

Instead, tell them to try “Linux Mint.”

What I remember from Bible Geek (and/or Human Bible, another podcast he did) was that the earliest of the gospels actually dates to the 4th century CE, and that three of them are likely derivative works from an earlier book, lost to us, that scholars call “Q.” I think it was John that was the only gospel thought not to originate from it.

Addition: looking it up, here’s Q source on Wikipedia. It states that Matthew and Luke are thought to originate from Q, but not Mark or John.

By some reports it’s over 5%, statcounter may be undercounting Linux.

Going from memory here, I heard it years back. Robert M. Price’s podcast The Bible Geek covered the argument against a historical Jesus in an episode, noting that a major pillar in the argument is an obituary written by Josephus. Wikipedia has a page on Josephus’s account.

Price’s argument, such that I remember, has to do with the fact that Josephus’ account outright calls Jesus the Messiah, despite supposedly being written in the first century CE when this would have been a niche argument, suggesting that this account was not actually written when it purports to be. But I haven’t listened to Bible Geek in a long time, all of this could be a misrepresentation.

Black cats: bad luck

Orange cats: dumb luck

I mean, unless the question was, “What are Lays potato chips made of,” which answers itself so it wouldn’t be used. But if the question was “What are Lays chips made of,” I could see how someone might not answer potatoes. And who even asks that question in poll anyway? I feel like there’s a universe of context collapse here.

Wait, which study was this? The page says it was from 2021. What was the question? What was the context? Who were polled and how? I am dubious.

On the other hand… https://www.osnews.com/story/143376/dark-patterns-killed-my-wifes-windows-11-installation/

You might try setting Google’s Web subsearch as your main search engine, or else put your searches through https://udm14.com/, which does the same thing.