I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

Enlightenment: calling meetings yourself because nothing you do matters and getting paid to listen to assholes talk isn’t the worst way to pay rent.

“Nuh uh, it was the illegal immigrants we didn’t kill with the razor wire”, Ken Paxton after Harris wins Texas, probably.

Might as well start from scratch at that point.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

About 23% of Americans and 33% of Republicans believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” – a 5% increase among Republicans and 8% among the general public since 2021.

Meanwhile, 75% of Americans believe that American democracy is at risk in the 2024 election. That, too, may be something worth fighting for – especially when 39% of Trump supporters and 42% of Biden supporters report having no friends who support the opposing candidate. When people do not trust or socialize with people unlike them, violence between groups is more likely.

I fear little can be done to prevent such violence.

It is really hard not to look at Trump as a cynical, malignant narcissist. Like how do you stop the unstoppable will to power at any cost? The real truth is there is very little anyone can do to avoid Mr. Dictator-On-Day-One. Why are such awful people drawn to power?

I don’t get it. How can anyone listen to what Trump’s fans say about him and want that? It’s like some kind of lazy, selfish, sadism. The way the people that love him talk about him and their beliefs makes it seem like they would rather see their enemies suffer than their loved ones thrive. But it’s not just Trump Cultists and Americana Fetishists. It’s not just the American Oligarchs or the ghouls in suits that work for them. Like a lot of the chronically online leftists are seeming kinda Wrath of Khan-y lately.

There are only so many fucks to give, why waste them on violent ends? Like you can have either revenge on the people who you believe are hurting you or you can try to stop hurting and live your life in spite of the malignant assholes of the world. You can’t have both.

I am flabbergasted. Who would have thought that a man with decades long ties to Russia, who’s met with and spoke highly of Putin, who had russian spies crawling all over his first presidential campaign, who’s backed by russian oligarch money, would say such a silly thing about Ukraine.

They’re planning an offensive that has moscow scared enough they are rattling their nuclear sabers. Seems like a poorly thought out move for a “destroyed” country and that their hegemonic buddies would advise them against rather than helping them tool up for the fight.

There aren’t many ways to organize raising the money required to build a better youtube or reddit. You could kickstart it, but you’d better hope whoever does the dev doesn’t sell. Another option would be a large open source ngo funding the development, but you’re still talking long timelines to completion.

There definitely is room for a more pro-social social media platform that isn’t a clone of something else. Paying for it is another matter.

Isn’t espionage generally a violation of international law? Like extra-judicial killing violates the sovereignty of the host nation? I guess I have been thinking this whole time that sort of stuff was 1,000% illegal, but everyone operated on a “don’t get caught” understanding.

I sincerely hope his plea goes unanswered. I might be mixing up a few empty suits, but wasn’t mitch the guy that played chicken with shutting down the government during the Obama administration and was yhe leading voice in the “the scary brown man can’t disrupt our plans for the court” bullshit that happened during Obama’s time in office.

Shame we don’t live in a just world.

Everywhere Maga has power they are trying to destroy the public education system. School shootings are useful to that end.

I sincerely doubt I would ever be within scent range of him.

Or she wants something from him enough to ignore it. The leaders of maga are almost entirely cynical. Men like Trump, powerful and vain, attract predators that sometimes look like sycophants. “Oh sweetie you banged me like a man half your age, and they say you’re not virile.” “They probably think that because you are letting the libs walk all over everyone.” “Of course you are if they’re doing it and you’re God’s messenger on earth they succeed because you let them” “Oh silly, I don’t know anything about that, but steve was talking about something interesting the other day”

This feels like an onion story

Software, 1,000%. I love linux and daily drive it. But when I have videos to edit, photos to rework, or collateral to design I have a windows laptop with professional grade tools to do the job.

I’m sorry, gimp is hot garbage. There isn’t a pro-grade, open source video editing tool or anything close. Inkscape is useable in a pinch. Scribus is useless.

Not everyone is a multimedia creative professional, but most software on linux never quite have the features you need, are no longer maintained, or will be useful in ten years.

That said, I’d still rather break out the laptop when doing client work than daily drive MacOS or Windows 11. Either way the barrier for most users is that linux almost works.

The theoretical benefits of Gentoo or Arch are completely negated by the fussy nature of those systems. You have more control, but to get it you have to do a lot more work. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just that’s the main difference between arch, gentoo, and a more streamlined distro.

Really it depends on what you want out of your distro. If total control is what you’re after, then gentoo is only the beginning of a deep k hole that ends in LFS and a ricing habit. Personally I like using my computer as a tool to do other stuff so anything more hands on than debian stable just gets on my nerves or turns me into a ricing addict. But I had to install gentoo to figure that out.

Gentoo is a filter. You either love it and continue diving or learn you want something else from your OS.

I love this guy, he is such a moron. Like maybe in some americana fetishist fever dream that might work. But I bet half his base doesn’t have family with enough free time to provide free childcare. At least not enough to justify not spending on daycare subsidies and other childcare assistance.

“Let them eat cake,” said man who hopes to be one cheeseburger-induced heart attack away from the presidency.

Oh no, the guy who will say anything to get elected is saying something different than he used to. How dare he, the scoundrel.

I guess I’m more interested in who the target demo for this piece is. Like everyone who’s going to care already has an opinion about him (for good or ill) is this a last straw effort to wear down his base? They live in an entirely different reality, if felony indictments, sex scandals, and the rest haven’t been enough him suddenly supporting a popular and controversial app actually might help him with the base.

Is it red meat for the outrage masochists among Trump’s opposition? If so, why not go for the juicer Russian psyop story that broke a few days ago about former trump staffers and alt right podcasters being paid by the kremlin to sow misinformation? That’s much more outrageous if you’re looking to get your rocks off about what Trump has done this time.

I am looking forward to the day the only thing people write about Trump is that he’s still alive in Argentina or a look at how the Trump era changed us all.

That’s actually the point drunk me was trying to make last night. The only thing being talked about in the media is the presidency but we are so truly screwed because the president can’t do anything about it, really. They can issue some executive orders and set policy. Even if Kamala gave a speech on just trans rights, there is nothing she can actually do unless the other two branches have been also claimed by the dems and even then good luck when texas passes a law that gets sued to the supreme court and overturns gay marriage.

The problem is so much bigger than who said what at what convention. The Democratic party needs to actually do something other than pay lip service to the trans population. Unfortunately trans people are less than 1% of voters. Even if all of their friends and family were allies, that’s still not enough votes to matter.

The average cis democrat would be perfectly happy with Not-Trump. No one wants trans people to die (at least hopefully), but if it was supporting trans rights or beating Trump? His evangelical base is getting tired of his shit. But if the scary brown lady started talking about transgenders that might be enough to bring them back into the fold.

Meanwhile in most red states the trans population will be ground into a fine paste regardless of who lives in the white house. Unless dems and pull a hat trick and take the presidency, house, and senate (next to impossible this year) that won’t change.

It kills me to write, but not talking about trans rights makes sense. That is not a problem within the power of POTUS to solve. A federal law or constitutional amendment is going to be the only way to protect trans rights, abortion access, and gay or interracial marriage. Plus, more cynically, she’s got the trans vote regardless, so best case she just says some words. Worst case she loses the paper thin margin because the jesus freaks who were going to stay home have a reason to vote.