I’ve said this about Musk before, and I wonder if Trump is going there too.

Essentially, you are an egomaniacal psychopath with unlimited resources, yet you have come to accept that you cannot have everything your little heart desires. Especially being immortal.

So since you are already one of the most important and noteworthy people on earth, history needs to accurately document the magnitude of your presence. Obviously!

But now is not the time to get all touchy-feely. You know damn well that destruction and chaos are quicker and more efficient ways to make your mark than creation and harmony. It is difficult to make history for curing cancer, and it is way easier to do it by telling somebody else to tell their people to go do some war crimes.

My fellow americans and I look at this concept and tilt our heads to the side like confused puppies.

Fuckin’ hell, I feel like a kid in 2226 reading this on some kind of wall plaque after it was discovered in the cautionary history archives that survived the great fires. I think it struck me when I read this line:

the rot is far too deep, and the purification of chaos is, unfortunately, the only remedy

It’s just a very elegant way to describe the btshit craziness of living in “interesting times.”

Oh and hey future people who have presumably learned to be excellent to one another: put me in the plaque! It’s a thing we used to do on this old internet here with screenshots, you see.

Your use case sounds perfect for using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement. Opening a Word doc or an old Excel spreadsheet is effortless. You don’t sound like the “I use Excel every day for my job and there is no replacement” folks with very specific needs.

And I will echo what the other reply said: try Linux on your laptop! Not only will it probably work fine, it will probably also feel much faster and more responsive.

Trying most of the big Linux distros is super easy and zero commtment, too. When you boot from the install media, it loads directly into the OS desktop running natively on your hardware! Then once you’re ready to install it, there’s usually a shortcut on the desktop or something.

I recommend trying Linux Mint. It is so simple to install and full featured out of the box, plus being based on ubuntu and being very popular itself, information and help is everywhere.

I don’t have any issues with KDE, and I admire their work beyond the DE/UI. Kdenlive is my chosen video editor, for instance. I believe it’s the flatpak version too, so it no doubt loads a bunch of stuff into ram.

I’m not sure what you mean by “restricting” with the DE since I have a terminal at my fingertips at all times. I assume you mean some design decisions or lack of some customization options that KDE has?

But the weird selection of apps has me lost. It comes with stuff installed that you might expect, like firefox and libre office. It uses mostly the Ubuntu repositories so you can apt or apt-get install most things you’re looking for. And since it’s linux you can add repositories and all that fun stuff.

I also don’t know what you mean by filtering flathub.

I’d expect that most brand new users install Ubuntu or Linux Mint because of how often they are recommended.

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with Canonical/Snaps removed and some added polish. The default DE is laid out like windows before 11 (“start” button in lower left) which seems to make sense for new users.

I’m a knowledgable enough user, being a developer on embedded linux products, and I also stuck with Mint long term. It’s still a Linux system that I actually control. The fact that it was very user friendly and full featured it off the box doesn’t take away from that. It just meant that it wasn’t the learning experience you’d get with something like Arch.

I appreciate the juxtaposition between your username and this comment wanting to beat one of the universe’s most useless life forms.

I completely understand the sentiment!

I am still into some tech and “new computer” type stuff. I am about to install a bigger/faster drive in my PC and set up my Home Assistant server. That PC is already my Jellyfin server. I am also in the middle of building a brand new PC for my kid, which will also run Mint, lol.

But I spend time only on the things that I’ve learned really matter to me, and not on all the things you’re “supposed to” mess with in your home lab that you obviously have.

You know the meme (or meme category) where it’s a resume or linkedin profile where the recent work history goes something like Senior Network Architect, then Goose Farmer?

I may literally have a 3D printer still in the box, and PC & networking parts all over the house, but my daily routine is embedded linux C/C++ sr developer by day and animal tender on the evenings and weekends, lol.

Wilhoit’s law:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

In looking up the exact text, apparently it is often attributed to the wrong Wilhoit, lol.

I never left!

I think I’m just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think “that’s a youngster’s game.”

Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn’t broken!

Ouch, that line sure as hell would work on me!

But I’m not just an American who watched his show. I’m local to his area and I’ve been to the actual studios at WQED multiple times, on top of all the show artifacts I just saw the other day.

I found myself among some Mister Rogers quotes and artifacts yesterday, of all possible things.

So just for today I’m gonna push back on this one a little bit. I think the goodness is out there, but unfortunately much of our society is kinda designed to separate us from our humanity and mental peace.

I agree with the others’ sentiment that you need to be your own advocate (or be fortunate to have a loved one ego can do it) in order to get the best healthcare results.

That goes for all healthcare systems, and our horrid system in the US makes it even more necessary, not less.

Yep! The most expensive equipment they might need is a magic smoke compressor, if that.

The Democrats really suck. Our FPTP 2-party system is really some bullshit. However, it is really difficult for me to buy into the validity of the slippery slope you are describing when the people around me keep voting for the option that is #1 worst by a whole fucking lot.

And the further that #1 worst keeps surging and lapping #2 on the evil-dex, the further their psycho supporters seem to like it! We’ll see if the pedo shit can finally reverse that.

This would be a different conversation if we’d elected democrats over and over to avoid republicans and somehow still got dragged to the right. At the end of the Obama administration, for instance, there was the concern of the bait and switch.

But no. He gets impeached a couple times for betraying the US in different ways after being openly terrible for years, and dozens of millions of people still turn out to vote for him. He tries some light coup and all the daily otherwise career ending craziness, and they turn out to vote for him AGAIN in HIGHER numbers.

The fact that the democrats are the good cop capitalists to the republicans’ bad cop capitalists is definitely a problem, yes. Any of us who get to vote in the US should be keenly aware of that. And there are multiple things we can try to fix in parallel. But sometimes you have to fix things sequentially too.

I can imagine a future device with an e-ink page that’s so thin and flexible that it looks and feels like a paper book with magic changing text. I don’t know how many consumers would pay a premium for that, but I would definitely buy my wife one.

I’m just here to point out that the fact you genuinely care about your carbon footprint probably puts you ahead of 80% of the population, and the fact that it has materially affected your device choices probably puts you ahead of 80% of the remainder.

There’s definitely a unique satisfaction that comes from filling tech needs with hardware that already exists, and which does a great job at it too.

That goes across hobbies and mediums too. I just finished a big outdoor carpentry project where I was able to find perfect long-term uses for pieces of wood from The Initial Build in the construction of The New Hotness.

I think it’s pretty heavily implied that people are talking about a given tech giant’s entire ecosystem when they say de-google, delete Facebook, Fuck Nestle- I mean, fuck Apple, etc. lol

I was an outdoorsy kid in the 80s and 90s so pocket knives were common, but of course had rules. I hadn’t carried one for decades, but started again this year because of hobbies that have me working outside and it’s become super handy. I’ll even clip it in the pocket of whatever shorts or PJ pants I’m wearing in the house while just chilling with the family. 100% for utilitarian uses, and literally every day.

One thing I have to thank the EDC, tactiool, and/or Mall Ninja Shit communities for though is the amazing variety of high quality pocket knives that use replaceable utility knife blades! Light and slim ones, not rattling box cutters.

Mine is one of these. Plain titanium color, and after an embarrassing amount of screwing around I settled on Tajima V-Rex II blades. I don’t have a collection of knives or anything like that, but it is so satisfying to have the one tool that is exactly what I wanted for the job, and have need to use it constantly.

Ah, my mistake. Thanks!