tokisto: Take a look at these sites:
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/
http://www.gnu.org/links/companies.html
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2485430/windows-pcs/preloaded-linux-systems--weighing-the-options.html

adamhm: I recommend Linux Mint - I even wrote a guide to help people start using it which you might find helpful, and if you have any questions or need any help there are a lot of Linux users here :) Trying it in a VM first is a good idea, you won't be able to play many games but it's quick to set up without needing any system changes or having to reboot & you'll at least be able to get a feel for it that way.

TodaysLoneWolf: Thanks for the advice! Your reply was a lot more positive. I'll try the VM method this w/e. I already have the disc set up but ran into problems doing a boot thanks to my Mac. I'm trying to either find alternative methods but I WILL learn Linux this time.

morrowslant: Another way to force yourself to use Linux more is to do all your Web browsing, facebook, linkedin, etc on that Linux VIrtualMachine. If you REALLY feel brave, you start playing around with the command line text editors like nano, pico or gulp vi.

mike_cesara: Is casting spells in terminal really necessary these days?
I do that because I choose and feels more natural to me, but it would work point and click way as well I think

mike_cesara: Is casting spells in terminal really necessary these days?
I do that because I choose and feels more natural to me, but it would work point and click way as well I think

mike_cesara: Is casting spells in terminal really necessary these days?
I do that because I choose and feels more natural to me, but it would work point and click way as well I think

rampancy: Ok, so as someone who isn't on a regular basis a Windows guy, I really would like to know: what's the deal with all of the Windows 10 hate? Is it based on the changes to the UI like with Windows 8? Or is it just plain bloated and unstable like Vista?

Most of my (very short) experience with 10 so far is on a Chuwi Hi8, and it's not too shabby, provided I'm using it in "Tablet Mode".

clarry: Well it isn't all rosy on the Linux front. People like to complain about Windows' unification of the UI with mobile, but those who have used Linux have witnessed the change in Gnome, the shift into Unity, major KDE rewrite, etc. At least you can opt out of that mess if you're using alternative, smaller desktops or window managers. On the other hand, if you liked (say) old Gnome, you're pretty much on your own.

And if you like life with the command line, things can be less rosy still. Unlike with desktops and window managers that are easily an user choice, it's harder and harder to have any say at the lower level when systemd is showed down your throat, old tools get major revisions with significant increases in complexity, messy scripts and piss poor documentation (gurb2 for example). Or old tools are abandoned and you need to learn a new set of tools while documentation keeps referring to the old one or a mix of old and new, without telling you how one or the other is broken (see old ifconfig vs iproute2). New distro releases constantly change the way you do things, often without correspoinding change in documentation... then you have all the outdated wikis and docs that effectively read "TODO" or "FIXME" or "here's how to do it but don't do it since it's broken since release N+1" all over the place. Good times.

For another example of things we remember, consider Pulseaudio and ALSA. They could've continued the development of OSS and fix & improve when upstream went commercial, but instead they chose to develop a new system. Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. "Advanced" presumably means "Overengineered, big, complex, and hard". For years and years we had this issue with "legacy" OSS using programs needing exclusive access to the audio device, and ALSA & OSS applications couldn't happily coexist at the same time, well, not output sound at the same time anyway. And ALSA was very very poorly documented. And yeah, you had to configure it. Dmix wasn't a default, and it got many other things wrong too, depending on your card and setup and whatnot. Alsawiki was sparsely populated, if it existed at all. Man pages were absolute shit. Figuring out the configuration syntax, and then after syntax, figuring out what all the devices and parameters and plugins actually are and how they interconnect.. yeah, good luck. Most people just blindly pasted shit from wikis and forum posts and IRC until it eventually (hopefully) worked somehow.

Eventually, it got pretty good. Documentation still sucks but at least it sucks less. Dmix was enabled by default. You still needed to configure things if you had multiple sound cards or a surround setup. Programs mostly worked however, and OSS was mostly forgotten. Pulseaudio happened and fucked it all up. People blame Ubuntu for shipping it broken, but I kept having to fix family members' computers' audio problems regularly for *years*, even years after people told pulseaudio is fine. It was not fine. Most often, the most reliable fix was to get rid of PA entirely (hard on all those "easy to use" distros that insist on installing shit packages on you any chance they get). And then people started really depending on PA. So now you have programs that don't do sound properly or at all without PA. And on some systems you still have problems with PA. So it's broken either way...

Massive change, massive churn all the time. Ten years ago, major distro updates always caused trouble. Unless you used something rolling release (Gentoo, which I did use). Five years ago, same thing. Today? Same thing. I watched my father update his Fedora today. It was sad. Actually, I was planning on trying Fedora on my new laptopt, but I just lost the appettite for that.

The security thing is another front that isn't exactly rosy. Certainly fanboys keep telling Linux is secure, as if repeating the mantra made it so. Facts are often absent from the surrounding discourse.

Back when I started with Linux (back in 2005) my image of the community was that it was helpful, inclusive, held portability as a highly regarded virtue, and choice was a natural human right. Now the community feels extremely polarized, discussion is very hateful and argumentative, and always uderlined by this "our way or highway" overtone, suggesting that people must make a choice, an exclusive choice, and abandon everything else, or be abandoned. Portability isn't a concern as long as whatever runs on the high and mighty Linux as it exists in the mind of Lennart or whoever..

As far as privacy goes, you have to be real careful especially with the distros led by corporations. Ubuntu in particular has made some, uh, questionable moves.