http://www.styluslabs.com/

Maybe try Write?

My vote is for mint. If you’ve been a long time windows user it should be the easiest one to get used to. PopOS is also newbie friendly if you’re not into the feel of Mint for whatever reason.

My biggest recommendation though is to spend some time with a few different OS’s and try setting things up different ways. Like if you start with Mint, try something new a month or two later. It’s a good way to get used to the way linux OS’s work under the hood.

I’m not a programmer at all, but if you have some background with computers and are willing to sink some time into learning and setting up a new system you’ll be fine.

I tested it out bc I thought I’d need it to get teams running for school, but it turns out we’re only using teams’ video calls so Vivaldi works too. Edge is fine I guess? I dislike that it’s chromium and I dislike microsoft but it’s good to know edge works fine, in case I need it for some reason at some point. I still uninstalled it when I realized I didn’t need it.

Normally, I use firefox for normal personal browsing and vivaldi for school (since some sites we use work much better on chromum, and it’s nice to have that separation anyways).

Not technically the first, but what got me into it was libre office. I was too broke too afford word so I was looking into alternatives.

Same story here. I dream journaled religiously for a couple months, it happened once during that time, and then I gave up, lol.

My partner and my mom both use swipe, I guess I thought it was more common. Meanwhile I would rather walk over to my computer and use a desktop version if possible if it’s anything more than a sentence here and there.

I saw UFO’s. I don’t want to believe in aliens, but I witnessed it when I was with a pretty big group of friends and we all remember it and none of us have a better explanation. The people who saw it first were outside smoking pot, the rest of us didn’t believe them until we went outside and saw it ourselves. I was sober that night fwiw. We tried recording it but no one’s phone had good enough dark recording to pick up anything, and no one had a real camera on hand. The flight style didn’t match any craft any of us knew of - it was an array of lights that moved together, and then separated into smaller groups, and eventually individually. They moved unnaturally, with near-instant acceleration, deceleration, and extreme direction changes. It was too high up to be likely to be drones or helicopters, and right above a major Canadian city, not near any military base. If this was, like, Nevada or something, I would assume it was a government test craft. The closest match I’ve ever heard was in an interview with a pilot who saw UFO’s, and that scared the shit out of me. I’d love to find a non alien explanation, because I don’t want to believe and also I know it sounds crazy. Like, I myself probably wouldn’t believe someone else telling me this story.

I like kids, and want to become a parent. Not because kids are cute - they often aren’t - but to have a family and get to nurture a young person and see them grow up. However, I hate the societal pressure to have kids and the way it pushes people who don’t genuinely want to have kids into parenthood because it’s the default. And it’s often justified with ‘kids are cute’ as if finding kids cute is all it takes to be a parent. So you run into shitty to mediocre parents running around with kids they didn’t want because they were told kids are the fucking meaning of life, but gave up early on because, what do you know, parenting is actually hard. And for a lot of us, those are our parents, grandparents, bosses, friends, or community members, and it’s so frustrating to see that everywhere. It’s really disturbing to be told by shitty parents (like my own mom) that parenthood is the best thing in the world.

As long as it’s not in front of actual kids, I don’t see a problem with jokes like this, and I sometimes find them pretty funny tbh. I’m not interested in giving shitty parents a free pass because kids are cute. It’s not cute when someone doesn’t support their kids or think about their needs, or sees them as a cute accessory instead of a person. I’m with the childfree people on this - usually their hate is not towards the children, but towards shitty parents and towards having kids being seen as the default.

I disagree. I never fully stopped using reddit, aside from the protests. There are just too many small unique communities there that I can’t leave atm, because there is no equivalent Lemmy community. I use it less and less over time but I can see how many people in my shoes would have just returned to reddit 100% instead of using both.

Try a few distros before settling down - setting things up a few times is a good way to get to know the ins and outs better. Try something other than plain Ubuntu - I really enjoyed Mint and PopOS personally, both of which are forks of Ubuntu. In my first 6 months I tried around 4-5 different Ubuntu family distros, and that was such an important learning experience for me.

If you want to use wine, get bottles instead of running plain wine. The dependencies are much easier to manage, and you can run separate configurations of wine. As I know from personal experience, the sandboxing also helps prevent you fucking your computer up.

