Jesus, technical people are some of the worst communicators I’ve ever worked with.

It’s not necessarily their fault though. Y’know who goes into technical jobs? People who often prefer to work with machines, physical stuff, laws of nature, that’s who. And often because it’s MUCH easier than working with people, at least for them.

On top of that, soft skills are HARD. Communication is HARD. It comes easier for some, but it’s a skill like any other. It’s the technical socialites, the diplomatic devs who become the best managers and leaders, due to the rarity of their hybrid skillsets.

I’m in the middle. Just technical enough to mostly understand the devs and understand the implications of plans, and just enough soft skills to turn that into decent documentation, emails, and working with clients.

SUCKS that I’ve gotten a taste of project management and hated the absolute fuck out of it. I probably would’ve been decent at it otherwise.

If I had to guess, he’d try to find a business selling enterprise supported distributions of Linux, buy them, then try to expand/convert them to develop “consumer Linux”. He’d advertise it as getting out from under the thumb of evil corps (ie his competitors), then as soon as it gains even a modicum of traction start implementing privacy violating shit, ads, whatever, to enshittify it as quickly as possible for a quick buck.

Inkscape is for vector art, yeah. Great for design, not for like, painting.

Krita is pretty great for a free digital art app. But I used it for about a year and could never quite get used to it. I recently went back to Clip Studio Paint (with my perpetual license they do still honor), and my experience just improved so much. It was like… ah, yes, an art program that clearly paid people to specifically make the UI easier to use for non-programmers, what an underrated feature.

Because honestly, Office is pretty great for what it does.

I know a lot of folks here can’t get over it being proprietary or all the other anticompetitive stuff Microsoft has done with Office, but once we got M365 at work, a lot of my work life got a lot easier.

Any time I have tried to use LibreOffice or other alternatives, I feel like I’m giving up ten years’ worth of quality of life improvements. That’s generally my experience with 99% of FOSS stuff - fully functional but dogshit to navigate and use.

“what’s the Judge Rotenburg Center?” looks it up “Jesus”

So like… “Forums are a good communication technology for modern use” and “have you ever found a solution in a forum” are different things.

As a counterexample, I’ve had more luck finding weird ass computer hardware issue solutions by appending ‘reddit’ to a search string than just about anything else. On the other hand I’ve wasted hours and hours on forum threads that go nowhere, with a million dead ends, and terminates in “see this other thread for the actual answer” and then that thread is archived or otherwise inaccessible.

I have definitely solved the odd issue from forums… but only because forums were the only thing available. Reading through them is still a chore and a half. Especially when 90% of the posts are “has anyone found a solution for this yet” ad nauseum that you still have to scroll through to eventually (maybe) find the page with the post you actually need.

I may just be bad at forums, but that’s been my experience with them for the last 20+ years.

Well if that’s your only exposure to it, then yeah I could see why you think it’s not good.

But if you just want to hang out with a regular group of friends async and in voice chat, it’s pretty damn good.

I left mumble, teamspeak, and Skype for Discord.

Discord is easily the better options among those choices.

I also can’t think of much use for being in more than one call at once. I dunno seems like you’re just looking for a different thing. And that’s okay.

I will never understand “forums are best”. I’ve tried, but they are worse in just about every aspect compared to any other communication system I’ve seen.

People just like what they like, I guess.

I’ve used pixel phones for a long time, but I’ll eat my hat if Google actually honors more than 5 years of updates for the pixel 8.

Yeah, I’ve never had an ad like that on a work laptop, ever. A good IT dept will lock down the experience to minimize distractions for business purposes, and lock down features that aren’t appropriate for work.