Just be sure to get the edge release if you care about gaming or have current (like newer than 2021) hardware. Mint’s main release is on an old kernel, 5.15 I think. Mint edge release is running kernel 6.5, which is from earlier this year.

“The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of mishandled manhandled customer service.”

Just a typo.

Microsoft will just enable it via an update once all the fervor dies down. They haven’t abandoned the plan, and won’t, not while your data is pure profit for them.

Hell with them, no more Windows PCs in my home. I’m sick to death of everyone and their mother trying to both advertise to me and sell my data without my permission and at zero benefit to me.

The fact this is even necessary makes me want to shit a brick.

“Do you want to make an online account?” No. “Okay, please set up your local account.”

That should be it. And honestly, even that’s egregious to me. Signing into online bullshit should be opt-in, not opt-out. Thank goodness I don’t use Windows anymore, finally wiped the last Windows machine in my house this past week.

Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?

My plex server is headless, running Almalinux. Doesn’t take much, I have it running on a very old NUC8 (NUC8i5BEK). The box is also running Asset UPnP and AudioBookshelf server too.

Personally, unless the server will also be the client (as in, you’ll be watching from the server box and not a streaming box, tablet, TV app, etc), I’d skip any GUI and just install it from the terminal, save your resources for what matters. Desktop environment is pointless for a server machine.

If you were buying a cheap machine to handle it today, I’d probably recommend a Beelink (or other) mini-PC with a Ryzen 5000 series chipset (5500u/5560u models with 16GB RAM can be found very cheap, generally $215-$240 new these days). The 5000 series in particular are very power efficient for something you likely will leave on all the time, and have both 6c/12t and 8c/16t variants, though the 8 core ones will probably be more like $300-$320.

Whatever you buy, if it comes pre-installed with Windows, delete the OS. I wouldn’t trust preinstalled on these boxes, and in any case Microsoft is getting really sketchy with this whole Windows Recall thing anyway.

steam://controllerconfig/413080/2866090215

Try this config. I posted about it above. It’s worked well for me to the point I’m no longer even comfortable playing GW2 on a keyboard, I’m able to react much more quickly to everything with the gamepad setup. Most important thing is always use action camera for combat and general exploration unless you specifically need the mouse for something.

Here you go: steam://controllerconfig/413080/2866090215

Paste that steam link in a browser while Steam is open and it will pull up the controller config.

Control mappings have face buttons and R1/R2 as attacks, L1/L2 as button layer modifiers, Joystick mouse and more. F-keys are on the d-pad, and most mouse related functions are active while holding L1. Pressing L2+R2 heals. Back button is your "interact. L1 + R3 switches between “action” camera and regular mouse mode for aiming. Action camera is better for combat, and is the mode I use like 90% of the time. Dodge is on R3. L3 swaps weapons. There’s also key combos for all the mounts, special action abilities (N key, on L2+back)… basically, everything you could possibly want to do in-game, there’s a controller way to do it. You may need to remap some of the mount buttons, I forget if I did custom mappings for some of those, as I have a lot of mounts (everything except roller beetle and gryffon).

Hope it works for you. I think it’s a great config, but my perspective may be skewed since I’m highly accustomed to it from muscle memory and using it for years (with Xpadder even, before steam controller mapping was a thing). I’ve used this config for every single class in the game and dialed it in so I can play literally any class without issues, including ones that have a number of aiming skills like engineer and elementalist. Actually, elementalist is a blast for this, dpad was perfect for switching elements compared to fumbling with F-keys.

I dunno about this one. Waiting to see what the crowd thinks as far as reviews. Secrets of the Obscure was as mediocre as they come and I have doubts now.

I’ve been playing it on a gamepad since 2012. I’ll see if I can get my Steam config link for you later.

Try entering the pin wrong repeatedly. May not work, but there’s a setting to force a wipe if it’s entered incorrectly 10 times. Will only work if that was enabled that at some point, but it’s worth a shot.

For instance, you can’t factory reset an iPhone without connecting it to either an OSX computer, or a PC running their special program.

This is patently untrue. Settings -> General -> Transfer or Reset iPhone. You have the option from there to wipe all data, do a full factory reset, or transfer the phone’s data to another device.

I’ve no idea where you’re getting your info from.

Generally underscore _ works best for this, and should be viable for both OSes.

Too little too late. They lost what goodwill they might have had with me. I dealt with that for months until I decided to flip it. I won’t be using Ubuntu in the future unless for some awful reason I specifically need an Ubuntu server (and in that case I’d still push for Almalinux or another alternative).

That delay happens on first launch every boot. Also the automatic updates happening basically whenever is nonsense. It should tell me an update is needed, not just kick it off whenever it feels like. That kind of crap is why I use Linux and not Windows, and now why I don’t use Ubuntu.

Well. in the modern day, there’s Ubuntu 22.04 and up with their insistence on snaps for many otherwise native apps. For example, Firefox as a snap and taking anywhere from 30 seconds to up to 2 minutes to launch when you first open it.

I used Ubuntu for years, pretty much from 16.04 all the way up to 22.04 but that was a line for me and I ditched it for Manjaro. The experience has been much better overall.

Snaps should be for applications that may not receive updates on current systems or have a hard dependency on old libraries for some reason. Things like Spek come to mind. To use if for something like Firefox, and not only use it, but insist on it to the point you can’t install the native version without ridiculous workarounds… it’s absurd. And on top of this, it’s especially dumb because flatpak already existed prior to snap, but as usual Canonical had to be special instead of working with community standards.

Amazon based search results integrated in the Unity dash beg to differ. Canonical has a history of being shitty.

These are things for any OS though. I mean, on XFCE I spend time setting up my preferred shortcuts, software, tools, etc.

On Mac, install rectangle, shortcuts, debloat. There’s no perfect default for everyone.

The Steam deck is a special case because it’s literally a gaming handheld (though the term handheld for that thing is admittedly loose).

And there’s still some things even with the deck. Did you set up emudeck? Heroic launcher? Configure it for desktop mode?

I don’t see any of that. Cortana is disabled via settings toggle, no AI stuff, start menu web search is disabled. Updates are set to automatic download only and are only run upon shutdown if I choose “update and shutdown” instead of just doing shutdown.

I dunno, there are legitimate things to complain about with Windows, but none of this really fits.

In my case I power on, Steam launches, and I run a game. When done, I press the power button and it shuts down. That’s it.

I don’t need a push, a Linux machine is my daily driver (and has been for something like 8+ years now), and I’ve worked in IT doing virtualization/automation/data management and compliance for several years. I spend a lot of time in the terminal.

To me the Windows gaming PC is essentially a console, no different than a PS5 or a Switch is to someone else. It’s been up and running as such since before Proton was fully viable and for its use case I don’t see a need to change it until it’s due for a rebuild/replacement/upgrade.

That was just one example. And I’d you review that page you linked, they don’t all disagree, there were more than a few reporting issues with it. It’s gold rated, but not platinum.

I’m glad you’re enjoying the experience, but either way the point I was making is that my gaming PC is just an appliance. It works and I have enough other things to do that I don’t feel like reinstalling the OS and a butt-ton of games.

When I need to do a rebuild/upgrade in the future I’ll likely revisit Linux with it, but until then I don’t see the point. I only turn it on a few hours a week to game and otherwise it’s off. And when it is on, I just want to game, not potentially spend time fiddling or troubleshooting if something isn’t as expected.