Awesome to hear!

+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.

It’s my #1 “just works” distro

Why not both? 🤓

I am constantly impressed with the level of general idiocy of end users when it comes to stuff like this…

No web ui, just the direct CLI interface.

For my team, I have set up lab accounts on the host machine and configured the SSHD daemon to drop them directly into their designated lab container when they use that account and key combo.

Nothing fancy.

Apparently, you can use Curve Pay, which is a UK-based virtual card manager and wallet which works with NFC tap to pay.

There’s a blog post by a guy last year who posted about it. Idk anything about tap to pay third parties, so look into that at your own risk.

I’m currently in the process of deploying a Linux lab environment at my current workplace actually.

Check out Incus if you haven’t already. Incus Containers

It’s a community supported fully open source fork of LXC. It supports full system Linux containers as opposed to Docker-style single application containers. It also supports full QEMU virtual machines of you need them.

It’s likely going to replace my entire traditional type-1 hypervisor setup in my home lab because of how much lighter weight it is. My most lightweight VMs are typically still 2GB of RAM, things tend to get funky when I go below that. Whereas my clean install of a Debian 13 container on Incus was using around 90MB. In these crazy times, anything that uses RAM 10x-20x more efficiently has my attention.

It can also do all the typical hypervisor back end stuff, HA clustering, automatic container snapshots, userspace isolation, virtual networking, static and dynamic resource limitations, etc.

The daemon runs on all major distros, but you can also build and use their IncusOS, which is an immutable distro-fied Incus deployment that is optimized out of the box. (Although I’ve had great results just running it as a daemon on a basic Debian installation.)

It’s super easy to learn and get going, and it’s working perfectly in the early tests for my team as a Lab environment platform.

What issues are you having with GrapheneOS? I’ve installed it on several different devices and it’s been super easy.

I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.

My current job has expensive enterprise class HP laptops, brand new, Nvme drives, the newest CPUs, 32GB RAM, blah blah.

Nearly every day, my corporate VPN app just shits the bed. The tray window that pops up to connect just goes black and never shows anything. I have to open task manager, end the process, wait 30 seconds for it to autostart to then authenticate.

My WSL instance constantly fails to start and I have to run a Powershell command to fix it. Programs won’t maximize won’t open when I try to switch to them until I do it 4-5 times.

Everything is slow and clunky even when I have almost nothing running.

Meanwhile my 8 year old low end Thinkpad with 8 GB of slow DDR4 RAM and a 2.5inch cheapo SSD runs fine with Linux Mint thrown on it and I frequently go 4-6 months between updates.

Haven’t had a Motorola in many years. Hopefully this works out well and we get a really nice piece of hardware that isn’t subject to the whims of Google.

Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.

Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.

Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.

How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?

The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.

This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.

All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.

Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).

But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.

And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.

It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.

Start with Linux Mint. It’s similar in vibe to older Windows, (think Windows 7/10)

You can use the GUI for everything, even major version upgrades, driver installations, and Kernel changes.

It comes with everything you need to get started, and their software portal is easy to use and get stuff from, including gaming staples like Steam, OBS Studio, etc.

One of the reasons Linux Mint is so great, all the awesome things about Ubuntu under the hood without any of the trash 😊

Netbird and Pangolin too.

Day-mon, every Linux admin I’ve worked with, old and young, pronounces it that way too, so that’s where I picked it up.

I’ve never heard of people deliberately pronouncing it like that to avoid offending Christians though, seems like an American take lol.

I thought that it was just an archaic spelling of the modern demon and an alternative pronunciation to clairify that the speaker is referring to a technical part of an OS, not making a joke about the spiritual nature of the machine lol.

It sounds cooler to say day-mon anyways IMO.

Breaking News! Multiple forks discovered in kitchen, exclusive coverage tonight at 11:00!

Don’t feel bad about the distro you land on, especially not Linux Mint. It’s the #1 distro I recommend to completely new Linux users.

I use it myself for any computer that I want a #JustWorks experience on. The Cinnamon desktop environment is super stable and easy to use. And so far, Linux Mint is the only distro I know of where you truly don’t have to use the terminal for anything even kernel updates/rollbacks, alternative driver installations, and major version upgrades.

The Mint team is wonderful and they’ve created a fantastic product.

I like good GUIs. There are GUIs that are clean, responsive, well designed, and full-featured.

Sadly, that is rare nowadays, regardless if the software is FOSS or not.

It seems like for proprietary software, the corporate approach is to design slow, boring GUIs that lack most/all advanced functionality. It’s designed for dumb users who just want to click and swipe.

FOSS on the other hand rarely has full or even part time UI/UX devs due to the cost. So often the GUIs are clunky, messy, and a horrible pain to navigate. The upside is that they usually have extremely deep features, but good luck finding them.

If I have to pick, FOSS all the way, but I wish I didn’t have to. There are a few FOSS programs that have very nice UIs, Bitwarden, Protonmail, Musescore, Godot, and many are getting better, but the landscape is still rough out there.

As for CLI, I prefer it for some things, it’s just faster depending on the function. I find myself operating with a hybrid setup now days. I have become proficient enough with the command line that I can switch seamlessly between my GUI environments and the CLI-only environments. I don’t really think about it much anymore.

Exactly my expectation, sadly. The crypto/NFT rush and then the AI rush has shown GPU manufactures, Nvidia especially, that people will still pay for GPUs, even at insane prices. So of course being a publicly held mega-Corp, they will keep the high prices and set it as the new baseline. Same to a lesser degree with AMD.

Ram will follow a similar pattern. Temporary extreme market conditions will create scarcity, prices spike to unheard of levels, desperate consoomers will still buy out what supply they can get, and signal to the companies selling it that the new high prices are actually totally fine.

The days of mid tier GPUs being $200-$350 are long gone. So are the days of 64Gb kits of mid-teir RAM for $200

And no, the market isn’t going to adjust in a good way for gamers with devs and studios writing more efficient code that runs high quality graphics on lower end hardware. We will get the dystopia option, no more consumer PC parts, rent a pre-built to use at a huge markup, or you pay for an online subscription to a cloud gaming platform. Either way, it enshitifies.

Free Options:

• Go to your local library, borrow DVDs, Music CDs, and Audio books. Take them home a use one of the many free software options to rip the content onto your own computer.
• Stream recording. You can find all kinds of free streaming sites to watch movies and TV shows. You can use the ytdl command line tool to rip those movies and shows to your own computer, and I don’t think that will trigger your ISPs alarm bells, I might be wrong though. If that is too advanced or isn’t working, just go full goblin mode and start playing the media full screen, then use OBS or another free screen cap software to record your screen. Set it and forget it.
• Torrent raw and risk it from your own home. Depending on your country, this might not actually be a big deal.

Cheap Options:

• Mullvad is $6 per month. You can almost certainly afford that. But if you truly can’t, then if you’re in the US (idk about other countries) donating plasma can net you $30-$40 on the low end and $60-$80 on the high end. And assuming you’re reasonably healthy, you can donate once a week. Even just one session at the low end would net you 4-5 months of VPN access.
• Sell stuff on Ebay, Craigslist, etc. You probably have some old junk laying around. Old computer parts, clothes, random tools, etc. All you need to do is find something worth 6$ and bam, there’s a month of VPN.
• If you live in an area with multiple ISPs and you pay for your own internet, call the other ones and tell them what you’re currently paying for internet, ask them if they can beat it by at least $10 a month. They will almost always say yes, and they will often include free installation and equipment set up too. You’re now saving at least $10 a month on your internet and can afford a monthly VPN plan.