S410

I've, in fact, never purchased Windows willingly.

The only few times I (technically) did were with laptops and small form factor computers which were only available with it pre-installed.

This, honestly, should not be legal.

I suppose it's true for very old or more exotic hardware.
Since last year we can't even run Linux on i486 CPUs, and it's not even some relatively exotic architecture!

You can use Debian Sid, for example. That way, instead of waiting for a bunch of updates to install them as one big upgrade, you, basically, always have the last version. You don't get those big upgrades at all, this way.

That's not possible with Windows. Even if you were to install every update that comes out, you wouldn't end up with a system that's somewhere between Windows 10 and Windows 11. You're forced into a major upgrade.

You do, in fact, need to accept support to benefit from it. Those releases are the support. Support = updates!

Sometimes people or companies retire their distros (e.g. Mandriva), or just do stupid decisions that piss of their users (CentOS) and force the users to switch to a different distro. This, however, is extremely rare. Microsoft do that on a schedule.

Debian releases are more similar to Service Packs on Windows.

Windows releases are entirely different products.

There are changes to the defaults, sometimes, but they're just that: changes to the defaults. If you're upgrading your existing install, they won't affect you.

For example: Debian switched to Gnome as its default DE a couple years ago. It used to be XFCE. However, if you already had a system with XFCE, if wouldn't go and replace it for you.

On Windows side, meanwhile, when Microsoft decide to change up the DE, you get the changes, whether you like it or not. Remember Windows 8? It's not like those who upgraded from Windows 7 got to keep their Aero theme and Start Menu.

It's not really comparable to the way Windows versioning works. Releases of distros like Debian are closer to Service Packs on Windows: they're just a bunch of updates bundled together.
Alternatively, you can use Debian Sid or Arch, for example, and get all the changes as they're being made. That way, you get a lot of smaller updates a lot more often.

Literally most of them. All the big ones like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch, etc. are 10+ years old and still get updates pretty much daily.

Debian had its 30th birthday back in September, actually.

1k USD. Should be enough to leave my shithole of a country, if I'm lucky.

146%

Trains are great and they're definitely underutilized in the modern world, but the thing they excel at is getting stuff from point A to point B (like a warehouse), not spreading it around across thousands of different destinations.

Building a light railway to each and every walmart, target, 7eleven, etc. it's just not practical in any way:

My city, for example, has a relatively extensive tram system. You can get around most of the city by it and there's quite a few stores that are right next to tracks, so, theoretically, something like that could be used to deliver goods within a city.

However, it's, both, way louder than cars and trucks (I used to live right next to a railway) and every time a tram or its powerline break, the entire line stops. You can't, exactly, drive around a broken tram when you're on rail.

Trucks were invented in 1890s. By 1900 the world's population was 1.6 billion, 5 times smaller than it is now.

But population numbers aren't the only thing that has changed since then.

A hundred some years ago FDA didn't exist. You could buy eggs, meat, etc. from your local farmers and butchers. Now, you need licenses and to comply with a whole bunch of different codes. Fewer people can comply with those, so the average distance things need to be shipped has increased.

There's, also, a lot more things nowadays that were never possible to produce locally (or even just close by) to begin with. Semiconductors, medications, even fine fabrics for clothing require fairly complex processes and logistics. You can't just plop a fab or a lab in every large-ish city - that is going to be even more of a nightmare to supply with resources necessary to keep it running, than shipping final product from somewhere else far away.

I use Arch + Gnome with VRR patches on my main PC.

It find it actually easier to use than e.g. fedora or ubuntu due to better documentation and way more available packages in the repos... With many, many more packages being in AUR!

By installing all the stuff commonly found on other distros (and which many consider bloat), you'll get basically the same thing as, well, any other distro. I have all the "bloat" like NetworkManager, Gnome, etc. which is known to work together very well and which tries to be smart and auto-configure a lot of stuff. Bloat it may be, but I am lazy~

Personally, I think it's better to stick to upstream distros whenever possible. For example Nobra, which is being recommended in this thread quite a lot, is maintained by a single person. In reality, it's not much more than regular Fedora with a couple of tweaks and optimizations. Vast majority of those one could do themselves on the upstream distro and avoid being dependent that one person. It is a single point of failure. after all.