Good analogy by using cars. You can test drive a car. Since a lot (all?) distros have a way to run off a USB, so you can get the general “feel” of it. Then you can go from there. Or if you have room to work with, setting up dual boot isn’t that hard (outside of how Windows acts sometimes about it). Asking a lot of people what flavor ice cream they prefer isn’t going to help you decide your own.

Maintained, a bit slow on the updating sometimes, as I mentioned. But a big factor for going with Ubuntu was if you’re looking at software out in the wild, chances are they’ll have either an Ubuntu version or something that will work with it. I’m not a fan of compiling stuff (although maybe with more Linux exposure that will change too).

In hindsight that’s probably not a great reason, after all it’s why Microsoft dominated the field for so long.

Being supportive of Ubuntu seems to be a minority, but I picked it over others simply because it felt more like what I wanted from the Debian lines. And I haven’t had any major issues at all. The main project I’ve got ahead of me is to remove Snap, as I see that’s a problem, mainly due to updates being so far behind (plus I’m pretty sure it’s a resource hog, I can see it there in Btop all the time). I’ve had several apps that I originally used Snap (I mean, it’s right there, why not) to find the version is old and missing newer features. So I just find the Apt or deb version, or even AppImage, and I’m back running. The OS itself is solid, and I so, so love just booting up and going within seconds, as well as shutting down right away. Not the classic Windows “hang”.

But I get that some people run into incompatibilities sometimes with hardware, so you do have to look around and find what works best for you. An example of mine on that was an old MacBook I had that simply was stuck since the OS isn’t supported anymore. So I put Kubuntu on it (since it needed a light OS), and it works fine for what it is.

I’ll be glad to give more info. I’m not sure where to find the logs to tell you what VLC is doing. See my other comment on the comparison of a browser - I want it to use VLC as if I was browsing websites where it just loads into the existing window.

I’m trying to get any new video I click on to play in the existing instance of VLC after running a first video. Not in a new instance. If VLC is open no other video will ever use that instance. It’s like if you load a new webpage in a browser but have to either close the existing browser window first or load into a new tab or window, and I find it difficult to believe that’s an accepted behavior.

I think there’s some that go through that dwindling urge to keep going. But there are also the ones that you describe, the “oh, new shiny thing”.

Yeah, I mean math and even science aren’t always intuitive, so we have to have rules and theories to go by that demonstrate repeatability. Subatomic physics doesn’t even really work like our models say, it’s just that the models give the best results in predicting what we’ll find.

Another example is randomness. Not all random numbers are the same, it depends on how you derive them as to what you’ll get. I guess in some way that’s related to what numbers will pop up for an irrational number. It’s said with enough monkeys randomly typing on typewriters eventually you’ll get a Shakespeare work. It already happened a number of times… since we’re in sense monkeys and got a number of Shakespeare works. Didn’t even need typewriters.

I don’t think that’s a given. It’s just like there are different sizes of infinite, and more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are real numbers, or something.

Movie was pretty good. Book was excellent.

I think there’s proofs to show that won’t happen. Don’t ask me to find them or explain them, it’s beyond my scope.

What I’m waiting for is them finding a repeating sequence of 1s and 0s that when arranged in a matrix form a crude circle. A message to those who can learn to find it, with more to follow.

I really hate the ones that I ALMOST remember, can almost see it, and the harder I try to focus the blurrier it gets.

Kokoro was the one I was going to mention. I played around with it a bit, was very impressed with the speed and quality. And then I realized I had been using it in CPU mode. GPU is incredible.

Mint is one of the more “Windows-like” versions of Linux. The deal breaker for Linux usually isn’t the OS, but what software you’ll run on the OS, and often a crucial one will be MS Office and compatibility with the proprietary junk that comes with it. If you need just a spreadsheet and word processor and they don’t have to be 100% MS compatible, then LibreOffice will work fine (even ON WIndows). If it’s other types of software, then see if they have a Linux option, or if there’s success in using Wine or Lutris to run it on Linux.

Linux won’t be without some learning curve, but it’s not nearly as steep as it used to be. I spent years occasionally playing with dual boots of different distros but not really using them, but last year found some things that would run better on Linux (I started by using WSL on Windows but it’s so slow because of what it is). Now I’ve all but completely remove my Windows partition, everything important is now moved over to my Ubuntu and I do not want to go back now.

They’re all code names “Al”.

I know, I see that all the time, people apologizing for their English second language use, while being far clearer in imparting their meaning (which is the only important thing in the end) than so many single use American posters.

I blame the drive to use anything new before the competitor does and gets an advantage, added to worse and worse IT departments that don’t really know what they’re doing. There could be some companies that have a good IT that just get overruled, of course.

What?

There’s a Mac version labeled (horrific). So many levels to unpack there.

You’re too late. The rebellion has flown away.