I’ve been a fan of the easy to install all-in-one Linux experience of modern distros, being an old guy with a family and a keen awareness of how much I need to maintain some of the non-computer hobbies in my life. Mint has been my jam for a long time.

But just recently I had reason to try out regular old Debian with KDE Plasma, and I think I have found my happy place. I just moved around my hard drives and set up my handful of self-hosted things on this fresh system. It’s so nice to occasionally use as a desktop while it is also a rock solid server.

Gross.

I continue to have my own little cognitive dissonance about the Fediverse:

The world needs more FOSS and information needs to flow in a decentralized, democratic kind of way.

Howeverrrrr… Lemmy is awesome for we few that it clicks with. For the good of the users and especially the volunteer admins who run our instances, I am glad Lemmy is not the big glowing target that reddit is.

Maybe we just hang out and keep the lights on no matter whether it’s for occasional lost Linux users or for when mainstream folks decide to ditch oligarch-tech en masse.

The funny thing is that the biggest practical benefit to most Linux users is not the access to do these things.

It is the secondary effects of not needing to restrict access in order to preserve lock-in and enshittification. It makes the whole user experience better because it is only doing wider you’ve asked it to do. For example, I apply updates more quickly on Linux than I ever did on Windows, even though my Linux DEs are way less pushy about it, because the process is an absolute breeze!

Look at each OS option like you were a product development team, and think “who are my stakeholders?”

The commercial products have long lists of what’s driving the product features and anti-features. Linux has the developers who want the code to be helpful and stay free, and the users who want it to do what it says on the tin, with the option to audit or modify the system’s code. But of course it’s still run by humans, so big personalities and bad actors and whatnot do affect things.

The US immigration “policy” is just as stupid as it is inhumane. At this point it’s easier to imagine it being orchestrated by rivals that think long term, rather than being just from the ever-present conservative hate and ignorance.

Our economy is built with an infinite growth mindset, moreso than most. ALL developed nations are seeing population growth slow down and even reverse – that’s just what happens when populations get educated and wealthy.

So what are we doing? Violently kicking out tons of lower paid workers while also scaring away some of the most highly educated and specialized Ph.Ds.

But hey, at least we’re consistent and also make conditions horrible for natural born citizens to raise USian children!

I’m another data point where displays work under Linux better than Windows, making this particular example amusingly wrong.

This is a Dell precision laptop with a dual usb-c connected docking station. Intel cpu plus a discrete nvidia gpu.

Using Cinnamon in X11 on Linux Mint or LMDE, works great.

Using KDE Plasma in Wayland on Debian? Works great!

Using Windows 10? Bzzzt.

I think I’ve had Linux DEs occasionally forget my monitor order & rotation just like Windows would, but out of the box Windows wouldn’t even use all my monitors.

Ahkshually, cultures all over the world have eaten crustaceans for millennia!

(I made up that fact for the sake of the punch line, no idea if accurate)

I leave ls alone and instead do

alias l='ls -latrF'

I do sometimes just want to use the plain version, especially if I’m in a small terminal window for some reason. But I think my brain likes scanning 1D lists more than 2D grids, no matter whether I’m in a terminal or using a graphical file manager.

Funny timing for me.

Just the other day I was at a hangout / arcade kind of place and saw some folks playing a PS3 driving game on a CRT and ngl it looked really damn good. I was across the room so the low resolution wasn’t as apparent, but the quality of motion and contrast works at any distance.

Cool story, goog.

I’m just going to keep waiting for a linux/foss phone so that its features and capabilities are actually predictable year to year.

But maybe I’m just too picky about what features and capabilities I want. I admit I’ve gotten used to some pretty outlandish stuff like… lemme check my notes here… “the device does the things I tell it to do.” Real galaxy-brain shit!

We have the original Kinect and an old Xbox 360 permanently stationed in the living room of the house.

Being able to have Kinect Party or its prequel (Double Fine’s Happy Action Theater) on the TV out there is absolute magic when you need to entertain a group of kids.

Holy crap, I think you’ve cracked it.

LLM AI is the trillion collar costing, terawatt consuming rubber ducky for the new millennium!

Yeah I agr–

Have a nice day!

I went and scrolled facebook recently and it is absolutely crazy. You get some ads, sure, and a few things that real people posted, but like half of what is on there feels like some kind of shady psychological experiment.

It’s like a whole spectrum of flavors of ultra-processed engagement bait. Much of it is made to look like normal people posting normal things, just with a “follow” next to the name and 5,000 replies from kind old people trapped in a rabbit hole they don’t even know exists.

I can only hope that THIS time, with the sheer amount of information available, that future historians will convince society that it’s better to run society based on evidence and progress and humanity.

We have the old boys club running our companies, grifting and building a giant economic bubble to make a quick buck they have no use for, and casually destroying some of the most valuable brands out there.

They are running many of our governments too, and that’s not working great.

Where else am I going to keep all my Linux installer USB sticks, the bundle of cables that comes in handy every year or two, or the stuff I printed at work for my family that I need to take home?

I liked it back in the day, but I don’t mess with that stuff no more. That’s how you get another GlaDOS.

Why do you prefer them to flatpaks? Genuinely curious. I’ve only used appimages once or twice.

Yeah we should just choose a winner and go with their system.

This should be easy!

omg it’s not just a website but it’s in the repos?

Honestly though if i’m doing video stuff and I leave htop and nvtop running on the second screen, that gets you like half way to this.

Have you guys seen Jurassic Park? It ran on UNIX!

kinda /s. I mean, it took somebody young and feminine to fix what the old white guy fucked up right? (I’m an old white guy fwiw, but MY system fuckups are all natural)