My main original Skyrim play through on desktop was 100 hours.

My Skyrim VR play through was 200 hours. I think in 2019. So fun.

I recently had a similar experience. I used Linux Mint for the longest time, which is ubuntu based. And I tried LMDE for a little bit recently.

But then I decided to try straight Debian 13 w/ KDE Plasma. I absolutely love it, and I’m old enough that seeing

starting Debian GNU/Linux

just feels cozy and correct. Plus like you said the speed and stability are somehow even better, but that I had issues before.

I thought with them it was more about the entire device than just the OS. People might say they love their mac but nobody is telling friends & family to just install macOS on that old PC that’s losing Microsoft support.

100% agreed. I agreed more with each paragraph.

Your last sentence hit on what I think is a contributing if not primary driving factor in the health crisis you described.

It’s like the goal of modern society is to insulate us from the natural world and from learning subjects or doing tasks that we don’t absolutely have to.

But we are critters that evolved on this planet just like the others. You can’t just live a commoditized life that consists of work, car, screen, sleep, repeat and get the same fulfillment out of life as if you found the unique path that’s optimized for your unique brain.

Not acknowledging that everything jacks with your head to SOME degree only prevents you from trying to defend yourself as best you can!

Over the past several years I have gone through a transition from living life the way I was supposed to, or that I thought I wanted to, to living according to what produces the best outputs from my brain. Once I have the lived experience of an undeniable improvement from some change, it might actually become a habit.

It isn’t necessarily a linear correlation where you can pick the cutoff that best suits your personality and politics.

The technology and the act of surveillance don’t just slide you up the safety/privacy slope. They carry their own risks that can REDUCE safety while still paying the privacy trade off. And it is not predictable.

And that (plus caring about people) is why I don’t support the Leopards Eating Faces coalition even though I’m an old white educated native-born male USian.

I personally might not use a headphone jack or SD card slot very much, but for the market that a GrapheneOS phone would be targeting they seem like OBVIOUS things to include.

The crowd getting excited about this partnership is pretty much the same crowd that complains about features like those going away.

Then make the machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible…

That’s probably a huge part of it. How many billions of dollars have been spent engineering content on a screen to get its tendrils into people’s minds and attention and not let go?

EnGaGeMent!!!

Bold move to combine their names and then give it those damn “we’ve forced AI into this” sparkles, lol.

There are a lot of people out there, so many things can be true at once.

I think it’s inevitable that some people use labels as excuses just because awareness of those conditions is so much higher. I also think it’s inevitable that there are a lot of people who struggled all their life with things that are difficult to diagnose or weren’t on the minds of parents and teachers 30 years ago.

And there’s probably no way to ever say definitively, with evidence, either way on this – but it would blow my fucking mind to find out that Lemmy didn’t have a neurospicy percentage of participants significantly higher than the general population.

And even if that were known to be untrue, I think Lemmy also attracts people who are more aware, open, and accepting of that stuff in themselves and others.

My Windows partition at work went unused for several months before I wiped it.

At home it took about two weeks before I reclaimed that space!

My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.

Fortunately we devs are able to “dual boot” to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can’t even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)

All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:

The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don’t write many office-format documents though, so I’m more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.

You know how in media streaming and gaming there’s that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?

Microsoft’s stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I’m not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.

My experience being born into religious conservative white america is that phrases like “I don’t believe in” or “I don’t agree with” are just the politically correct language and/or dog whistle for “I hate that shit but I need to act polite.”

I’d make #2 even more general to include experimentation and trial and error with your routine, especially breakfast and lunch plus your sleep hygiene.

That might sound complex, but you just do one thing at a time. If you have a few better days because of it, that direct evidence is the best way to make it stick in your brain.

The fact that I have any routines at all is evidence enough for me that it works for me. But I’ve been working at it for years. There are definitely multiple stimulants involved, lol.

And sometimes if you can’t make any progress, maybe you need to kinda look upstream and see if there is something else blocking you to work on instead, or that you need to combine with what you’re already doing. And sometimes it can be basic stuff that seems like it’s obvious, like maybe getting some real food in your stomach along with the coffee.

But, the Null Hypothesis generally IS that X does not exist until you receive evidence otherwise.

That’s pretty much how we all work, we just have very different sources and standards when it comes to which evidence is taken seriously.

I had two different reactions to your comment simultaneously.

First, yeah the meme is political but you went hard on the American angle. But the image is of israel, it says israel in two places, it’s joking about the pope which is not an american thing, and then it mentions the name of a dead american.

Second, I just don’t think Lemmy has enough users and enough content to be picky and granular about categorizing all memes into the appropriate community. And that’s before we even get into the realities of federation and how there could be multiple active “memes@*” communities.

If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.

But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.

I think it’s more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?

I’ve spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!

Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)

I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.

I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)

I have had to learn about random things to fix problems on Windows computers far more often than with Linux computers, or even just to get them to behave the way I want.

It’s usually a lot faster and more permanent on Linux, though. And I get to learn about an open technology rather than a closed product.

Attitudes like that are not how we got a trillion dollars in spare data center infrastructure to find a use for!

Those consumers will be happy owning nothing THIS time!!