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.

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.

See, this

I care within some limits. Using a phone I don’t like aesthetically is not in that limits.

and this

No no, I would prefer privacy.

are in direct opposition. They are irreconcilable positions. It’s your phone, it’s okay for you to decide you won’t compromise on aesthetics on your own devices, if that’s what’s important to you. Just own it and be prepared for pushback when you’re commenting on an article about a privacy-focused OS and using this as the basis of your criticism.

This is still kind of reading like “Look, I know ‘pretty phones over privacy’ is a bad take, so no, but really, yeah.”

Basically all the positives you’ve mentioned have been aesthetic, with one you even admit is worse to actually use, but which you prefer the look of.

So does Qbittorrent, if you’re unaware.

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.

If you assume they’re all 13" wide laptops and stacked them on their side to get maximum height per unit, you’d still fall 305,752 km short of the average lunar distance. You normally only see this level of hyperbole in the estimated street value cops give for drugs they seize, pretty impressive.

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.

Yeah, there are a lot of people in groups that one might think “Hey, you know the Republicans don’t like you and want to make your life miserable, right?” but are socially conservative and are not willing to let that stuff go. There are lots of predominantly Black or Hispanic churches from the “Fun is a sin,” denominations like the evangelicals, Pentecostals and Jehovah Witnesses whose members will not make any compromise on issues like abortion or gay rights. Even amongst the more secular people living in these communities can still be influenced by the folks that live around them. You also get a lot of people, especially older people, who are still on board with the law and order, tough on crime shtick, believing this is the sure way to get nice, safe communities to live in.

Religious, older and concerned with security doesn’t sound all that different to the stereotypical white conservatives that serve as the base for the Republicans in rural areas. They just need a bit more of a nudge to get there because they have to overcome some resistance to voting for a party that explicitly targets things that are important to them in other areas.

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.