Oh yeah agreed. Their role in the rat race makes up a significant part of their personal identity. That’s part of the design, to keep you focused on your consumption instead of your life.
I guess I should have referred to the noise as attention-grabbing things instead of serious things, lol.
My son was the prime age for Baby Shark when it blew up a few years ago.
I remember we were on a ride at a little local amusement park and some girls started singing Baby Shark.
I was the dad that stepped in right on the beat and bellowed out “DAAAAAADDY SHARK DOOT DOOT…” with as much bass in my voice as I could manage.
I grew up in a conservative household. Fuck that whole universe of attitudes.
If you’re putting it off you might be frustrated afterwards once you see how easy and fast it was, lol. If you make a bootable USB drive, which you should, you can boot to a live desktop and see linux running on your hardware before you install anything to a hard drive.
I have recently converted from Mint, including a brief stint with LMDE, to good old Debian + KDE Plasma and I absolutely love it. But I am also enough of an enthusiast that the few extra setup steps were fine.
I wonder, is hatred of advertising a common thing for folks with ADHD? They take away something you are giving your attention to because it interests you, and shove some other crap in your face just to serve their own interests.
I remember being enraged at the scheduled commercial breaks in the '80s and '90s. The only benefit they had was that I always knew which segment of the show I was in and therefore roughly what time it was.
But now? It is so much damn worse and the normies just seem more OK with it than ever. I just remind myself they are living in a society that conditions them to accept it and gives them a thousand more serious things to worry about.
Edit: some words not have right letters
Watching TV of any kind at other people’s homes, and especially my parents’ place, can feel like some real black mirror shit.
It’s difficult to argue against Mint when your use case is a current windows user who just wants to drop Linux in its place.
I like and appreciate the extras that physical albums bring, as well as the freedom and reliability of physical media.
But even as an old guy that’s all about connecting with the physical world and stimulating all the senses and all that, when it comes to the mechanisms of listening to music it’s hard to beat FLAC albums on the Jellyfin server. It takes up so little space.
The importance of open & interchangeable hardware and software goes way beyond the upgrades you may or may not make, or even saving money & reducing e-waste.
You get better products that way. Having complete control over your system benefits you even if you never exercise that control. It is literally a constraint on enshittification.
I open nano more often than any other editor, and by a lot. I spend more TIME in vscode and maybe Kate, but lately I’ve been tweaking setups on a couple of machines.
sudo nano /that/cfg/file/u/thinking/.about
It sounds like they’ve gotten fat, rich, and complacent. Just like some societies I know!
Well hey, at least our rights-obliterating global surveillance apparatus is already named like the bad guys in a stupid action movie!
How do I make somebody else’s comment go viral?
It’s not the technology running on the PC that people have a problem with. It’s the owner of that PC.
I’ve been a fan of the easy to install all-in-one Linux experience of modern distros, being an old guy with a family and a keen awareness of how much I need to maintain some of the non-computer hobbies in my life. Mint has been my jam for a long time.
But just recently I had reason to try out regular old Debian with KDE Plasma, and I think I have found my happy place. I just moved around my hard drives and set up my handful of self-hosted things on this fresh system. It’s so nice to occasionally use as a desktop while it is also a rock solid server.
Gross.
I continue to have my own little cognitive dissonance about the Fediverse:
The world needs more FOSS and information needs to flow in a decentralized, democratic kind of way.
Howeverrrrr… Lemmy is awesome for we few that it clicks with. For the good of the users and especially the volunteer admins who run our instances, I am glad Lemmy is not the big glowing target that reddit is.
Maybe we just hang out and keep the lights on no matter whether it’s for occasional lost Linux users or for when mainstream folks decide to ditch oligarch-tech en masse.
The funny thing is that the biggest practical benefit to most Linux users is not the access to do these things.
It is the secondary effects of not needing to restrict access in order to preserve lock-in and enshittification. It makes the whole user experience better because it is only doing wider you’ve asked it to do. For example, I apply updates more quickly on Linux than I ever did on Windows, even though my Linux DEs are way less pushy about it, because the process is an absolute breeze!
Look at each OS option like you were a product development team, and think “who are my stakeholders?”
The commercial products have long lists of what’s driving the product features and anti-features. Linux has the developers who want the code to be helpful and stay free, and the users who want it to do what it says on the tin, with the option to audit or modify the system’s code. But of course it’s still run by humans, so big personalities and bad actors and whatnot do affect things.
I’m another data point where displays work under Linux better than Windows, making this particular example amusingly wrong.
This is a Dell precision laptop with a dual usb-c connected docking station. Intel cpu plus a discrete nvidia gpu.
Using Cinnamon in X11 on Linux Mint or LMDE, works great.
Using KDE Plasma in Wayland on Debian? Works great!
Using Windows 10? Bzzzt.
I think I’ve had Linux DEs occasionally forget my monitor order & rotation just like Windows would, but out of the box Windows wouldn’t even use all my monitors.
Ahkshually, cultures all over the world have eaten crustaceans for millennia!
(I made up that fact for the sake of the punch line, no idea if accurate)
I leave ls alone and instead do
alias l='ls -latrF'
I do sometimes just want to use the plain version, especially if I’m in a small terminal window for some reason. But I think my brain likes scanning 1D lists more than 2D grids, no matter whether I’m in a terminal or using a graphical file manager.
That sounds a lot like when they insist that nobody will ever innovate if they ever have to pay taxes when they get rich off their product.