I think it would be pretty funny if jesus did return and cast all these rich assholes into the lake of fire. Because they fucking deserve it.

I’m pretty sure the browser has more sandboxing than a desktop app running as me. The desktop app could do anything. Firefox tries to prevent webpages from doing nefarious stuff.

When I have to use discord, I use it in the browser. I don’t trust the app not to get up to no good.

Pop!_os worked fine for me out of the box. The UI is a little mac-like (dock on bottom, spotlight like search when you hit the super key) by default.

Steam just works. Heroic launcher just works. It’s simple.

I’ve also used mint, but had slightly less luck with its install working out of the box. All issues fixed eventually but there was some head scratching.

Linux nerds tend to have opinions and it’s easy to lose sight of what it’s like as a beginner.

But ultimately it’s pretty easy to switch distributions. They’re all free.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

If right wing people were smart they wouldn’t be right wing. Of course they’re going to believe and share AI slop video. They’re emotional driven fools.

My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.

It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.

I only buy drm free music and then back it up somewhere myself. Bandcamp at least is drm free, but who knows if they’ll turn to shit after being bought and sold.

Buying music on Bandcamp and similar has been good for me. When I got laid off I kept all the music I owned and didn’t have to pay anymore. All these subscription services suck.

One of the guys at my old job submitted a PR with tests that basically just mocked everything, tested nothing. Like,

with patch("something.whatever", return_value=True):
  assert whatever(0) is True
  assert whatever(1) is True

Except for a few dozen lines, with names that made it look like they were doing useful.

He used AI to generate them, of course. Pretty useless.

Moved to Linux (popos on desktop, mint on ancient laptop). Been fine. Don’t miss windows. Play games and browse the web without issue.

Thiel is a dangerous piece of trash and I’m disappointed he hasn’t… let’s say… been beamed up like kirk.

When I was making money, I’d buy albums from bands I liked. Built up a nice library.

Some people buy albums

Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:

• maps and GPS
• messaging (signal)
• emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop)
• ebook reading
• Wikipedia / quick research
• Lemmy

I could drop lemmy from mobile because it’s just a time waster and news source.

Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don’t need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.

Games are nice. I don’t want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it’s 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn’t fit in my pocket.

I don’t have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don’t find it much of a distraction.

Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.

I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”

Have you tried explaining something to someone lately? A lot of people don’t care and don’t understand. About anything

Switched to linux. No regrets so far.

Of the installs I’ve done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit “retry” and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn’t work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.

I’m not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve