I just gave my mate a laptop with Mint on it, this lappy's like ten years old and it's replacing a two-year-old one with win11 on it (and the linux one is faster, natch, another reason why this actually might be important, given that I've gotta live on a planet with a bunch of e-waste on it) and this is what happened: nothingLike it was a complete non-event, I installed Mint, gave it to them, they had a quick look at the first-run thing, set up light or dark mode, chose favourite colour, did some updates, and then the very first Actual Using Computer thing they did was look to see how to install Firefox and well firefox was already installed, it came with it, so... done?They said they'd sometimes have to use Apple computers and Mint was way more familiar than a Macand that was kinda... It. They just carried on with their normal computer tasks and everything was normal.I see quite a few posts about people moving to Mint specifically who say it was kind of anticlimactic, like they were expecting some kinda Issue or they'd have to do some l33t haxxing and they ended up... not disappointed, exactly, but feeling somehow let down that Nothing Happened, the computer kinda became transparentAnd I know my mate isn't gonna fall in love with Linux, and that's fine, you shouldn't fall in love with machines anyway it's not healthybutI think for months this is just gonna feel like Normal Computering, UNTIL this friend of mine has some cause to use a windows machine again, with all its nags and pokes and ads and trying to pester or force you into doing stuff that you don't want to do, and THAT will be The MomentBecause you forget, so easily, how normal you thought it was. Because it WAS normal, to you. You don't remember normal, normal isn't memorable even when it's a horrible sort of normal. You need to have the bad normal taken away for a while in order to see through it and notice how abnormal the normal gotWhen I started on linux it was Windows XP days and windows was unreliable and slow but Basically Alright, now windows is so so different, so much more malicious and creepy. Fifteen years ago linux felt like Freedom To stuff, now it feels more like Freedom From, y'know