gila [any, any]

I’ve gotten used to using the noctalia-shell dock to unify my on-screen and off-screen windows / tiled window groups. Even if a window from my dock is active in a different workspace, clicking it in the dock from any other workspace switches to it immediately. Fundamentally it’s similar to managing floating windows. But now having different workspaces for different tasks makes sense to me for the first time. It lets me maximize space for groups of tiled windows. My whole life I’ve just disabled that shit immediately.

Switching her OS wasn’t to force her into conforming to my ideals or something. I tried setting her up on Chrome OS first, but it’s ass. For anything outside of Google’s ecosystem, you need an Android app designed for phone displays. There’s no real email client, no real office suite, no real way to harden her browser against scams (which she’s fallen victim to in the past).

A simple Linux distro with silent automatic updates is genuinely a better fit. Everything she needs is right there on her GNOME dock. She hasn’t called me for laptop support in months.

I just put Fedora on my mum’s Chromebook and told her it was an update

It made it easier for her to access email anyway

Did you know there is potential for VM escape exploits? As long as a VM has direct access to your GPU, you can’t safeguard yourself completely. No matter what you do, you need to take self responsibility to ensure the software you run comes from a reputable source.

Granted, VM escape exploits targeting gamers is a very low possibility, but so is windows malware running in a linux userspace actually causing any harm.

Running pirated windows games via proton is quite secure. Spend the mental resources trying to be secure by checking the sources of your game files & cracks.

broadly, gain flexibility, lose familiarity. just try it and see.

one thing i’ll spell out, you’ve likely never had to consider the logic by which windows loads dll versions. essentially, if you put a modified dll file in the same folder as an executable, when the executable calls for it that modified dll will be loaded instead of the system’s builtin version. game and software cracks sometimes rely on this principle. but on linux via wine/proton, that isn’t the case. so you’ll need to configure wine/proton to do a “dll override” in some cases (i.e when your game/software crack utilizes a modified dll). the process is pretty straight-forward, the main thing is knowing you need to do it.