Once this grid is 10x10, then you will know it is time to move onto another site.
The lack of working hardware acceleration is mostly NVDIAs fault for not providing open sourcr drivers, and the community's effort at reverse engineering the GPUs has been nothing less than Herculean. As for codecs, Fedora is derived from Red Hat, which is an enterprize distro and does not include (proprieatry) codecs to avoid licencing issues. Every problem you have listed is a result of corporate fuckery and not of Linux.
As for tech support, with Microsoft you can click the "diagnose" button, which does nothing, or spend a lovely time with an outsorced call Center which again, does not solve the problem.
The "complicated aspects" are the central idea of the platform as a whole. The concept of multiple servers united by a single protocol is not that hard, and any user not being able to grasp something as elementary as that would not make a good community member. Call me a snob, elitist, whatever. Lemmy is not a commercial project and has no YoY growth projections or sharholders demaning growth at all costs, and I would like it to remain so.
Yes, but isn't it a bit unfair (not to mention hardly enforcable) to demand of new instances not to host certain communities because the already exist on instance xyz? Even on Reddit there were spin-off communities due to powertripping mods. So far the most likely solution seems to be topic clustering, which we can probably expect in some future update.
I really don't understand the hostility towards nerd/tech oriented communities. Every time an online community dares to be on the nerdy side you get people loudly proclaiming how that's the worst thing ever, and that we need to expand until every Tom, Dick and Harry has a user acount.
Usually, when a site is adopted by the general public, the quality of the posted content goes down the toilet. Bots, shills and intrusive advertising follows, and the site dies a slow death. Reddit's r/all was a museum of ragebait, reposts and celebrity gossip, and I certainly don't want Lemmy to do an enshittification speedrun because some users refuse to learn how the fediverse functions.
Once again, this is a feature, not a bug. Two different servers, two different communities, united by a common communication protocol. This is what separates Lemmy from other Reddit clones, and what made it thrive, unlike non-federated sites who are either splintered and languishing, or attracting an unsavory audience.
Why do Lemmy instances automatically federade with every other instance? Wouldn't be more wise to add instances manually, from a list?
Uh-oh, you seem to have a storygamer on your hands. Some newer systems such as PBTA and Forged in Darkness have a "pass the GM stick around" mechanism, and borders between players and GM are slightly more fluid. I presume this is her first time playing a traditional RPG, so I would recommend taking her aside and telling her that in D&D (which I assume you're playing) players play only their characters, while the DM plays the rest of the world.
They will shit their pants once they find out about the metaverse logo. Personally, the Threads logo reminds me of a coiled tapeworm, which is very appropriate.
And what would be those "trade secrets"? The ability to make posts and have them being read by other people? I'm pretty sure every forum software since the '70s has prior art. Elons fragile narcissism know no bounds.
Download BalenaEtcher and burn an .ISO of your selected distro to a USB memory stick - Pop!OS and Linux mint are perennial favorites. Bear in mind that this will erase all data from the stick.
Boot the laptop into BIOS (you will need to check with the manufacturer to see which key you will need to hold to do so) and scroll down to the "boot from device" or similar option. Select "Boot from USB", save settings and reset your laptop.
If all goes well, and your laptop likes the distro, you should see a bunch of cryptic text scroll by. Don't worry, this is what Linux shows instead of a loading screen. A menu should pop up, asking you if you want to try out the Live distro, or install the OS. Choose the live distro first, this will create a version of the OS that works from the RAM disk and does not install on the hard drive.
You can now play around with the OS, browse the internet, play games, anything except saving locally to the hard drive (unless you Mount it, but that's another story). When you are good and ready, you can either choose to dual boot to Linux and Windows, or take the plunge and use Linux as your primary OS!
Hope this explanation wasn't too rambly. Have fun!
Oh look, it's almost as Meta is an untrustrworthy actor that plans to EEE the fediverse. I consider any instance that federates with Meta a lost cause, to be defederated as well.
Thunderbird is a pretty decent client, and OSS to boot!
Eh, Hermetic Qabbalah has been a part of Western Esotericism since the 17th century, and one of its foundations. I would say its a spiritual practice inspired by the Jewish Kabbalah, but wholly separate from it.
At this point, you will either try to mitigate the harm caused by proprieatry software by adding as many Open source programs to your MS system, or treat the underlying cause and install a FOSS OS.