I had an app that secretly tried to compile an old version of GTK.2 in its entirety. My potato computer freaked out…

Thanks for the heads up :)

I did not know there was forks. Thank you very much for pointing this out :)

The year of the Linux desktop is whenever you make it !! For me, that was 2002, the year I ditched windows for good…

You couldn’t be more wrong here, my Arch install has been my daily driver for years, and it’s sitting at a grand total of 846 packages. No reinstall. No avalanche of dependencies. No mythical fleet of 7,000 half-assembled cars in the garage. You don’t need to bolt on a crap-ton of packages just to get a working system…

Everyone has to start somewhere…

Hard to say, but I’d say no…

Sometime around 2004, I somehow managed to get a friend to try Linux. They spent an entire weekend compiling a custom kernel just to run some experimental beta driver that might have made Doom 3 somewhat playable on their system. Everything compiled just fine, but whenever they booted up the system, they discovered they had forgotten to re-enable sound support. A recompile fixed that, but performance wasn’t what they were expecting. I think they got like 15fps or something like that. After a few weeks of using Linux they reinstalled win-xp…

I still use X11 & will continue to do so for as long as possible. Wayland’s not bad, X11 just seems to works better…

I feel the same way. I’d love to see them move toward developing their own independent index. I also really hope they stay true to what makes them different and don’t get caught up in the whole “AI-everything” trend. Search doesn’t need to be artificially padded or reworded by a chatbot, it just needs to be genuinely useful, transparent, and connected to reality. If Ecosia focused entirely on building a clean, human-centered search experience powered by their own index, without the AI noise, I think that would be far more valuable than following the same path other major engines have taken…

I switched to using Ecosia a while back, and have had no problems with it. The results are generally relevant enough for everyday use, and it feels good knowing that my searches contribute (at least in some small way) to reforestation projects.

It’s not perfect, of course… It still relies partly on bing’s index, but the experience has been stable and consistent for me. I also like that the interface is clean and privacy-focused without trying to upsell the search experience.

In the past I’ve tried alternatives like StartPage and DuckDuckGo, but Ecosia has quietly become my default. It just works well enough without much fuss, and that’s something I really appreciate right now.

Always great to see more people curious about Linux, especially when the motivation is escaping ms-bullshit…

If she wants something that just works but still feels polished and professional, I’d actually give openSUSE a look. Leap is rock-solid and perfect for people who want a stable system that behaves consistently and doesn’t demand much maintenance. Tumbleweed, on the other hand, is rolling release, so it’s always up to date but still surprisingly reliable thanks to openSUSE’s testing process.

Both use YaST, which is one of the best control panels in the Linux world. You can do a lot with YaST, like manage users, partitions, updates, drivers, and networking all from one place without ever touching the terminal.

Mint is also a fine choice as well…

Switched to Linux in 2002 because I hated using windows & was searching for a better computing experience. Instantly fell in love & have been daily driving Linux ever since…