Christian

I remember mint being billed as essentially just that like a full ten years ago. I’m actually surprised to hear mint hasn’t been enshittified itself at this point, I just assumed that would have happened by now.

If it’s MY car why would adverts be in it?

Because you’re too poor to afford the monthly payment on the ad-free model.

Frog, dog, and kitten, over and over and over in completely arbitrary orderings.

I’m just speculating on reasons behind why people might feel it’s still not user-friendly. It was a pretty easy transition for me too, and that was years ago.

While there’s a little bit of getting acclimated to slightly different programs for the same tasks, I kind of imagine sophisticated needs primarily comes down to hardware. A company making some sort of computer hardware doohickey might design and test and provide support for something with Windows/Mac in mind, and maybe for other operating systems they’re not cooperative with documenting support, under the mindset that it would reveal trade secrets or decrease shareholder value in some other way. Linux support then comes from other means like reverse engineering. This could mean that it will take time before all the kinks are ironed out, or if the product was short-lived the linux community might not care enough to have someone volunteer to keep up with support. Common, time-tested hardware will have good support. Plugging in some old printer that was discontinued shortly after launch will be more of a crapshoot.

I’m aware that at some point sourceforge went down the toilet, but in the early 2000s it seemed to be a pretty reliable website for open source software. I had gone a few years coming across more and more evidence that any software I was downloading from sourceforge was much less likely to be a load of shit than software downloaded anywhere else. At some point I made the connection that maybe open source software is better in general. That made me curious about the experience of using an entire operating system that was open source. Either 2012 or late 2011 I installed Fedora to dual boot with windows (like 70% sure it was win7, might have been vista). Over the next year or two I sampled a bunch of other distros, and also PCBSD (not sure if that still exists) at one point. In retrospect I was really sampling DEs, but I didn’t know the distinction.

Discovering the philosophy behind GNU was what led me to abandoning windows entirely. I think I had already had some of the core ideas of free software, albeit in extremely rudimentary forms (gee, these EULAs sure do seem like they’re deliberately obfuscated), floating around my head for a while. The concept of free software resonated with me, so that’s when I finally removed my windows partition. I stopped distro-hopping and settled on Trisquel for two or three years.

Afterwards, I decided to move to Parabola because I thought it would force me to learn things, but the main thing I learned was how to read documentation just well enough to get everything working by trial-and-error tinkering.

I’ve kind of moved on from free software at this point. I do still agree with the ideals, but I think the goals are somewhat inconsistent with a capitalist economy to begin with so I’d rather be concerned about that.

Today I use arch and still have no idea what the hell I’m doing, but I’ve had a stable system for years and I’m too comfortable with it to switch to a friendlier distribution.

-day/night, etc

Once she pieces together that dusk and dawn are in there too she’ll figure out day should be mid-day and night should be mid-night. She’s right there to becoming history’s second timecuber. All she needs to do is take that step past duality, from two to four.

I recently started pc gaming again, I had played some switch and ds stuff but the last time I had gamed on pc was almost twenty years ago. Even given that I’m focusing on 2d games, I thought there would be a lot more hiccups trying to run windows games on a machine with intel integrated graphics. I like indie games much better in general nowadays, I’m not even going to worry about what I’m missing without buying a graphics card.

I’ve used claws for like ten years and I have never felt any reason to switch, but OP’s criticism of thunderbird is that it’s too old-fashioned. Claws was more old-fashioned than thunderbird way back when I was trying out different clients, and has had no significant interface changes in the time since.

But yeah, claws is awesome. I can’t speak for power users, but as someone who doesn’t need a lot of features other than being somewhat idiot-proofed, it works great for me.

My work uses office365 and claws does not work with those mailboxes on its own, it took me a while to figure out the workaround. There’s a libre program called davmail that will allow you to access office365 emails from any client, it’s in the AUR and for Debian users I believe it’s in the native repositories.

Tony’s great. He does a thing he calls “Detroit style stuffed pizza” which does not really seem to be a Detroit style pizza at all but it’s fantastic nonetheless.

A lot of people like his sandwiches and visually they look very appetizing, but for whatever reason they don’t hit the spot for me. His pizzas are spectacular, and good breadsticks and wings too.

I don’t read five star reviews ever anymore. If I want to find a believable endorsement of a product, I’ll look for a four-star review that contains a criticism that isn’t that bothersome to me personally, but legitimate enough that I can imagine a customer who would be deterred by it.

We moved a year ago, and I found my favorite pizza guy, Tony, by maybe the most convincing online review I’ve ever read. The most recent review on google maps was a one-star that was basically like “I met Tony and he casually used foul language etc etc there is no need for profanity etc pizza was some of the best I’ve ever had though”

But being charitable to the person you’re responding to, they twice said explicitly that they didn’t understand what was being said and asked for elaboration and both times got a reply that more or less suggested that they didn’t understand because they’re illiterate. At some point the reaction becomes understandable.

edit: different poster from the first two, but I think they were sympathizing with the other person

I saw a snake-oil kickstarter for one of these about ten years ago.

I used to use the Trisquel forums, Trisquel being a fully-free operating system and at the time the only one that could be installed by a total novice. There was a guy there, Chris, who was heavily involved with the company ThinkPenguin. Chris seemed genuinely passionate about free software and actually seemed pretty genuine when plugging his products, he’d point out the specific points where his products failed to be fully free and sometimes give examples of competitors who could do better and some justification for why he didn’t feel it was realistic for ThinkPenguin to match that. I had some respect for him and some of the stuff he wrote on that forum really helped me understand the movement better.

