The 20 minutes was just what the installer took while I worked on other stuff. I guess if you took the time I used to download the .iso and flash the drive then it would be around 30.

I guarantee that I still got that done quicker than even the first round of Windows updates / restarts on that old hardware that hadn't been booted for 3 years.

I also find that updating bazzite is pretty quick. It's nothing compared to the Windows bootloop of nonsense. Also that machine doesn't have TPM so I would have been out of support soon on 10 with no way to go to 11.

It's still perfectly capable hardware that can run a lot of games. I see no reason to yeet it into the trash or run an insecure / unsupported OS because Microsoft told me to.

Yea that should be plenty for all the telemetry, update checks, notification services, and AI slop tooling (Copilot) to run.

You should be fine as long as you don't launch any applications, play any games, or attempt to use a web browser or the rest of the computer in any meaningful way.

We call this the "Jurassic Park Problem" at work. Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.

I booted an old win 10 laptop the other day to see if it still worked. It has a GPU so I thought it might be nice for a few light games while I travel. Immediately started screaming about updates and all the normal windows stuff.

I booted to Bazzite from a flash drive and had it installed in like 20 minutes. Runs like a dream now. It's amazing to see what that old hardware can do without Windows choking it.

It's so easy now to run an option that doesn't suck.

The first Witcher game. I adored it. Janky controls, weird plot holes, subpar graphics. But oh man - the environments, the ambiance, and the dialogue absolutely slap.

I avoided the Switch 2 and opted for an Ally to play PC games. It's tempting to pick one up for this but I just find Nintendos pricing and policies to be really gross and anti-consumer at this point. I'll probably just play the classic version again.

Give me a break.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that's had to suffer through this kind of crap.

My last company did a yearly circle-jerk session like this where the leadership literally recorded "intro bits" of themselves like you'd see on a jumbo-tron at a sporting event. You know, like a snappy montage shot of them nodding their head or waving or some shit with fire around it.

And then they literally played these clips on a giant screen with intro music while they came out on stage. It was the cringiest, most ego-fueled, shit I've ever seen from a company that could barely manage their basic operations.

It seems like every day now that I have to break out the "man-made horrors beyond comprehension" line.

I put it on my gaming desktop and ROG Xbix Ally X and love it. Works great. The Windows Rog Xbox Ally X portable experience sucks. Also I'm not missing the intrusive updates and AI junk jammed into absolutely every Microsoft product.

I'm sure Zorin is solid. I went with Bazzite since it does a lot for gaming out of the box and makes updates pretty easy. I have another Laptop with PopOS on it and have really enjoyed that as well. Again - pretty straight-forward experience if you are coming from Windows.

I took time over the weekend to put Bazzite as my primary OS on both my desktop and ROG Ally. Not because it necessarily performs better but just because I've had enough of all the creepy AI shit that MS is doing.

People who say these things clearly have no experience. I spent an hour today trying to get one of the better programming models to parse a response. I gave it the inputs and expected outputs and it COULD not derive functional code until I told it what the implementation needed to be. If it isn't cookie-cutter problems then it just can't predict it's way through it.