Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.
I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.
What makes it so much fun? Genuinely curious.
I love learning new tech and operating environments. I’ve been like that ever since I was little. When I even get a new gaming console half the fun for me is digging around in the dashboard settings.
I was designing webpages in HTML4 back in the 90s as an early teen. Tinkering with stuff brings me joy.
Nothing is off limits, you can change everything
Is it intuitive on how to make those changes?
no
And that’s the beauty of it. Figuring it all out, until “hey wow, it finally worked”
user-facing stuff you would commonly want to change?
yes, for example desktops like kde are extremely customizable, and that power is just a couple of clicks away.
on the other hand configuring internal stuff is jot intuitive at all.
If you’re the type of person with an opinion on on how software should work, there are options to make it happen.
It’s been my first trip back in a decade, just looking through my options in the core repo these days has made me giddy. I worked for years as a Windows environment sys admin, half my tools went out the window for directly better options almost immediately.
Most of the open source software you’ll find had someone who thought there was a big enough issue to roll up their sleeves, so lots of the projects are answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet too. The entire orientation puts fixing things ahead of profiting off them.
It depends on the person and their experience obviously, but for me, trying Linux back in 2020 felt like when I was new to computers in general and was poking around and learning Windows XP for the first time. It was fun seeing all the different settings options and features that were new to me.
If you’ve only ever used Windows, Linux is like using a computer for the first time.
I’ll never forget leaving my first college football game at the half cause my Dad and me were both bored and going to a Compaq store and buying our families first home computer.