Yeah, I think you’re right, and I think that’s exactly why it’s a blind spot for me.

On several occasions I’ve also lent an old laptop to friends when theirs broke, and all of them ended up using Linux for months no questions asked. They later went back to Windows because of the Word grammar check, but other than that it just worked for them.

But of course, if you can’t get your drivers to work it’ll be a completely different experience.

If you’re ok Arch I guess it at least signals a willingness to learn! I would never dare to go there haha.

Yeah. I’ve double checked that my last few laptops worked well with Linux before buying them. But I don’t buy very flashy technology, so it was never really any question.

My printer is from Brother, and it’s just plug and play. At work it’s all web print and has been since I started working for pay, really.

A test could be to start by using Libre software on Windows.

Switch to LibbreOffice or some other alternative instead of Word. Gimp, Inkscape, and Krita for graphical stuff. Whatever proprietary software you use, check if it exists for Linux; if not, see if you can find an alternative you’re happy with.

For the people I know, Word is the biggest deal breaker.

Dumb user here. I completely disagree with this.

I was using Ubuntu for a few years, now I’m on Fedora. I don’t really know how to do anything. For my needs it’s just very easy.

Maybe my needs just aren’t sophisticated enough for me to encounter all those problems I’m supposed to be having. But I’ve been using it for years and my experience is that it really just works.

Thank you so much for the thorough response!

It seems it’s easier to deal with the firmware from a Windows machine, so I’ll deal with that back in the office next week.

If that doesn’t help I’ll take it out of the case again and see what’s up. I don’t have a soldering iron yet, but if it’s an obvious problem this might be what pushes me over the edge. :)

The problem with Pine is of course that they don’t even try to deliver on software, so their products are only available for end users if the community has made robust software.

Then again, Purism has also struggled to deliver on their promises. A phone made for Android but embraced by the Linux community is probably the easiest way to go.

I dislike Apple more than most people, and they are indeed terrible with standards in general, but with web standards they’re doing the world a bit of a favour by pushing WebKit (based on KHTML) on all its users. WebKit is open source and used in for example GNOME Web.

Had it not been for Apple nobody would give a shit about creating websites that work outside of Chrome.

I find it hard to believe anyone can have such an incredibly clairvoyant understanding of the tech industry that they manage to see Mozilla as an evil megacorporation, yet at the same time failing to see any fundamental problem with Brave.

It could be a lot of things going on other than just sexism, but I cannot help but feel like any time a woman takes the lead in an open source organization a bunch of often vague but always hateful discourse follows in open source forums. Most people are of course fine, but a toxic minority will usually manage to get some weird discourse going that spreads to anyone taking whatever they spew on face value.

Often it can be hard to distinguish valid criticism from less than valid criticism, and in the case of big organizations there is always valid critiques to be made, so I don’t blame people all that much for falling for it. Still, being a happy user of both GNOME and Mozilla products for more than a decade, it tickles me just how much hatred these projects receive online.

That’s my five cents anyway.

It’s a bit of a dog whistle, I just don’t entirely understand for what yet. Basically you’re better off not asking and going on with your life.

A charitable answer is, however, that a central source of income for Mozilla is Google paying them to remain their default search engine. Mozilla is hesitant to truly attack Google, as it would be biting the hand that feeds it.

More importantly though, Mozilla has a female chairwoman. A lot of tech savvy people would rather stick with Brave, whose CEO they can relate to.

Ah, I thought you were implying that FireFox itself depends on Chrome for rendering.

I feel like I’m not exposed to vebview particularly often when using my phone though, maybe in part because I dislike it and tend to actively avoid it in my workflow.

Except, of course, that FireFox doesn’t use webview.