A security researcher has discovered that Microsoft Edge will load all your stored passwords into memory in plaintext at startup, making it easy for malware to scrape those passwords.
2026 is gonna be the year I finally move to Linux. I have huge concerns about many aspects of switching, but they’re being overtaken by concerns about staying with Windows. I don’t even mind if my overall user experience is a bit worse on Linux (I am trying to have reasonable expectations that it won’t be the walk in the park Linux advocates on Lemmy like to claim), I just have much more faith in its security, privacy, customisability and - most importantly - the motivations and intentions of its developers.
Controversial take from someone who dual boots windows and linux on my home PC and uses macs as work machines but, honestly windows is fine. IMO if you’re the kind of person who cares about a good running machine you’ll have configured settings and gotten rid of the bloatware and done a bunch of stuff to make windows a relatively decent experience anyway, and linux requires a similar amount of effort to get running the way you want it also, but can be a differently polished experience.
Modern OS’s are much of a muchness in practice with regards to their pros and cons. Please don’t downvote me to hell linux lovers, it’s my honest opinion after decades of use of all three.
If you move to one of the big supported distributions, you’ll be extremely surprised how easy it is.
If you just want things to stay consistent and easy, I can’t recommend Linux mint enough. I installed it on my son’s laptop almost two years ago and he’s never needed my help to fix anything since.
The installation walks you through everything, just like Windows, but it’ll only take about the third of the time. Everything just works and there’s no trash to uninstall or debloat scripts to run when you’re done.
If you do any gaming you might want to run Fedora or bazzite (fedora with training wheels), but if you’re using KDE for the desktop that’s almost as easy and seamless.
Can confirm, Bazzite is ridiculously easy. If you don’t want to dual-boot it’s easier to install than Windows. I have it on my laptop and all my games run better now.
Except Tropico 6. For some reason that made my entire system go crazy. 😄
Bazzite is so easy to set up it’s kind of ridiculous.
I ended up jumping to straight Fedora just so I can fiddle with things a little more, but for 99% of users the immutable distro thing is perfectly fine
Best of luck! If you’ve got questions or problems feel free to DM me (or reply here) and I’ll try to help as best I can. I’ve been using linux since the mid 90s, so I have a decent idea of how it all works :)
I have huge concerns about many aspects of switching, but they’re being overtaken by concerns about staying with Windows.
Do not. Use. Mint.
That shit bricked my computer for 3 years as a teen with an unpatched bug that impossible to ever download any file to my PC again, including any potential fixes. Spent months on stackexchange forums. No solution lol
Windows has yet to screw me over that hard. (Yet.)
Around what year was this issue? Both windows and Linux were pretty unstable until - someone correct me on this - 2012? Windows 8 was the last unrecoverable crash I had. Oddly never had an issue with Linux, but I know it happens, I’ve just been lucky.
You missed out on windows fucking up drivers for some SSDs a few months back. I had a MSI machine for a client that was unrecoverable on 11, and to re-install from scratch.
2026 is gonna be the year I finally move to Linux. I have huge concerns about many aspects of switching, but they’re being overtaken by concerns about staying with Windows. I don’t even mind if my overall user experience is a bit worse on Linux (I am trying to have reasonable expectations that it won’t be the walk in the park Linux advocates on Lemmy like to claim), I just have much more faith in its security, privacy, customisability and - most importantly - the motivations and intentions of its developers.
I switched my mom to Linux because teaching her how to use Linux as her daily driver was easier than trying to unfuck windows on her computer.
Back up your data and then go nuts.
Controversial take from someone who dual boots windows and linux on my home PC and uses macs as work machines but, honestly windows is fine. IMO if you’re the kind of person who cares about a good running machine you’ll have configured settings and gotten rid of the bloatware and done a bunch of stuff to make windows a relatively decent experience anyway, and linux requires a similar amount of effort to get running the way you want it also, but can be a differently polished experience.
Modern OS’s are much of a muchness in practice with regards to their pros and cons. Please don’t downvote me to hell linux lovers, it’s my honest opinion after decades of use of all three.
If you move to one of the big supported distributions, you’ll be extremely surprised how easy it is.
If you just want things to stay consistent and easy, I can’t recommend Linux mint enough. I installed it on my son’s laptop almost two years ago and he’s never needed my help to fix anything since.
The installation walks you through everything, just like Windows, but it’ll only take about the third of the time. Everything just works and there’s no trash to uninstall or debloat scripts to run when you’re done.
If you do any gaming you might want to run Fedora or bazzite (fedora with training wheels), but if you’re using KDE for the desktop that’s almost as easy and seamless.
Can confirm, Bazzite is ridiculously easy. If you don’t want to dual-boot it’s easier to install than Windows. I have it on my laptop and all my games run better now.
Except Tropico 6. For some reason that made my entire system go crazy. 😄
Bazzite is so easy to set up it’s kind of ridiculous. I ended up jumping to straight Fedora just so I can fiddle with things a little more, but for 99% of users the immutable distro thing is perfectly fine
Best of luck! If you’ve got questions or problems feel free to DM me (or reply here) and I’ll try to help as best I can. I’ve been using linux since the mid 90s, so I have a decent idea of how it all works :)
Do not. Use. Mint.
That shit bricked my computer for 3 years as a teen with an unpatched bug that impossible to ever download any file to my PC again, including any potential fixes. Spent months on stackexchange forums. No solution lol
Windows has yet to screw me over that hard. (Yet.)
I’ll take things that didn’t happen for 500
it’s more that even if this did happen, it’s unlikely to be specific to mint.
Around what year was this issue? Both windows and Linux were pretty unstable until - someone correct me on this - 2012? Windows 8 was the last unrecoverable crash I had. Oddly never had an issue with Linux, but I know it happens, I’ve just been lucky.
You missed out on windows fucking up drivers for some SSDs a few months back. I had a MSI machine for a client that was unrecoverable on 11, and to re-install from scratch.