I tried MX for a while. It was alright but not the distro for me beyond that short period of time. I’m glad it exists but a bit mystified at how it ended up topping the charts.

Yeah, I bought a Dell laptop for that reason. Turns out the spec I wanted wasn’t available with Linux preinstalled, so I had to buy the Windows machine and install it myself anyway. At least I never had any real driver issues or anything else like that. Laptop lasted 10+ years running Linux practically the entire time.

Props to any OEM who supports Linux, bigger props to anyone who ships Linux preinstalled, biggest props to those who favor Linux by default and charge extra to install Windows or refuse to do it outright!

Very true. Many hobbies have rituals. Cyclists assemble their gear, clean their chain, and choose their wardrobe before their ride. Card collectors and collectors of all kinds of things often have detailed ritualistic organization of their collection. Potheads might pack and burn their bowl the exact same super optimized way every time. Gardeners might walk meditative paths and talk to their plants. Those descriptions are outside observations of people and their hobby rituals that anyone can make. OP has given us an inside look into their hobby, which is pretty damn cool and insightful!

I was in tech, both IT and business enablement roles. I got replaced by AI so now I’m a professional curmudgeon.

I was on Evernote in the distant past and remember their pricing strategy pushing everyone out. If companies want to fail that bad, don’t let us stop you. It was a loss though because, at the time, Ever note was one of the most functional mainstream connected note apps.

Yeah, having the physical medium gives you a more trustworthy backup. Instead of all your hard drives getting wiped by the solar flare, you have multiple different mediums with strengths and weaknesses. I’m also inclined to hold onto physical copies.

I was always a sport and hobby hopper growing up and rarely stuck with the same thing long enough to get good, just competent. The two exceptions are biking and dancing.

In dancing there’s a common story about getting good: When you are new, you know you are bad at it, and go to beginner classes. When you get better you start overestimating yourself and going to classes well above your skill level. When you get good… you know you suck and you go to your friend’s beginner classes.

The people I dance with tend to appreciate solid basics and good etiquette over perfect flashy moves. Never lose sight of the basics because the 1% that makes you stand out at something relies of the 99% foundation of becoming competent that you build by being a well rounded human being and putting in the time to get some experience.

Good luck!

I’m a guy, and I imagine you’re correct. Hormones change over time and with age. I usually get blood work done when I go in for a physical and have had those conversations. Everything is looking good, I’m just getting older. He did encourage me to keep up the exercise.

The average American lifestyle kind of discourages exercise and eating well. It’s also very stressful. I certainly can’t fault people for not doing it. I imagine those conditions exist a lot of other places too. I also started gaining a bit more weight in my mid to late thirties but I also rediscovered bicycling during that time. I didn’t really lose any weight, but the way it was concentrating in my belly slowed down or even reversed a little bit. I’m amazed at how much it balanced my mood. Still working on those glutes of steel though.

Thanks for sharing. That’s horrifying, but important to see, understand, and preserve. The understanding that through no fault of their own, children, their parents, their friends, and family could be violently and inhumanely murdered on an industrial scale and every place they knew reduced to rubble is dread inducing and just too cruel for the empathy center of my brain to allow, even when my eyes, ears, and understanding tell me it’s true. It’s particularly disturbing when we look at history and see that this is not exactly an isolated or rare occurrence.

Yep, if they actually had to clean up their messes a lot of things would have reflected their true costs and we probably would have built out the alternatives way further by now. Imagine if the motorcar had barely existed and we skipped straight to PEVs (personal electric vehicles) and distributed solar battery charging cafes.

Yeah, I’m sure the customers weren’t happy either when their friendly, helpful PoC was suddenly replaced with a clanker that has the intellect of a rotten potato, likely at a time when everyone was still struggling to hold shit together as it was.

We could choose to have a Nuremberg Trial moment instead… but anime titties.

I bought some imported candy at the Asian supermarket (in the US) and the bag had this warning on it. I know it’s a CA thing. Now I wonder if it’s an import thing too.

I wrote a hell of a lot of TI-83 BASIC programs in my day. Along with learning basic HTML, it was my intro to programming. The good games were the assembly language games though and you had to trade with your friends to find and get the good ones. There was a Gallaga type space shooter that was top notch.

I was working on a side-scrolling skateboarding game. Can’t remember if I every finished it.

Yeah, Web 2.0 was when they started walling everything off and displaying only a few posts or lines of text at a time. They already viewed your posts and info as theirs and were actively trying to make CTRL+F and CTRL+C useless for the average non-technical person. This war on copying and pasting led to all sharing being pushed towards their sharing frameworks on Android and iOS. No longer were we sharing links, but rather apps and info inside of apps. Comments were only shown few lines at a time, or collapsed entirely to make it harder to find info.

Phones were still fun to mess with and hack back then. Now I just try to use my phone less overall. They’re all the same garbage gilded in fools gold.

Why, so Zuck can stream back 8k footage of my bootyhole every time I take a shit?!

Right now I’m happy if I’m getting my advertised gig up and down. Any extra bandwidth would just be used by advertisers/spies to exfiltrate more data about me

People would rather talk in code and self-sensor than dump a fascist platform because that would be incoventient.

Playing devils advocate here as my phone is somewhat hardened and mostly degoogled already. My bank let’s you cash checks via the app, but not the website. I am willing to go feed them into the ATM by hand, but not everyone lives so close to the bank. It is an issue, but it shouldn’t be dealbreaker because privacy is worth far more. That said, ignoring the issue will only make us lose out on potential converts from spyware-android to hardened-android and mobile Linux.