Not for a SSD. Every manufacturer has some tool to update SSD firmware. Some Samsung models can actually be updated with fwupd but I’m unsure if this covers all Samsung SSDs or only the “Pro” series. I also tend to prefer booting into some dedicated “update ISO”, first, just to be sure that nothing interferes with the update.
I switch to Kubuntu in 2020 because Microsoft discontinued Windows 7. Then I switch to Debian to learn more about how Linux work, and after that I moved to Siduction to get the up-to-date packages. I still rice KDE to look like Windows 7 to this day :P
That is a good point I have not encountered too often. I don’t tend to customize the programs I use. I tend to just learn the defaults for that program.
Anyways, people keep recommending FlatSeal, which is a graphical way to customize Flatpak permissions, so that may be helpful to you.
I switched because Windows 2000 was total garbage, and because Linux gave me actual programming tools. I was like a kid in a candy store. Suddenly I had all these amazing professional software packages, and scripting languages that weren’t fucking garbage. I’m still WAY too good at DOS scripts. The number of years I wasted learning DOS. Fuck microsoft. I’m still a little mad.
I use Manjaro ARM on my Orange PI because I couldn’t get Arch ARM to work on it, while Manjaro has support of my devices out of the box. Since I installed a minimal possible version (without any DE), it doesn’t feel bloated or something. It feels like I’m using Arch but with slower updates. Overall, it’s good and I don’t notice much difference from Arch. But anyway, I haven’t tried it for a desktop station.
I was on windows and just got tired of the larger amount of spyware in my os. The last windows I used was 8, but I did hold out on that for a long time.
Wanted a new adventure to go on and a chance of pace from Windows 10 at the time. Benefits were a less bloated system and more customizability and a way to strengthen my command line skills. I was surprised by how light weight and overall polished the experience was.
My reasoning is nothing big and fancy or philosophical. Hell what had happened was: I upgraded from windows 8.1 to windows 10 and I couldn’t pair my phone to my laptop via bluetooth in a way that allowed me to use my laptops speakers and the music on my phone. I started looking for a fix and ended up finding some article or forum about how to do that in linux. Installed ubuntu 17.04 or something like that because I didn’t know the release cycle of ubuntu. I never looked back. After that tried Fedora then KDE Neon then back to Fedora then openSUSE Tumbleweed, and now EndeavourOS.
First I did it for privacy and to embrace free software.
However overtime I started to notice how much of a bloat Windows really was and my laptop runs a lot better, although I still have Windows installed because certain applications I need do not run on Linux or a virtualized Windows container unfortunately. I have also started to notice how much Windows tries to force you to use their Microsoft products like Edge Cortana and whatnot and force you into making a Microsoft account now, I mean shit I have a local account setup and one time when I was booting into Windows it asked me to create a Microsoft account, but luckily there was an option to just say no I want to keep using my local account. Outrageous.
Back in 2003 my sister needed a computer of her own to do schoolwork on. We couldn’t afford a new computer and the only other system we had in the house other then the laptop I had just bought was still running Windows 98 on a failing hard drive and the Windows install disk we had was borked.
I replaced the hard drive, started looking for options and found Ubuntu. And it made sense to me. Once I wrapped my head around the idea of the console, everything made sense in a way that Windows and DOS before that didn’t. And I had the freedom to modify anything I didn’t like, a freedom you don’t really have in Windows or Mac OS.
And it was fast! This ancient computer (AMD Athlon, 256 MB Ram, Ubuntu) was running circles around my new laptop (Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, Windows XP).
I wound up switching my laptop from XP to Ubuntu and ran smack into why some people complain about linux being hard to use. Some of my brand new hardware just didn’t work in linux. WiFi, no go ever (proprietary firmware), audio, ditto. I liked Ubuntu well enough that I decided to work around the nonfunctional hardware with usb WiFi and a audio expansion card until the next update to Ubuntu when the built in audio just started working.
Since then I have been using Linux as a primary OS for most of the systems that I use on a daily basis. When ever I am using something else I constantly find my self missing the flexibility that Linux based OSs offer me.
And, yes, the hardware situation has gotten considerably better since then, as long as your not running bleeding edge hardware.
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