Oh really? Man, I thought I was doing good. I never see ads since I use uBlock Origin.

I’m curious to know people’s thoughts on Startpage. I’ve been using it exclusively for a good couple months now and like it.

Not a clue, I only use the built in TV tuner program in Linux Mint. I forget what its called, but it does a decent job.

I have a Hauppage TV tuner card that I use to get OTA TV and record certain shows. I’m pretty sure there are USB solutions, but if I remember, at the time I got this it was one of the only cards that my system supported or whatever caveat I was operating around.

Does this account for all the investors and smaller corporations coming in and buying homes with cash out from under actual families? That’s been an alarmingly high number of cases with many recent home purchases.

My wife turns off the WiFi on her phone to avoid the pihole. She does this so she can watch the ads in her games to get an extra life or whatever. You’ll never win on that front and I won’t either.

As a long time dabbler and recent full on Mint user, I would recommended either Ubuntu or Mint for a first timer for sure. I would say that I enjoy Mint more just because I like the look and feel of the Cinnamon DE more over the Gnome DE or whatever it is that Ubuntu ships default with. Mint is very easy to use, doesn’t have lots of major updates all the time so it doesn’t break and it’s relatively light weight.

How DARE you ask about GUI controls! But seriously I’d love to see more of it. It certainly would make on-boarding of windows users much easier. All the CLI functions scare most away. It seems like every time I ask about a GUI for something I get shot down hard. Like I understand why CLI is more prevalent, way easier to troubleshoot and instruct people across multiple distros. But if you want to grow the Linux community, ease of use to the broad public has to become priority, and I think GUIs is the best starting point for that.

And having things built in would be a major help as well, instead of having to see if the software center has it, and then searching GitHub when it doesn’t. Again, I get that some distros might have that, but that would be a niche distro for certain things. A nice GUI tool to adjust GPU parameters would be super (using coolero at the moment), a better audio device manager, gamepad device manager as well, task manager that’s a little more user friendly.

I’m rambling and I don’t want to sound like I dislike Linux. I made Mint my only OS on my laptop and two PCs in my house. I love it. I keep W11 on my gaming PC as a dual boot strictly for VR. That’s all that’s holding me back. I’m fine with CLI tools but I’d reeeeeeally like it if GUI tools became more prevalent.

VR is very much not stalled. Is it a niche thing? Oh for sure, but it’s still very much being developed. Between all the new hardware and software that’s coming out, it’ll be a few more years of super niche stuff and then it’ll start becoming more mainstream.

As others users have said though, VR on Linux is non trivial to set up and sometimes ill advised. I run dual boot with Mint and W11 strictly for VR support.

on the way might realize it’s just easier to console. Kinda where I’m at.

Me too. Discovering lots of good tools are CLI, so just getting familiar with that instead.

Well put. I do need to learn much of the basic workings of CLI. Any recommendations on how to approach learning?