this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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When is an ad an advertisement and not a recommendation? Microsoft clearly likes to use the term recommendation for what others may see as an advertisement.

There are recommendations in the Start menu, Settings app, Lock screen, File Explorer, Get Help app, and other areas of the operating system already. These are often not that useful. App recommendations in the Start menu are limited to Microsoft Store apps.

Now, Microsoft is testing recommendations in the Microsoft Store app. If you never use the app, you won't be exposed to these. If you do, you may notice recommendations popping up when you try to use the built-in search.

First spotted by phantomofearth on X, two or three recommendations are shown whenever search is activated in the official Microsoft Store app.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 4 months ago (32 children)

I've recently made the switch over to LinuxMint and I was shocked. Installing a popular Linux Distro is EASIER than installing Windows 10/11 at this point. Seriously. The Linux installer is super noob friendly, very quick and straight to the point, it doesn't need you to create an online account and you don't need be wary of accidentally giving any corporation the rights to steal your data.

And all the software I use (Steam, Discord, Spotify, Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) were all downloadable from the GUI Installer and worked right away OUT OF THE BOX. No fiddling in any Terminal was required.

Seriously, it's easier than installing Windows at this point.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (21 children)

Installing Linux has never been particularly difficult, not in the last 15 or even 20 years anyway. I've always found it easier and more straightforward than the contemporary Windows installation process.

The challenging part is wrapping your head around the Linux/Unix way of doing things when things can't be done through the GUI with just a few clicks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (12 children)

I know the filesystem is simple to Linux users, but the semantic form of physical drives getting a letter always made more sense to me.

I have three drives in my computer. So they're labeled C:, D:, and E:. You can't place a file on "The Computer" - it's stored on some particular drive. If I install a game on the E drive, and then later somehow remove that drive and bring it somewhere else, that game remains on that drive, even if it's no longer E.

On Linux, as best I understand it, if I have three drives, two of them are at /dev/hdd0 and hdd1. But they're not actually there, they're accessed at /media/hdd0 after mounting them (or at least, that's the convention, and if it's someone else's computer, good luck). Then you either begin every game installation path with that annoying prefix, or you start configuring a dozen symlinks. If you place an item in /home/documents/notporn, then who knows which drive it's on because you don't know what symlinks someone set up to make that folder.

Windows does have symlinks too now, which has been nice for hacking a few installation directories, but I appreciate that it's an exception, and everything else follows relatively logical division of space, rather than this hybrid system where the filesystem isn't just stored files but also devices, programming concepts, and more.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

So just to help a little bit without getting too technical...

df -h is your friend to find out which physical drive or partition relates to which directory (called the "mount point")

If you want, you can set up each drive/partition to be mounted a bit Windows-esque.

For example:

  • Drive 1, partition 1 will almost certainly be root /
  • But drive 1, partition 2 can be mounted to: /mnt/d/
  • And then drive 1, partition 3 can be mounted to: /mnt/e/

And so on.

You'll need to look up fstab to understand how to do that.

I understand it's tricky to get your head around initially as I felt exactly the same coming from Windows to Linux.

Once you get your head around partitions being able to be mounted anywhere, it actually becomes really handy

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