On that note, backup your stuff - set it to do it automatically daily.

Look up some terminal games - there are a few that are designed to help you learn. I don’t remember the names (I’m down to track them down later if that would help), but in particular I remember an SSH-based file searching game and a folder exploration dungeon crawler themed game.

Learning commands is less useful than understanding how Linux is setup, but it’ll all come together with time - just keep playing around with it and learning new things.

I’m in kind of the same boat as you op, I’ve been using Swiftkey for 5+ years but have been wanting an altnernative that isn’t associated with the big tech companies for a while. After seeing this post earlier today I decided to give AnySoftKeyboard a shot.

I got it all configured the way I wanted but now I’m actually using it I don’t think it’s gonna work for me tbh. I’ll give it a few days before making a decision though. I wish there more options out there.

On the plus side, I came across this and it made my day:

I switched to linux before the steam deck came out, and things were already pretty good then, but it’s even better now that more folks are invested in it. Since then, I haven’t come across any steam games I have major issues with - however, I still have issues getting my controller running (I don’t use it often though, so I haven’t really looked into that much) and on certain games I have issues if I switch windows while it’s running. Generally for me, if it runs, it runs well, aside from occasional issues from needing more ram. It looks like we have similar cpu’s, and you have a better graphics card and more ram than me. I can’t speak for everything on your list, but I did play some civ fairly recently without any problems. Check protondb for the games you play most before making the switch - and if you’re worried, check lower rated games on there for examples of issues and fixes. I suspect it would be fine for you to switch.

That’s true, but hiring more workers and providing better pay and benefits to prevent turnover would have solved the situation as well.

Just trying on mobile first, 57% in the in-app browser and 55% in Vivaldi vs 87% in Firefox. Even if the percentage is wrong it’s interesting for comparing between browsers. Looking forward to trying on desktop (I haven’t seen an ad on desktop in years) and seeing if I can improve adblocking on my phone later today

As an autistic person with a severe gut disorder (ulcerative colitis - one of the risk factors is a diet high in processed foods) I think it’s very likely that autism causes gut issues, including microbiome issues. If you eat mostly the same foods, the bacteria that don’t feed off them will die off, and you get a less diverse, weaker microbiome. I’m not a microbiologist but I have personal experience here because my UC forces me to restrict my diet in strange ways when I have active inflammation (like for months or years), but I can later reintroduce foods, but then they’re harder to digest for a while because my microbiome has changed. So it makes sense that since most autistic people have more limited diets due to routine, obsession, or sensory issues, we would tend to have worse gut microbiomes.

People who view autism as a disease that might be curable will see any connection as a potential cause, even though in most cases the causal relationship is more likely to be in the other direction. It’s so frustrating.

Something I liked about the official app, that no other seemed to have, was the ability to flip through posts, one to the next, without having to return to your feed. If anyone knows of a Lemmy app that can do this, let me know please!

The official reddit app would frequently not load images/posts/comments etc or even sometimes fully stop loading anything at all. I have never had these kind of issues with the third party apps, or much of any other apps of any type for that matter.

Maybe. Pre-centralization, it was very similar - forum boards run by different people on different servers. A system like Lemmy is basically the same but without the inconvenience of having to make a new account every time, which should make it more accessible in the long run.

What it would need in addition to that is discoverability - if just a few major instances show up high enough in major search engines results it’ll be a huge draw. Right now discoverability is kind of abysmal, which worries me a little, but I know people are working on solutions.

Imo what we regular users can do right now that will have an impact is contribute to communities and keep them active, and encourage reddit-based communities to switch over. If we all can prove that this is an effective way to run communities, the people will come.

It’s not about what company has the best system and most control, it’s about what we as groups of people with shared interests gravitate towards. Lemmy fixes some barriers to running forums and might enable more individuals and small groups to start running their own servers again.

One small part of the problem I only learned about recently is the Whole Language approach to teaching reading. Basically teaching kids to guess what words make sense instead of actually teaching them how to read. It was popularized in the 80s and 90s but continued to be used in some parts of the US into the 2010s. An entire chunk of the US population (and a few other countries as well) was literally not taught phonics/sounding it out because their teachers or schools followed this ineffective alternative method.

Of course that’s far from the only factor, but it’s one many aren’t aware of.