Currently there are three things that stop me from going Linux and two of those are purely software related (the third is that I don’t want to hate my work software anymore than I currently do). Is it vital software in the sense of it allowing me to work or bring me income? No. Is it something I wish to just use without fiddling after every update because I use them for fun? Absolutely yes.

I am a 90s child, so I don’t completely fit your timespan, but I remember the first PC with SuSe Linux that I built with my father from old server hardware he got from his job.

Back then his job used unix and it was pretty common in his field of work. So Linux was the natural choice for a home pc. SuSe was popular back then, I think mainly because it came on CDs and had books available.

One of the main things I remember is the hassle with network drivers, having to download them on a working pc first.

When I started my apprenticeship as assistant tax adviser in 2016, I used the fax regularly to send stuff to the IRS equivalent. I was also in charge of printing certain thing because the setup for those to come out right was unholy. In the company I am in now, we are pushing for digital solutions but still have a lot of clients with a listed fax number. One of our digital partners had fax: we don’t do that here written in their signature.

It is a thing still sadly.

I haven’t used Linux in a decade and half (I know myself and I wouldn’t reboot once done gaming and I have one game that is not just wine or whatever and done and it’s my main one) and I still miss things from it. The first few PCs I used were Linux. It just sticks with you.

If you have to go back and forth with PSDs, GIMP falls of with layers and such. I had it happen that it basically rolls which ones to open every time on a layer heavy PSD.

I interpreted your comment as between countries, my bad then.

How do these comparisons look if we go by pay per hour worked? Because here in Germany the maximum amount you are allowed to work in a week is 60 hours. Unless in special positions (like the ones that have harvesting season or mine stuff), this has to be equalised down to 48 over a 6 week period at max (the special ones just have a longer period for it or a different timing system on what counts as break). If you are in a position that equals to 48 hours a week (6 day week), your minimum PTO is 24 days. If you have a 5 day week it is 20 days, and the numbers above shift down to 50 and 40 respectively. Most jobs that have any kind of skilled work behind them have 30 days PTO. Plus there are a lot of national holidays.

I work in taxes and the average days worked in a year is assumed at 230 (if we don’t have information otherwise ofc). That is less than 2/3 of the year.

Whereas my knowledge on the US is that 60 hour weeks are not necessarily an exception, you get way less PTO, you have less national holidays and you often need to network after hours to even be successful to a moderate degree (of course networking is a thing here as well, but it isn’t that necessary at a medium level, only if you want to get the high positions).

Vacations maybe because that also depends on where you want to go. Cars can differ wildly, unless you want a sportscar or some such. Same goes for phones, often you get one „free“ with your contract for mobile. Gas/Petrol vary a lot, because of taxes and other state side things attached to them. Same goes for electricity plus those also depend on availability.

Discord needs to be maintained too. The way rights for users are handled is confusing, even when you’re used to handling such.

And it isn’t fast to use. You have to register, you need the app which does not function well, it uses a lot of system resources, the list goes on.

Define medium size.

All messages notifications? Hell no never, not even on my own less than 10 persons server.

Stuff like announcement role pings? In servers I care or the roles let me filter very finely yes, irrespective of size.

@everyone pings? Only on servers I care a lot about or that use them sparely.

Thanks! Due to how queueing abilities work in FFXIV, rotation macros ain’t a thing even on predictable classes.

I see what you mean with the number row. I also like to have F1-F4 accessible plus tab.

Good thing the moonlander is on the big side there.

Weird tangential question: what is the cutoff point for FFXIV for you and why?

I recently swapped to a moonlander and I feel okay with a gaming layer, but I also do not do savage raids or above.

While it might not be as much, it still will be something.

I work in a purely windows environment because our main software does not really exist outside of it. The hours of IT troubleshooting for the most inane things I see happening is a pretty penny as well. The newest curiosity is Teams killing my RDP session once it loads in the GUI and the IT team is utterly clueless why. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t happen to anyone else and the only way to stop it is to kill the process via taskmanager.

And while a government might not be able to go FOSS, there are tools for communication that aren’t built like Teams.

My SO is in a government job and most of their software is some adaption on SAP or similar. They don’t have any chat apps. They use mails or telephone. They do have Skype, but that thing is a performance nightmare in their environment so they only use it if they absolutely have to.

Same goes for stuff like OneDrive. Even if you could wrangle it enough that it fits data security laws, it isn’t something they use in their daily work.

I only ever really browsed Reddit with Apollo and I monitored the situation somewhat. I feel like the subs that could migrate easier (more techy, more text than pictures) stayed closed the longest or permanently. The ones that can’t really (like those more picture streamy ones as the sfw porn network) were open again fastest from what I remember.

So depending on interest it could have felt way shorter or longer.

I am still missing some of the subs I liked, but I don’t expect some of them to actually pop up here.

Windows being „helpful“ is the worst. I can’t remember an instance were it actually was helpful. Just some were it managed to break things.

I know of someone who wanted to dualboot for certain games and their windows did exactly that too. At one point their AMD driver managed to uninstall itself somehow. On Linux they never had any problem whatsoever.

This sounds great in a bubble where it works.

Over here there is no standardised way of sharing such info between doctors/hospital/care givers. I have been through multiple GPs because some stopped working, some where to far away after a move and so on. I had to bring my data to them and good luck to me if I hadn’t gotten a copy of something when it happened. I had to stop medical personnel from giving me paracetamol (I have asthma and shouldn’t take any of that or anything like aspirin), the GP of my SO had to basically partly roll back a medication plan he had gotten from the hospital after being in the ER and those are mild cases where nothing did actually go horribly wrong. My SO got two incompatible medications about two years ago because the tool that crosschecks the database did not throw the relevant warning correctly. It messed with his brain chemistry a lot. His GP wrote the programs makers to have them remedy that asap, since it was pretty bad.

I actually use the health app medication reminder/tracking now and have seen that the app can theoretically store data from health professionals about me. It looks like it is completely unused in the country I am in and I can’t manually add in data at all. This would be super helpful in some cases where I could use it to quickly convey key points about my health, especially when I am not as present (high fever, accident or some such).