Yeah, it is what I’m going to install on my parents’ Win10 machines, but it is also what I use myself at home and work. There are almost no new users I wouldn’t recommend it to.

No distro is going to work for everybody, of course, and having the choice is part of the beauty. The mint project is doing great stuff though.

Saw it. Decided not to change it because that’s how somebody doing the “clapping on the syllable” thing would say it.

Yep that’s also an option if using an Ubuntu derivative at all is an issue for you.

LIN 👏

NUX 👏

MINT 👏

I’ve seen plenty of Debian mentions, and no pushback there whatsoever from me.

But if you find yourself frustrated that you can’t just have Ubuntu without Canonical’s snaps and ads and other ickiness, Mint is exactly that. Or maybe better, I dunno. It’s super polished and full featured and stable.

And even better in this era of Windows 10 support ending, the main/default version (Linux Mint Cinnamon) looks like Windows out of the box but it installs, works, and updates at like 10x the speed. (The 10x is an exaggeration for moment to moment desktop work and latency, but for the install and especially for updates I think it’s accurate)

It’s not just that, but it is unlikely that any star in our galaxy will collide with any star in Andromeda.

I think it’s easy to think of galaxies as individual things, like these nodes in the universe where all the stuff is stored. But galaxies are incredibly vast and incredibly empty.

I love the video this guy did on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsRmyY3Db1Y

The part that stuck with me is that if you made the Milky Way the size of the United States, our gigantic sun holding 99.86% of the matter in the solar system would be microscopic – the size of a red blood cell. And iirc, the planet earth would be all the way down to the size of a virus.

Yep. Space is expanding everywhere at once, but the effect is minuscule at the scales we’re used to. And even at galactic scales the “speed” of expansion might seem like a lot to us, but it still isn’t enough to overcome the motion of objects. I looked up some rough numbers to give you an idea:

The rate of expansion of space is 73 km/s/Mpc. So for every 3.26 million light-years between you and a distant galaxy, the space between you and that galaxy is expanding by 73 kilometers per second.

Andromeda’s blue shift indicates it’s headed towards us at 110 km/s. And in my non-expert head I’m thinking that blueshifted light must have already been redshifted by the millions of years traveling through space to reach us. So the galaxy’s speed through space towards us when the light was emitted was considerably higher.

Andromeda is 2.5 Million light-years away, btw. So the cumulative distance of space between here and there is expanding at something like 73 km/s/Mpc * 2.5 Mly * 1Mpc/3.26Mly = 57 km/s.

But when talking about relativistic distances and speeds, basic terms regarding time and location don’t always make sense.

Yeah, and the instinct to accumulate resources isn’t even remotely just a human thing. It’s often an essential element of survival.

And for sure a lack of money can cause plenty of problems that legitimately affect your well being. So there are problems for which money is the solution.

But when you constantly focus on the lack of money, whether it’s due to actual poverty or because grifters tell you for decades that all your problems are due to single black mom welfare queens getting your tax money, people start to reason that having the money or driving that Lexus SUV is going to be the cure for whatever their underlying non-financial personal issues are.

And since the real world is messy, the financial and personal issues can interact and amplify one another.

And here we are, in the US anyway, about to take this mess and make income inequality even worse while also making access to healthcare worse!

In my very limited knowledge of the household appliance market, Samsung has been a no-go for a long time. Like, the most expensive but also the most disposable.

And that’s before we even get to the enshittification and ad invasion.

It’s incredible to think about trying to explain the problem to my younger self 30 years ago…

“Yeah, computer hardware continued to scale pretty well so now even this refrigerator here has a computer inside it, a high resolution flat panel monitor, and even multiple ways to connect to the internet for remote control and feature updates.”

“wow, that’s amazing!”

"Yeah but nobody uses it. At least, nobody who understands tech and reads the news. You don’t even connect it to the internet in the first place. "

“What!? That seems totally backwards. What’s the problem for educated users? Are there hackers everywhere just waiting to connect to this iffy computer embedded in your home?”

“Oh no, it is much worse. The company that made the fridge could connect to it like they designed it to do!!! And to make it even more frightening, they usually have the infrastructure to be able to connect to EVERYBODY’S fridge at the same time!”

(begins playing spooky halloween music)

This seems backwards. Let’s just assume we’re always going to be willingly beholden to tech giants, and so we’re going to pass a law to make our masters treat us well.

Maybe instead campaign for a law that says all publicly funded computer resources must be reliably usable for 15 years. So you either go FOSS and save money too, or you get guarantees in writing before you hand over your hand over money to the people who won’t even let you see what their code is doing on your hardware.

“Someday, you’ll be rich” is the lie that’s told to us.

I think the prerequisite lie to that one is much bigger and more fundamental.

That lie is “you should want to be rich. Rich people are happy people. Rich people are good people. Being rich is the secret to happiness.”

Well, that’s probably more than one lie but you get the idea.

Yeah that’s typically how it works. People default to complaining and seeing everything as getting worse all the time.

I wonder if the “feral child” phenomenon has actually increased though (I don’t think there would be stats) and if that has something to do with the lower crime rate.

Not that it’s good to let your child be a feral nuisance. But if a child has shitty parents maybe that’s better for their development than whatever abuse the parents would choose to control it.

It’s not the funniest one, I don’t have an account, and I don’t live near one. But if I ever see the option to log in with Jollibee on any legit service I am already using I am switching over to that ASAP.

Bitwarden has been working great with me as sits transition to passkeys, even big corporate ones.

But yeah in practice, google and facebook are going to probably dominate because they are the easy + free option.

I’m a parent of one child who is the opposite of feral and never gets hit.

And while yes obviously we should not teach our children that physical abuse is how we keep people in line, this conversation needs to go far beyond the level if disciplinary tactics. What’s the whole overall parenting strategy?

I submit that actually having a strategy leads to less abuse, and that those who are the quickest to abuse are also the ones who do not take the time to reflect on themselves, their parenting, life, etc. At least not in a way that could potentially make them feel bad or change their ways.

And I’m not even trying to position myself as a perfect parent above physical intervention. Especially when safety is involved. But you have to leave room for escalation. If everything is met with the same reaction of losing your shit, then no bad behaviors seem any worse than others.

I don’t know if modern people are truly any worse at parenting than past generations, or if it’s yet another example of humanity’s shittiness being exposed by our explosion in communications technology.

Hey, don’t make light of my stuff.

I have some sick tunes in there too! ^__

I’m sure Plex has some great engineers, and Plex’s infrastructure is far more hardened and secure and reliable than my Jellyfin server.

But they are a way way more likely target, and Jellyfin still performs far better and doesn’t try to sell shit to my family members.

So basically the fediverse?

I mean at some point even websites seem grey net when the mainstream internet is basically AOL Future.

I think if there’s going to be an Eternal August version of the internet, it will be hidden in plain sight created by some of the same people that want to use it.

I started reading your comment here and formulating a reply in my head about how I was just limiting the scope of my comment and not lying and telling people to cast off responsibility and let Jesus take the wheel, etc.

But then your third paragraph is SO on point that I withdraw any resistance to your message.

Yeah I wanted to say something specific about not doing it in the city center, or do it when you’re driving past fields and trees. But I kept thinking of bumming out all the folks that probably don’t have such a resource available.

It’s just one of those things I am lucky to have available, so I intentionally make use of it. I don’t even have to work in the office every day, but it’s a nice office and my very short commute has the option of being about 2/3 on a twisty country road. So it helps get me out of the house and/or awake sometimes.

Oh and back to your PSA: if you are in heavy traffic and exhaust is an even bigger issue than debris particles, remember the air recirculate function on your AC.