But I wouldnt turn it on and actually play with it even if I could because I will always take the better performance.

Depends. In Cyberpunk I can get 90-100fps on 1440p on ultra with raytracing on and FSR4 Quality (via Optiscaler). That is a very good experience IMO, to the point that I forget about "framerate" while playing.

That's Windows though, in Linux the raytracing performance is rather worse for some reason and it slips below the threshold of what I find noticeable, so I go for 1440p native.

bit better RT performance about which I couldn’t care less about.

Yeah raytracing is not really relevant on these cards, the performance hit is just too great.

The RX 9070 XT is the first AMD GPU where you can consider turning it on.

bitcoin mining

That's a thing of the past, not profitable anymore unless you use ASIC miners. Some people still GPU mine it on niche coins, but it's nowhere near the scale as it was during the bitcoin and ethereum craze a few years ago.

AI is driving up prices or rather, it's reducing availability, which then translates into higher prices.

Another thing is that board manufacturers, distributors and retailers have figured out that they can jack up GPU prices above MSRP and enough suckers will still buy them. They'll sell less volume but they'll make more profit per unit.

So you're considering the 22H2 builds et al. separate versions, I just consider them service packs. They come with the regular updates, and the user experience doesn't significantly change. I couldn't ever tell you what "build" of Windows 10 or 11 I was on, but I usually know pretty well which distro version I am on.

But I guess it's true that they contain more feature updates than typical Linux updates.

I think you misunderstood. Windows 10 was released in 2015, and will have general support for all versions until October 2025. That's 10 years.

The current version of Mint, 22.1, was released in January 2025, and will receive support until April 2029. That's 4 years.

Had you installed the latest version of Mint in 2015, it would have been EOL in 2019. Had you installed Windows 10 in 2015, it would only be EOL later this year.

but when you explicitly state you are against it in the README of your project that is just wild

It's called a dogwhistle: they're letting other racist scumbags know that they are also racist scumbags and that their racist scumbag views are welcome, without saying anything overtly racist scumbag-y.

I use Arch myself (BTW :p), but I wouldn't really recommend that for users who freshly migrated over from Windows.

Yes, there are ways to get extended support (on Windows too btw), but a thing that should also be kept in mind is that "support" only means security patches and bugfixes, and not feature upgrades. There is also no guaranteed continued hardware support, nor guaranteed support from third party applications. On Ubuntu there's at least the HWE kernel, but that's also limited in time.

It's not criticism btw, it's just worth mentioning that the support model on Linux looks a bit different than what you get with Windows, and users should generally be encouraged to keep up with the latest release of their chosen distribution.

True, but often the distributions have an upgrade plan (for free). In example you can install an Ubuntu LTS and upgrade 4 years later to the next major LTS release. However, sometimes this has problems, because so much time and changes are in between. This is for sure.

Yes you can and should upgrade, which is what I was trying to say really. It's less set and forget as in "just let it update and it will keep on trucking for 10 years".

There are distributions with longer support period. Debian comes to my mind. But I don’t know how long and there were 10 year supported distributions too.

I think only the enterprise distributions (RHEL etc) do 10 year support, but they are not very usable for a desktop system, and I can tell from experience you start to run into compatibility and support issues with software if you actually use it for that long.

Debian is +- 5 years by the way.

foot is such a lovely little program. It has everything I want for a terminal emulator: it launches instantly, it has zero lag, no fluff, excellent font rendering, excellent copy/paste handling, excellent compatibility, and it's easily configurable and themable via a sensible, well documented config file.

TFW I realize I am a foot fetishist ... 😮

If you install Linux Mint today, you’ll still be able to update it in october and beyond, for the foreseeable future

One caveat: Linux distributions, even LTS variants, usually have a shorter support period than Windows, after which you have to upgrade your distribution, which is much like doing a Windows upgrade.

A particular version of Linux Mint, the example you mentioned, is supported for 4 years, whereas Windows 10 was supported for 10 years.

Not really the same scenario. PCs that could run Windows 7 could usually upgrade to 10, people were just reluctant to do so, partly also because 8 and 8.1 were such disasters. Eventually, everyone just moved on.

Today, a lot of 10 users would upgrade to 11 if they could, but their older-but-still-fine hardware is simply being cut off from Windows support.

Good news ... it's a suppository!