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.

The naming is one thing I legitimately like about the whole Linux/GNU/FOSS world.

Things are still named by nerds/enthusiasts who have some spark of joy and fun left in their hearts. Could you imagine a sanitized corporate software product released today with a name that directly refers to the established product it is meant to displace?

For example, things like GNU’s Not Unix or my favorite remotely accessible text/terminal based email client I used around the turn of the century, PINE Is Not Elm.

Then you get fun second-order software names like GIMP, too.

It’s all so preferable to the commercial software branding world where even though the visual presentation is extremely samey (everybody switching to the same popular boring fonts and removing logos/artwork), the actual brands are often made up silly words that are easy to get the domain name and the social handles for.

Be sure to follow BONTO! on all your favorite trillion dollar propaganda and surveillance platforms!

Haha yeah, I think SpiceDealer’s comment inadvertently supports the notion it’s meant to dispel.

But to be fair, the media world has been using the word “digital” to mean “electronic delivery” for a long time.

I appreciate the juxtaposition between your username and this comment wanting to beat one of the universe’s most useless life forms.

Here’s my hot take to offer:

The Krunch 106.66 from Saints Row 2 is the best radio station in any city sandbox GTA-style game.

I like metal and there are a couple bands I started listening to because of that radio station.

I completely understand the sentiment!

I am still into some tech and “new computer” type stuff. I am about to install a bigger/faster drive in my PC and set up my Home Assistant server. That PC is already my Jellyfin server. I am also in the middle of building a brand new PC for my kid, which will also run Mint, lol.

But I spend time only on the things that I’ve learned really matter to me, and not on all the things you’re “supposed to” mess with in your home lab that you obviously have.

You know the meme (or meme category) where it’s a resume or linkedin profile where the recent work history goes something like Senior Network Architect, then Goose Farmer?

I may literally have a 3D printer still in the box, and PC & networking parts all over the house, but my daily routine is embedded linux C/C++ sr developer by day and animal tender on the evenings and weekends, lol.

I never left!

I think I’m just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think “that’s a youngster’s game.”

Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn’t broken!

I was coming to the comments to make some kind of comment about how the chill vibe of this meme is the reason I brought nature to me and built a pond in my yard and etc…

But your comment was at the very top. My “keep those damn fish alive” sense kicked in. So my train of thought took a hard turn towards “holy shit is that a mink?? RUN!!!”

Or replace mink with a similar cute little murder machine species. I haven’t dealt with them, fortunately, but I’ve heard the stories.

Ouch, that line sure as hell would work on me!

But I’m not just an American who watched his show. I’m local to his area and I’ve been to the actual studios at WQED multiple times, on top of all the show artifacts I just saw the other day.

It was probably organized by corporations to slow down EU

Cries in red white and blue American tears

The owner class, their paid shills, and their useful idiots had half the population convinced decades ago that all regulation is bad and that government entities literally cannot do anything correctly.

I started believing some of that stuff when I was young and thought that people in the media argued in good faith. Plus I was more accepting of the cornerstone conservative axiom that money and “progress” are the marks of good people and good societies rather than silly nebulous concepts like “being alive is a positive experience for as many people as possible.”

I found myself among some Mister Rogers quotes and artifacts yesterday, of all possible things.

So just for today I’m gonna push back on this one a little bit. I think the goodness is out there, but unfortunately much of our society is kinda designed to separate us from our humanity and mental peace.

Yep! The most expensive equipment they might need is a magic smoke compressor, if that.

The Democrats really suck. Our FPTP 2-party system is really some bullshit. However, it is really difficult for me to buy into the validity of the slippery slope you are describing when the people around me keep voting for the option that is #1 worst by a whole fucking lot.

And the further that #1 worst keeps surging and lapping #2 on the evil-dex, the further their psycho supporters seem to like it! We’ll see if the pedo shit can finally reverse that.

This would be a different conversation if we’d elected democrats over and over to avoid republicans and somehow still got dragged to the right. At the end of the Obama administration, for instance, there was the concern of the bait and switch.

But no. He gets impeached a couple times for betraying the US in different ways after being openly terrible for years, and dozens of millions of people still turn out to vote for him. He tries some light coup and all the daily otherwise career ending craziness, and they turn out to vote for him AGAIN in HIGHER numbers.

The fact that the democrats are the good cop capitalists to the republicans’ bad cop capitalists is definitely a problem, yes. Any of us who get to vote in the US should be keenly aware of that. And there are multiple things we can try to fix in parallel. But sometimes you have to fix things sequentially too.