Anyway, like ten years ago someone made a post about a kickstarter for a new company called Purism, which was fundraising to build a fully free high-end laptop I think by the end of that calendar year. A couple hours later the CEO of Purism (his name was Todd) found his way to that thread and explained to us how exciting this was and he intends to use Trisquel as the operating system and we should totally support this financially, blah blah blah. He’s giving lengthy replies to every single comment made in that thread. At some point Chris writes an extremely extensive response about why every detail Todd has promised does not seem realistic, including recognizing from the kickstarter photos exactly which computer Todd intended to use as a base and why he felt that choice made no sense. I didn’t really understand any of the details here to be honest, but yeah. Todd gives a one-sentence reply to Chris’ post where he addresses zero of Chris’ points and instead simply tells us that Chris is slandering his project because Chris is afraid of seeing a competitor succeed and doesn’t actually care about free software.

At that point I didn’t really need to understand the finer points to figure out which one of the two was more reliable. It was so blatantly transparent that Purism became a running joke in the forums.

Todd obviously ended up backtracking on virtually everything, using a brilliant scheme of weakening the promises in the kickstarter description over and over and over and dodging questions about that. He made a bunch of petitions to the FSF to certify his stuff on the grounds that their certification requirements (all those details initially promised for his laptops) were unrealistic to achieve. No shit. He also created an online (change.org? not sure about that) petition to Intel, which was sure-fire going to work, I’m pretty confident Intel did remove their management engine because I definitely would have heard more about that if Intel inexplicably decided to ignore that change.org petition.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, because Trisquel was the only FSF-endorsed distribution that was realistic for general-purpose use, he also ended up blowing a bunch of the funding to make his own distro (called “PureOS”) because if he stuck with using Trisquel his customers could easily end up on a forum where his products weren’t taken seriously.

Anyway, his initial kickstarter got like $600,000. He did release a laptop which was functional but not really different from things other companies like Los Alamos and ThinkPenguin had been doing for a while. A few years later he promised a fully libre phone and I think got even more for that than the laptop kickstarter. Last I heard only a very tiny fraction of the orders had actually been filled, and people were upset about that because it was already a few years late and also the company was desperately trying to remove all evidence that full refunds on request had been promised for the first couple years of preorders. Also the phones remained like six times as expensive as the (at the time) new pinephones and only functional for people who were extremely generous with how they define the word “functional”.

I’ll admit I did find some entertainment in this, but overall this shit was really depressing because not only could the funding Purism got have gone to other projects, but, more significantly, everyone who got scammed will be much more hesitant about supporting libre projects in general.

edit: Just checked /r/purism, the sidebar reads “PLEASE! Read at least 10 posts here before considering whether to place a Librem order! :) System76 is also a great alternative for Linux laptops.” Sounds like a community of happy customers.

Good comment. I’m pretty sure “public money, public code” used to be a slogan a while back. It didn’t get a lot of traction but it resonated with me.

I’m considering getting back into pc gaming, it’s honestly been a couple decades so I’m ludicrously out of touch. On top of that I don’t know shit about wine, in my 10-15 years of running linux I think I’ve only run wine one time, right after making the switch. I quickly decided using native apps was easier and I’ve never really needed any software badly enough.

Anyway, my assumption is that linux piracy is so scarce that I’d be better off just looking to run windows cracks through wine, is that accurate? Are there any decent private trackers for games with a reasonably low entry barrier (an interview process for example)?

Honestly, I think it’s even overblown as a thing on reddit, I feel like virtually no one who is over fifteen and using reddit recreationally cares about karma. I’ve heard it presented like people are out there karma-farming because they feel a sense of pride in having a high number and I kind of think that’s an invented caricature to get mad at. I’m skeptical that anyone actually cares.

Obviously there are people and businesses/institutions who use reddit for promotion and narrative shifting and there are bot accounts to be sold to those institutions, and all of them definitely care about karma, but I think that’s something different (and more harmful).

In the present discussion, the people posting want to share that they’re trying something new. I don’t open these posts myself but I think that’s fine. It’s very unlikely there’s some hidden motive here. As someone who cares about free software and the linux ecosystem, I would hope that the community is receptive and encourages newcomers to participate.

I do understand how OP could be annoyed at seeing a lot of these in his feed, but I think the solution is to get them off his feed, just block the community. Letting newbies have their moment is more likely to grow the community.

I saw the picture before reading the edit and was trying to imagine what OP was doing that made the end key significantly more useful than the home key, like not going backwards on principle or something.

I know I’m not making a helpful contribution here, but I’ve been wondering about this stuff for a while myself and this thread has some great answers. Thanks for asking this OP.

I switched like ten years ago because I wanted to learn the details, but in all honesty I still feel like I barely understand anything. Not sure how normal this is, maybe I’m unusually dumb, but I feel like what I’ve really learned is how to troubleshoot and solve issues by reading documentation and tinkering, rather than understanding what I’m actually doing. I’ve had a stable system for years but I kind of feel like if a typical arch forum poster looked my system configuration for five minutes they’d be like wtf are you doing.

Idiot here. When I use the command pacman -Syu jdk-openjdk, I still get the error:

error: unresolvable package conflicts detected
error: failed to prepare transaction (conflicting dependencies)
:: jdk-openjdk and jre-openjdk are in conflict

It’s identical to the error when I just do pacman -Syu normally. What am I doing wrong?

Edit: I just removed the jre-openjdk package then updated normally and everything seems fine.