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.

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.

Bought a moonlander about 2 months ago. It comes fully assembled, there are multiple switches to choose from and blank or qwerty style keycaps. It is hotswap and comes with a tool for pulling caps and switches included, so you can change things up as needed. Iirc you can buy it barebones without switches if none of the ones they have are right for you.

It runs on QMK but they have their own configurator which is super handy imo.

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.

Accountant here too (well assistant tax adviser doing mainly accounting) and I have the numpad on a layer on the right hand and often used shortcuts on the left hand. It is really nice and only took me like a week to get comfy with.

The extra shortcuts also help a lot, because they are hardcoded into the software and some of them are pretty dumb (shift+F8 and ctrl+numpad / f.e.).

One thing I haven’t seen in this thread yet is how lower number keys allow for an even split and this ergo boards that allow for better posture, especially for the shoulders.

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.

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.

I know multiple people that do Skyrim on linux, at least one heavily modded. Outside of DyndoLOD not working right I can’t really remember any issues they had.

I use Sonar from Steelseries since I have one of their headsets. It does work for other headsets too, afaik it’s windows only though.

Any audiochannel mixing software that has an input (and output for microphone) should work. The main thing is to not let discord touch the device directly basically.

That is discord being sucky. Have had that problem a lot with various headphones, only thing that helped for me was using another software to manage things.

As for your actual question, my father has worked as a mechanical engineer for a few decades (recently retired) and after the major players did switch to only windows (they used unix in earlier days) he always had a dualboot system at home just for CAD work.

When I was about 11 roughly two decades ago, on the first PC I got to actively use. I think it was OpenSuSe. My father had unix at work back then and saw no reason to use anything but a -ix system.

I liked it a lot, back then so was mainly reading things on the internet, no gaming needed.

Haven’t cycled back yet, since I play a few games that don’t run well on linux at all and use some proprietary software. I do find myself trying to use linux commands on windows from time to time, getting annoyed with it not working before remembering.

I live in an area that was next to perfect when I first learned about OSM, so I had no real reason to contribute. I have seen their maps used by our public transport to show the way to/from stops (or even inside them on the particularly large ones).

This just reminded me that I can in fact contribute and I will check out the iOS options for doing so.

I would if I had the time to get things off the ground and moderate in the beginning. I wouldn’t want to throw up an instance and then just leave it on its own.

I am not sure if my current server allows for instance creation, since I did not prioritise that when choosing it.

Most of those I am missing are also very picture heavy, now that I think about it. Like constant streams of pictures rather than text posts, which might not be the best for lemmy right now? I imagine it would increase load way faster than text posts do.

I will check through the community finder again later and see which topics might have gotten an instance in the mean time. It has been two weeks since I last checked.

I feel like I am not yet, but I will be. Some of the subs I have on Reddit aren’t here yet, partly because they’re either niche or liked by a lot of people that are less tech literate including their maintainers.

I have gone trough some instances before deciding on my current one and I like the stance of most that are for an active discussion, against mindless downvotes and for overall more communication than social media consumption.

The fact that there is next to no automated account making will also help in the long run I think. It makes it an less attractive target for the bad kind of bots imo.