Not so much help but hope: I got rid of Windows 11 and switched fully to Linux Mint a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was doing but I tested things on USB and also on a very old laptop I had laying around before I made it my daily driver.

I’m not particularly a tech person. I own a small creative business and have a toddler, but I figured out what I needed to quickly. I don’t game and didnt use Winsows exclusive software so have no opinions about that.

What I didn’t expect: to actually be genuinely interested in my computer again for the first time since I was a teenager (which was not recent…). I love customizing my desktop. I love discovering new open source software. I’m learning more than I expected and it’s just a totally different relationship with the tech I use every day, in a nice way. And no more BS ads / bloat when I’m just trying to exist on my computer.

I just took a peek and you’re right. But there is an option to “pause” a group, I didn’t explore enough to see if it could be permanent. The rule that you can only delete a group when it has no members is absurd, wtf

You should be able to “archive” a group as admin, which essentially shuts it down. I haven’t tried but I’ve seen it happen in other groups. And yeah, it’s really disturbing what people will accept from FB for the sake of inertia and comfort. I’ve told a couple friends about Meta using the localhost loophole for tracking and recommended they delete the apps and just use the web version if they need to, and they all still have the apps. Who even needs privacy, right? Sigh

It seems only image containing content federates to Pixelfed, so text only posts are not visible

That’s interesting (a little chaotic with the different sized images but still). I’ve been using Interstellar for Piefed and it apparently doesn’t support that, so I had no idea

I had a bad feeling about that with Pixelfed when I saw them repeatedly ignoring questions about when to expect groups, ha! I know you can follow / reply to Lemmy groups with Mastodon, but can you post to them from there? Or from Pixelfed?

I’d rather keep it part of a bigger social network where people can interact with it as needed while doing other social stuff. Plus I know most people won’t leave FB for it, and getting new different people involved would be nice. Just a bonus if people move to the Fediverse to see it and realize there’s more to explore.

Maybe I haven’t given it a super fair chance, but I was not impressed with Friendica. I only tried it on the webapp, but the interface was just depressing and not super intuitive. I keep hearing it’s a good substitute for FB but it needs some work before I would feel comfortable recommending that to people

Once you fixed that issue did Linux work well dual booting? I’m sure I can get past it but I’m mostly worried that this foreshadows ongoing problems

I had a bad feeling that dual booting wouldn’t be the seamless thing I hoped for. I have an old Mac laptop I might try installing on to see how I like it and decide if I’m just gonna wipe Windows entirely.

It’s incredible how shit Windows is and everyone just accepts it. It shows me ads on my lock screen FFS (and I know how to disable that cuz I’ve done it three times now and they keep coming back like a horror movie monster you didn’t behead).