I don’t stand behind any of it. We shouldn’t even give them an inch IMO.

It’s like magic too, because any new weird kind of package manager I add, it’s just picks it up and starts updating it. It can even update Windows apparently.

I use an unholy blend of paru, Flatpak, Docker and AppImage apps (no Snap!) with Topgrade to update it all.

I hate that we live in a world where a selfie is now an official form of ID. My bank wanted one the other day to use their app so I just deleted it lol, get fucked

I have a .scripts folder in home with a bunch of things. Most of them are for backups, aka they just rsync a bunch of things from different places into one place on my backup drive. I also have one called get_trailers that I can run in my Radarr folder which takes the names of any movie folders in there and uses yt-dlp to search and grab the trailers from Youtube and puts them in the correct folders alongside the movie.

I actually find it pretty helpful for tech support stuff. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s usually at least in the right general area and TBH it beats going through endless forums where the answer is buried among 8 pages of people bickering about nothing, or those ones where someone has your exact problem and then replies “nm I fixed it” and doesn’t say what they did.

I tried out a game/demo thing that was a tester for AI NPC dialogue. I asked an NPC to tell me about himself and he replied that he could not connect to server lol

They’d also probably make it so that debt carries over into your next life.

I got banned from one of the UK subreddits when someone posted a lengthy comment about why Brexit was amazing, and I responded that Brexit was idiotic. I got banned for “being political” and the person I was responding to didn’t lol.

As a side note to the general “try a bunch and see what you like” recommendations: you could also try using a virtual machine (something like Virtualbox) that lets you run a PC inside your existing PC first. That way you can try a bunch of distros without worrying about wiping your existing setup, and it’ll get you used to the install process. If you mess it up, just delete the VM and start a new one, no harm done. Then when you find one you like and feel comfortable with the install process, you can back all your stuff up and do it for real, knowing pretty much what to expect.

The Magnificent 7 and A Fistful of Dollars are just Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but westerns.

Yeah same here, I’ve been procrastinating while I gradually build my collection of mp3s/flacs, but the second I hear an ad on Spotify I’m done.

There’s also the opposite to this, when someone else reads your stuff and says they really like a certain part, and you look to see what it was and it’s something you wrote 'cause you just needed a transition from point A to point B and you put zero thought into it/don’t even remember writing it.

Nobody ever likes the bits you agonized over for ages and thought were really good lol.

Architecture is the other one that worries me. I don’t like the idea of unknowingly walking around in a building that was designed by AI. I work with AI and it can’t even be trusted to write a blog post correctly, let alone design a building that’s safe. And I know if I’m thinking of that now, it means someone else has already thought of and attempted it at least 6 months ago.

As someone with a degree in the arts, I’m pretty sure that almost all art as a career is under threat from AI. Sure, AI can’t match the human experience and expressiveness needed for really great art, but that’s not what most artists do to earn a living. And the vast majority of the people who traditionally pay for artists to make stuff for them really don’t care at all. Now they can get Grok to fart out a logo or a poster in 15 seconds and not have to talk to an artist, they’re all set.

I know someone whose dad used to work as an international courier, and at some point (I think in the late 70s/early 80s IIRC) he ended up in the situation where he was in Japan for a week, with nothing to do, and his hotel room paid for by his employers. He didn’t leave the hotel the entire week, just stayed inside the entire time ordering room service and… making a point of not seeing Japan, I guess.

I know it’s probably bad form to link to reddit posts here (but I’ll use redlib to it’s slightly less shitty lol) but there was actually a pretty interesting thread on r/Linux about this the other day. tl;dr: It looks like a lot of this is due to lobbying from Meta so they can shunt responsibility for age verification onto the OS and dodge fines for not regulating their sites properly.

I just did this too, except I bought a refurbished Pixel, so I paid someone else $100 for Google to fuck off lol.

I feel like Ubuntu used to be the sort of default “new user” distro, but they keep going off on these weird tangents so that doesn’t really work anymore. Then it felt like PopOS might have been the new one, but now they’re mid-way between transitioning to COSMIC so that’s not really a good fit either. I think maybe Mint is the default one now, but also Cinnamon is kind of it’s own thing so it doesn’t set a new user up well for becoming familiar with the more universally used DE’s like Gnome or Plasma.

I think Fedora and Debian are also a decent fit for new users, but that’s also not a very exciting answer so that’s probably why it doesn’t come up as much lol.

I’m not sure if CachyOS counts as a “gaming” distro or not, but I use that on my desktop/work machine. I’m pretty familiar with Arch (BTW) and I can do a manual setup from scratch if I need to (that’s what my laptop runs) but Cachy just seemed like a way to use Arch with a simple setup and a bunch of default optimizations. So tl;dr laziness I guess lol.