So are we living in some kind of Bizarro Eternal September?

Where instead of being flooded with normies, a few dozen thousand of us are walled in behind barriers to entry that the greybeards of old could only imagine.

It’s like a social experiment that would be unethical if we weren’t all self-selected to be here. Will we flourish or will we go mad?!?

Given my experiences so far, I’m gonna ride this thing as far as it takes me. Just today I was inspired by a fellow lemming to format my entire hard drive just to switch to a slightly different Linux distro. On my work laptop! :>

Fun, fun, we skip along together!

Swirling towards the center…

Where there is no pain and we are truly together, forever.

…

Eat at Arby’s

Because the standard version of Mint uses the ubuntu repositories. You get to utilize most of what makes up ubuntu, but decoupled from the stuff Canonical wants to push. It has some added polish as well.

It was more of an ubuntu-specific reply rather than “what’s the best distro” thing.

But now that you mention it, there is also Linux Mint Debian Edition! :D

I might actually start using LMDE at work, since we have some stuff that’s more focused on debian than ubuntu.

If they want ubuntu, let them Linux Mint! :D

Thank you for this post!

For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.

I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it’s pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.

Everything is a wave if you dig deep enough.

At least, as far as we know right now. But the standard model and quantum field theory have been really solid with really precise predictions for many decades at this point. (not any kind of expert here, just find it interesting)

I think you are completely right, but that doesn’t invalidate the point behind the OP even if the specific comparison doesn’t fit great.

Having a cozy dark indoor day won’t kill you, but it does seem to be good for us to get ample exposure to the natural world.

Yeah, that’s another fun aspect of our culture. Jobs that many people actually want due to what they are passionate about lead to abuse.

It’s the reason I never seriously considered getting into game development or becoming a teacher.

I am the rare father involved in the PTO (parent-teacher organization) along with my wife at our kid’s elementary school. We were handing out basic cheap supplies to the teachers last month as a Christmas thing. We’d interrupt the class to give the teacher a SINGLE roll of paper towels and then a small box of tissues or some glue sticks or whatever, and they were excited and grateful every time!

If you are a user of any mind altering substances, or have any interest in starting, it might be worth giving the movie or show another try in that state. Assuming your chosen goodies leave you coherent and able to form memories, lol.

And it’s not just to put you in a good mood, though that certainly helps. Maybe it’s just the spicy neurons in my case, but being high can qualitatively change the experience of how I relate to characters. (not extreme like empathy on / empathy off, sometimes things might just land different)

My fellow americans and I look at this concept and tilt our heads to the side like confused puppies.

Your use case sounds perfect for using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement. Opening a Word doc or an old Excel spreadsheet is effortless. You don’t sound like the “I use Excel every day for my job and there is no replacement” folks with very specific needs.

And I will echo what the other reply said: try Linux on your laptop! Not only will it probably work fine, it will probably also feel much faster and more responsive.

Trying most of the big Linux distros is super easy and zero commtment, too. When you boot from the install media, it loads directly into the OS desktop running natively on your hardware! Then once you’re ready to install it, there’s usually a shortcut on the desktop or something.

I recommend trying Linux Mint. It is so simple to install and full featured out of the box, plus being based on ubuntu and being very popular itself, information and help is everywhere.

I don’t have any issues with KDE, and I admire their work beyond the DE/UI. Kdenlive is my chosen video editor, for instance. I believe it’s the flatpak version too, so it no doubt loads a bunch of stuff into ram.

I’m not sure what you mean by “restricting” with the DE since I have a terminal at my fingertips at all times. I assume you mean some design decisions or lack of some customization options that KDE has?

But the weird selection of apps has me lost. It comes with stuff installed that you might expect, like firefox and libre office. It uses mostly the Ubuntu repositories so you can apt or apt-get install most things you’re looking for. And since it’s linux you can add repositories and all that fun stuff.

I also don’t know what you mean by filtering flathub.

I’d expect that most brand new users install Ubuntu or Linux Mint because of how often they are recommended.

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with Canonical/Snaps removed and some added polish. The default DE is laid out like windows before 11 (“start” button in lower left) which seems to make sense for new users.

I’m a knowledgable enough user, being a developer on embedded linux products, and I also stuck with Mint long term. It’s still a Linux system that I actually control. The fact that it was very user friendly and full featured it off the box doesn’t take away from that. It just meant that it wasn’t the learning experience you’d get with something like Arch.

The naming is one thing I legitimately like about the whole Linux/GNU/FOSS world.

Things are still named by nerds/enthusiasts who have some spark of joy and fun left in their hearts. Could you imagine a sanitized corporate software product released today with a name that directly refers to the established product it is meant to displace?

For example, things like GNU’s Not Unix or my favorite remotely accessible text/terminal based email client I used around the turn of the century, PINE Is Not Elm.

Then you get fun second-order software names like GIMP, too.

It’s all so preferable to the commercial software branding world where even though the visual presentation is extremely samey (everybody switching to the same popular boring fonts and removing logos/artwork), the actual brands are often made up silly words that are easy to get the domain name and the social handles for.

Be sure to follow BONTO! on all your favorite trillion dollar propaganda and surveillance platforms!

Haha yeah, I think SpiceDealer’s comment inadvertently supports the notion it’s meant to dispel.

But to be fair, the media world has been using the word “digital” to mean “electronic delivery” for a long time.

Here’s my hot take to offer:

The Krunch 106.66 from Saints Row 2 is the best radio station in any city sandbox GTA-style game.

I like metal and there are a couple bands I started listening to because of that radio station.

I completely understand the sentiment!

I am still into some tech and “new computer” type stuff. I am about to install a bigger/faster drive in my PC and set up my Home Assistant server. That PC is already my Jellyfin server. I am also in the middle of building a brand new PC for my kid, which will also run Mint, lol.

But I spend time only on the things that I’ve learned really matter to me, and not on all the things you’re “supposed to” mess with in your home lab that you obviously have.

You know the meme (or meme category) where it’s a resume or linkedin profile where the recent work history goes something like Senior Network Architect, then Goose Farmer?

I may literally have a 3D printer still in the box, and PC & networking parts all over the house, but my daily routine is embedded linux C/C++ sr developer by day and animal tender on the evenings and weekends, lol.

I never left!

I think I’m just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think “that’s a youngster’s game.”

Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn’t broken!

I was coming to the comments to make some kind of comment about how the chill vibe of this meme is the reason I brought nature to me and built a pond in my yard and etc…

But your comment was at the very top. My “keep those damn fish alive” sense kicked in. So my train of thought took a hard turn towards “holy shit is that a mink?? RUN!!!”

Or replace mink with a similar cute little murder machine species. I haven’t dealt with them, fortunately, but I’ve heard the stories.

It was probably organized by corporations to slow down EU

Cries in red white and blue American tears

The owner class, their paid shills, and their useful idiots had half the population convinced decades ago that all regulation is bad and that government entities literally cannot do anything correctly.

I started believing some of that stuff when I was young and thought that people in the media argued in good faith. Plus I was more accepting of the cornerstone conservative axiom that money and “progress” are the marks of good people and good societies rather than silly nebulous concepts like “being alive is a positive experience for as many people as possible.”