shikitohno

You’re probably selling yourself short on the tech front and over-estimating the difficulty of installing something new. If you wanted to install something like Linux Mint or Fedora, the most complicated step would likely involve making a bootable thumbdrive to load it from. You could check that all your hardware works as intended (ie, can you connect to wifi, does sound play properly, can you watch a video on youtube, etc) without actually modifying your base OS, and if it does, the installations mostly hold your hand and you can get a perfectly sane setup just sticking to the defaults for most things and clicking next. There are plenty of options out there where you don’t need to be a command-line wizard to have a perfectly usable system.

I would just say that not everything needs to be a BIFL product, but there can be a tendency to push towards recommending only buying the best of everything. Like, I cook a lot at home, so it made sense to buy a $200 chef’s knife that I’ll get tons of use from and decent sharpening stones to maintain the edge. I listen to a ton of music, so I’ve dropped probably around $1500 into a pretty good pair of headphones, a DAC and an amp. On the other hand, I solder like once every couple of years, so getting my cheapo $40 Amazon special made more sense than dropping $500 on a much better soldering iron that offers features I simply don’t need and won’t benefit from. Sometimes good enough is exactly that, but it can be a nuance lost in these discussions.

Heck, even though I use them several hours a day, my hearing just isn’t that good for me to justify spending a substantial amount upgrading my current audio gear. Even if there is an improvement to be had, I’m not sure it would be something I could even notice, so I’m not tempted to go down the rabbit-hole of upgrading my DAC, amp or headphones, as it would be chasing diminishing returns that I’m not even sure would be perceptible for me at a simple biological level.

I wouldn’t jump to compare Reddit to Amazon. Amazon may have operated at a loss for a few years, but it seems pretty clear that Bezos did have a roadmap to make it a profitable business and made decisions to make progress towards that relatively early. Reddit has never been a profitable business and has no real way to get there that doesn’t alienate increasing numbers of their users. It’s basically in a race to cut a deal that makes spez some money off the whole thing before the bottom falls out from under it and someone else is left holding the bag.

Even when Amazon expanded into categories and took losses on them, Bezos was able to do so knowing that it would damage other businesses that didn’t have the deep backing needed to outlast him, eventually leading to many competing retailers in that sector shuttering and Amazon being able to raise prices and rake in money once there wasn’t really another competitor in a given field. He might be a massive scumbag, but spez is a massive scumbag and an absolutely inept businessman. For all his assholery, the best case scenario for his legacy is driving reddit into the ground and managing to foist it off on someone else before they realize it’s no longer worth anything.

This is still predicated on the idea that the boomers and elites aren’t happy to burn the US to the ground in order to sustain their death grip on the political status quo. They and the Israeli lobbyists are already attempting to implement some pretty wild stuff that shows they have no regard for anything but advancing their plans, come what may. Just recently, some conservative Democrat Assembly Members in New York advanced a proposed law targeting recent pro-Palestinian protests that would make blocking a road, bridge, tunnel or transportation facility as part of a protest an act that would get you hit with domestic terrorism charges, a class D felony and up to a 7 year prison sentence.

Unfortunately, the boomers and elites who still think fondly of Israel and have a knee-jerk rejection of any criticism of it have an entirely disproportionate influence on our politics, and are not averse to doing untold damage to our current freedoms, institutions and fellow citizens to advance their rabidly Zionist agenda full throttle.

That avoiding systemd is even a choise is nuts

I really want to know what the crossover is on people who know what systemd is, much less have any actual reason to decide they wish to actively avoid it, and those who would find this the best way of determining their next distro. That has to be a vanishingly small group of people.

My hard drive on my laptop died in college and I needed to get a paper written in a few days. I didn’t money to get a new Windows license and Fedora was free and had a live disc I could burn to install off of in the school’s computer lab without getting in trouble. I distro hopped a bit since then, but never went back to Windows. Things worked and it wasn’t as hard as people made it sound.

No evangelizing, I just use my computer.

Could be for the sort of awful filters so frequently employed by schools that just block content based on matching a list of banned words exactly, like I used to have in high school years ago. We couldn’t visit a page on breast cancer without an admin override while learning about cancer in the school library as part of an assignment, all because their awful content filter flagged the page as porn for having the word breast in the page.

Screw that, I’m just taking a later lunch then. If they don’t like it, they can take it up with the Department of Labor to see what they think of making employees attend a meeting during their breaks.

I don’t want to go back to a world without the internet or cell phones, but I would like expectations to change. Just because you can theoretically reach me at any time doesn’t mean I’m obligated to respond to you or acknowledge you at any time. Whether it’s work or personal acquaintances, I can’t stand it when it’s treated like a horribly rude thing to not immediately acknowledge and respond to any communication, no matter how trivial. A lot of times, I’m busy working on my own thing and don’t want to kick off twenty minutes of back and forth texting over some trivial thing that’s going to distract me from what I’m doing.