I don’t think the point was supposed to be that Valve is good.

I think it was supposed to be that it is possible for a profit-motivated company to do something that legitimately benefits the rest of us even though the motivation was their profit goals.

Maybe more of the credit for that should go to the original creators of the FOSS licenses than to Gabe Newell, but it’s still nice that it happened either way.

Too bad it will be difficult for us to see all their fancy cheap RAM through all the yummy Venezuelan oil covering this place! It’s totally worth my eyes and skin stinging a little bit all the time. Oh and my lungs of course.

~sad /s~

Because the standard version of Mint uses the ubuntu repositories. You get to utilize most of what makes up ubuntu, but decoupled from the stuff Canonical wants to push. It has some added polish as well.

It was more of an ubuntu-specific reply rather than “what’s the best distro” thing.

But now that you mention it, there is also Linux Mint Debian Edition! :D

I might actually start using LMDE at work, since we have some stuff that’s more focused on debian than ubuntu.

If they want ubuntu, let them Linux Mint! :D

Thank you for this post!

For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.

I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it’s pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.

I’ll proudly wear my Space Nerd badge all day long!

It does look like an artist’s rendition of the Milky Way galaxy like it’s an alien meme pointing at us. But, wouldn’t you know it, it’s not pointing to the right place. :D

It looks like we are half way out between the core and the outer rim. (very sci-fi sounding sentence, but I like it)

Sorry to take so long to reply! I hope you see this.

The metaphor I came up with a couple years back when I was still in therapy was that we all have unique individualized instruction manuals for our brains and bodies, but for some cruel reason we do not get a copy.

Naturally, our two instruction manuals will be very similar in most areas. Needs for nutrition, water, and sleep probably overlap a lot. But maybe lactose will ruin my day and gluten will ruin yours.

Getting into the realm of mental health, medications, neurodiversity, physical health, personality disorders, and our closest relationships, all of those things interact constantly the complexity just explodes. It is unavoidable that any given person will have to to do some trial and error to craft a lifestyle where they can thrive.

Unfortunately I think tons of miserable people passively fall into the routine laid before them and don’t even think about what options might be out there. And double unfortunately, society only seems to be more designed to push people in this direction because it’s good for business. Work hard to keep yourself alive, consume to feel something, repeat.

An important subtext underlying all of this is how our biology is so reactive and adaptive to our environment. Do you want to be better at lifting heavy things? Lift heavy things more often. Do you want to be better at playing the guitar? Play the guitar more often. Do you want to be better at being mindful of what’s actually important to you? Be better about being in a meditative mental state and in control of your mind? All need their respective workouts.

And it’s never just one silver bullet. That last paragraph sounds pretty chill and zen, and that’s how I am most of the time. I’m not in therapy any longer and I’m good at introspection, but I am still on my medications that keep chemical stuff in balance.

Some philosophies that really stuck with me:

Buddhism: meditation and the focus on being able to step back and be an observer of your emotions and sensory inputs and whatnot. It’s a nice framework for exercising whatever you want to call the muscle that lets you be in control of your own mind and understand your reactions better.

Stoics: the notion that in many cases, things can only hurt us if we let them. We can recognize a problem and solve it, but whether that causes anxiety or dread or excitement in our minds is something we can control.

And above all: continuous improvement. You aren’t going to read something and fix all your problems. But if you find a tidbit that resonates with you and you do something that makes life 1% better permanently? Huge victory, and a great use of your day!

Yooo, can communism get ME that swole too?

That’s the neat part. There is no point. You get to define what matters in your life!

Optimistic nihilism. 💫

(this is not meant to downplay the real strife brought about by the rich trying to min/max society and looking at human beings like expendable resources)

That sounds like me during my decades of raw dogging ADHD and a bouquet of comorbidities.

It can still be that way for me, but with medication and vigilance and mindfulness and constantly trying to reverse engineer my brain/body’s needs, I had a much more productive 2025 than previous years. (productive at the things I care about, not just becoming a good cog in the machine at work)

That couldn’t be a picture of Andromeda though, since that is not the perspective you get from our galaxy. Andromeda is facing us more with the edge than being broadside like in this image.

I’m not complaining though. Thanks for including the alt-text!

Yeah, that’s another fun aspect of our culture. Jobs that many people actually want due to what they are passionate about lead to abuse.

It’s the reason I never seriously considered getting into game development or becoming a teacher.

I am the rare father involved in the PTO (parent-teacher organization) along with my wife at our kid’s elementary school. We were handing out basic cheap supplies to the teachers last month as a Christmas thing. We’d interrupt the class to give the teacher a SINGLE roll of paper towels and then a small box of tissues or some glue sticks or whatever, and they were excited and grateful every time!

Hell yes!

I love losing my phone in my own damn house and not worrying about it for hours.

Many times even if I’m listening to music while I do yard work and tend to animals, I’ll leave my phone inside. That’s one nice thing about wireless earbuds with good range. Keep the screen far away. Even if I’m not in the mood I know that looking at trees and pets will produce better results for this brain.

I’ve been working on reverse engineering the brain requirements for a while, hence the existence of some of that stuff, lol. Straddling the line between still working the tech job while playing retired goose farmer. (no geese here, but various other types of terrestrial and aquatic critters)

If you are a user of any mind altering substances, or have any interest in starting, it might be worth giving the movie or show another try in that state. Assuming your chosen goodies leave you coherent and able to form memories, lol.

And it’s not just to put you in a good mood, though that certainly helps. Maybe it’s just the spicy neurons in my case, but being high can qualitatively change the experience of how I relate to characters. (not extreme like empathy on / empathy off, sometimes things might just land different)

I remember it well…

The smell of the gunpowder. In the play room.

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.