• ninetynine@lemmy.film
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    1 year ago

    I run Windows on the main family computer for simplicity and Linux on my personal (slightly older) laptop. I’m trying to teach my kids about it in hopes that they will have the same level of curiosity that I did back in the early 2000s. Plus I’d love to not run Windows at all.

    • Kaped@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Id install Mint/Ubuntu on that family computer. Kids wont see much difference and everything works out of the box nowadays in Linux.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      My kids (9 and 6) use Linux to run Minecraft and Steam games, it’s literally not a problem. In fact, the only times they’ve used Windows was for:

      • school - my laptop had an issue with Zoom, so I just booted into Windows (I fixed it, but now my kids don’t need Zoom anymore)
      • Minecraft Bedrock edition - we never got into the game because we were waiting for his friend, who flaked out

      So they basically see Linux as fun and Windows as a disappointment. I actually switched from KDE -> GNOME and my kids didn’t care. In fact, one huge benefit to Linux is that they can ask me to unlock the computer while I’m working in my office, and I just ssh in and run the unlock command, easy as pi. Or if they want to switch Minecraft servers (I have one for Pixelmon and the other for Minecraft), I just run two systemd commands to swap servers.

      My wife still uses Windows, mostly because she plays MMOs (currently Lost Ark), and those tend to have anticheat that just doesn’t work on Linux. I and my kids all run Linux exclusively. As long as their games work, they don’t care.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Nah, I had plenty of issues with KDE:

          • keyboard layout pop-up would keep popping up after selecting a new layout - I switch between Dvorak and QWERTY frequently
          • start bar doesn’t auto-hide consistently; I’ve had it overlay on top of full screen windows, and not pop-up when hovered
          • no real support for Wayland - I tried on both NVIDIA and AMD, and neither would load; I was able to get it to load by starting KDE from the CLI, but it was unstable

          And that’s just off the top of my head. I used KDE for years (2-3) and has a variety of weird issues, and when I got my second monitor recently (different refresh rate, no FreeSync, whereas other monitor has FreeSync), I bailed and switched to GNOME. GNOME just worked and got out of my way.

          I don’t care too much about either, but KDE was just too buggy for me. I personally would prefer to go back to a tiling WM, but teaching my kids to use it would be too much effort so I just use GNOME. My kids didn’t have a problem with either, and my laptop still runs KDE, so it’s not like I’m against it by any means.