Thank you. The downvotes don’t bother me, but the attitude of some of these linux fans does. Skills issues my ass. I’m fairly IT literate. I can find my way around basic unix stuff for work, and don’t care if i have to spend some of the time i get paid for on reading man pages. But at home, my computer just needs to work. Linux is not ready for that, and some of these fanboys just put people off.
Did I say I want to keep using windows? I don’t. I want to get off W10 before that becomes an unsupported security risk, and won’t go to W11. All I said, or meant to say, is that I don’t feel comfortable yet to move to Linux, and posts like this don’t make me more confident that Linux is trouble free. It’s not just that I don’t want to spend hours fixing problems, it’s also for the sanity of my family who just need a working computer
Things like this are why I still haven’t switched to Linux. Had a play with Mint on a USB stick and liked it, but I just worry that when I start to use it for real, I am going to spend far too much time searching for solutions to weird problems and going down rabbit holes.
That may be interesting to politicians and economists. But GDP shrinking or growing by 0.x % makes no difference to most of us. Not until shrinkflation, above inflation annual price rises baked into contracts for mobile phones etc and general enshittification are dealt with.
It depends on the details of the car scheme. A BEV is great, assuming you can charge it cheaply at home, except for the two days where you have a 400 mile round trip. For those, motorway fast charging will get you there and back. I have had a company BEV for 3 years. Worked out ok with lease cost and tax benefits. But I have now decided to abandon the company car scheme and got a private car with a petrol engine. Never saw the point of a PHEV, lugging a heavy battery around while running a small petrol engine. Probably good if you mostly drive around town, but that’s not my use case. For private cars, BEVs are just too expensive, to buy, to insure and to repair. My reasons include:
I get a cash alternative if i don’t take a company car,
I can’t claim actual cost for motorway charging, which is very expensive. It works out more expensive per mile than a petrol car (for me, a small modern BEV may work out better) This is the main issue for me as I do long trips fairly regularly.
My car needs 2 hours to charge even on a motorway fast charger. Normal local public chargers don’t work for me, too slow. The car needs 12 hours on my 7kw home charger.