New crappy UI that was also reorganized about 4 times since Windows 10 launched, so depending on how old of a build (and with Windows update breakage it could be quite old!) is on the computer that was just dropped before you you might have to click for a while
I used Mint when I first started playing around with Linux about a decade ago and it was pretty good. But I recently tossed it on a laptop that I primarily just wanted to run a web browser and have minimal faffing about and I’ve been extremely impressed with how it’s matured.
The DE is snappy and unobtrusive with extremely sane defaults. The software center is extremely usable and has very nice flatpak integration, their replacement desktop utilities for the Gnome utilities they once used are very full featured and don’t get in your way, and in most cases where Canonical built their own tool that nobody else uses, Mint has already swapped it with the standard tool. If your goal is to just get a Linux desktop going with minimal faffing about Mint has really become a brilliant choice to do so with
I’m trying to remember but some Microsoft Office product did something entirely unexpected when I hit Ctrl+P to print. I wish I could remember the details but it was absolutely soul crushing seeing even basic keyboard shortcuts remapped
The uphill battle isn’t technical it’s social. The UI is a little less polished, the syntax is slightly different, and Excel has close to 30 years of market recognition. For 99% of excel users LibreOffice Math will absolutely cover their needs 100% with as much time spent figuring it out as they would spend figuring excel out. That last 1% of users however will complain that the syntax changed, they’ll complain that they have to entirely redo the formulas in every one of their old spreadsheets, they’ll feel undervalued and you better believe they’re some of the most valuable people in the company because they learned long ago about working smarter and not harder, plus they know how to automate their work and are therefore much more efficient workers.
People saying libre office is a full replacement for Excel haven’t seen what excel power users in offices can do. It’s usually people who in another life would be programmers but for whatever reason they can’t/won’t make the leap out of excel and into full fat programming. Expecting these same people to convert to a free clone of excel that uses slightly different syntax and has less polish is a great way to lose a very valuable employee extremely quickly.
I absolutely love the environment that Linux affords one, and I would financially support the developers of the tools I rely on (which of course includes libre office) if I were in the financial position to do so, but I’m not delusional when it comes to the role Excel plays in the 21st century office. The business world is run from poorly backed up, undocumented Excel spreadsheets on anemic desktops, and that ain’t changing anytime soon
Ah so a very different point in your career than most of us seem to have thought. Probably your best bet is to get an easy cert that shows basic PC knowledge and/or start throwing applications out in all directions. If you can get 6-12 months on your resume at a slog of a callcenter or other shitty entry level support role that should be enough to kickstart you into an IT career if that’s the direction you want to go. Get onto a corporate helpdesk and use that time to figure out what you need to learn and go from there.
To build off of the above poster, some things sometimes take some tweaking to make work. When you distro hop you’re really just hopping to a different set of defaults and maybe a few relevant library differences. Learning what to do and how to do it can be daunting but when you get it its brilliant and then you have some idea what you need to do the next time you encounter a similar issue
Hey look, ageism! Remember the participants in the flower power/hippy movements would be in their 80s right about now, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say most of them probably didn’t completely flip 180⁰ on their beliefs and become gun toting MAGA voters.
In other words, not old people fit your description
My favorite are the services that keep rejecting the randomized passwords so I have to manually think of a password. I ain’t creative enough on the spot for that! Just accept my /dev/urandom output dammit!
What gets me is the people that don’t know their own passwords, don’t know how/where to look them up, and don’t even understand how to reset their passwords
I worked support for a phone manufacturer for a while and helped a lot of poor lost souls struggle to get back into their Google accounts on their new and replacement devices. I got a lot of them in, but some may have never gotten out of authentication hell
So I’m going to go against the grain here and say to get some college under your belt. A 2 year degree and a cert or two (which can even be part of your degree program, or sometimes will allow you to skip some classes saving you time and money) will easily get you into a helpdesk job, and from there you can go into whatever specialization ends up tickling your fancy.
I’ll also say, helping someone with their nth password reset doesn’t have to suck. Sometimes there’s a root cause that you can help with which makes you far more helpful than the tech who just helps them reset it 10 more times. One of my proudest achievements in a previous role was successfully teaching all of our users who’d email us a scan of a printout of a screenshot of an error message how to send us the screenshot directly, and we went from 1 ticket like that per week to none for my final 6 months. All it takes is some compassion and meeting the users where they are without judgment for the common goal of getting both of our jobs done a little easier.
My cheap electric razor throws a ton of noise onto whatever electrical circuit it’s plugged into
How to sort out ZFS filesystem errors
That the bathroom socket I plug my razor into and the plug across the house that the main desktop is plugged into happen to be on the same electrical circuit
As someone who commuted an hour each way for a year, I both calculated to the best of my ability and then tested. I could shave 5 minutes off by going 65 instead of 55 on the 55 mph highways, and fuel consumption was significantly higher. Going 30 in a 20 zone will do jack shit for someone commuting on surface streets