If it weren’t for Ubuntu, I’d wager half or more Linux users wouldn’t be Linux users. I have no hard data to back this up and I’m willing to be told I’m wrong. But most of the stories I hear are “started on Ubuntu back when they were mailing out free CDs” and “tried a few other things, gave up until I found Ubuntu”

It’s barrier to entry was so long for Windows users, and it allowed people the time and space to get comfortable with being on something not-windows, and sure, eventually a big chunk moved on, but it got them to this side of the fence, and that’s admirable. Wubi (a dual boot installer you could run from within windows without a CD a thumb drive) is what really got me on Linux, and eventually I stopped dualbooting altogether.

I am not a techy person. But I started using Linux in around 2007ish (might have been a little earlier). First started because of philosophical issues with open source mentality.

I bled for that philosophy, let me tell you. Nothing worked out of the box, my only friend who used Linux was an online friend, and his tech support could only help me if we happened to be online at the same time. He helped a lot, but dozens and dozens of guides later I managed to get it mostly working. Google.com/Linux used to be a thing, and it was quite helpful. After a few reversions back to Windows in the early days I got a terrible little netbook, and Wubi became a thing. It allowed you to install windows from within windows, without having to have a live CD. It worked great, but it was right back to all the same touchpad, wifi, monitor, et cetera issues. But this time I could go back to Windows and research my issue, print off the guides, and use them to troubleshoot. So much easier than asking my neighbor to use their computer, or trying to read and follow the guides from my blackberry lmao

Now? I haven’t a had a single issue like that when installing a distro in 10+ years. Shit just works now. Granted, I stick to mainstream distros, or forks of mainstream distros. Craziest thing I’ve tried recently was Bazzite, which is basically just silver blue. I liked being on Bazzite and silver blue, but I ended up going back to regular old fedora workstation, because relying solely on flatpaks is limiting, and I (remember, not a techy person) don’t understand rpm ostree lol

Was using a VPN to watch iPlayer last night and then hopped on reddit and was like “whereintheactualfuck is all the porn‽” Before realizing I had it set to the UK. Blew my mind for a minute

In addition to this excellent point, during the outage I saw several people asking which server to switch to from .ee, and the replies made me realize how much I love it here. My fellow Slrpnkians didn’t get all bent out of shape and pissed about things the admin just simply couldn’t control at the time. From what I saw (maybe it’s different in private messages/behind the scenes, iunno) any people talking about the skrpnk outage from their alts were all being very reasonable, understanding, and just being generally decent netizens. I love it around here.

I always mention whenever I see libro.fm brought up: if you don’t have a local store you want to support for whatever reasons, Firestorm in Asheville, North Carolina is a fantastic refuge for the local queer community, it’s a worker cooperative, and they’re struggling to survive. Please consider them if there isn’t another local place in your own community. With the big book stores and then Amazon, a lot of communities don’t have a physical local shop anymore, so if someone has a plug for their local, I think it’s worth making on these kinds of threads.

I would also like to know please

Because they did some stuff a while back with closed source code, and it scared me off. I’m not the most tech literate person, so I mainly base my stuff off what the open source nerds tell me to do. With a password manager in particular I wanted to be on something open source, because I don’t trust big corpos not to backdoor into my shit, especially since I don’t really understand how it works and don’t know how to keep myself safe other than listening to people who know more than I do. So when the open source folks started saying get off bitwarden, I did, because I saw what happened with other password managers that had leaks and hacks. Plus, I wanted a vpn anyway (and now actually need one if I want to watch porn in my Christofascist state), and they only charge me like 20 bucks for everything.

Motherfucker! I just switched to proton from bitwarden a couple months ago.

Where do I go from here? I’ve got their family plan thing for vpn and password manager. Help me find something else?

Update me when you do? I want one, but can’t afford something that won’t work well, so I haven’t looked into too hard. Lemme know what you get

Depends on what you’re wanting to learn. I’m a fellow tech illiterate noob, but I’ve been off and on with Linux since like 2006. Finally switched full time a few years ago. Honestly, with Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora I’ve found you basically can just set it and forget it, depending on your use case. YouTube has been my best friend whenever I have a problem, normally I type my issue into that before even google. How long have you been using Linux? If you’re still in the distro hopping phase,I suggest trying to swap Desktop environments instead of distros, as it gives you a little experience with the terminal, is well documented on how to do it, and gives you a good idea of what kind of UI you want

That’s all I got, though. I really am pretty illiterate at tech stuff haha

Thank you for replying so quickly! I’ll email him back and let him know I should be able to get the formatting the same. I really appreciate your advice!

So I just emailed my professor, and he says that I can use fade in if the formatting is the same as final draft, and I buy the license so there’s no watermark. Which sucks, but fuggit it it lets me keep using Linux. Do you know if the formatting is the same? This is only my second ever screenwriting class.

The school pays for final draft, and I am poor. But someone else just showed me fade in was free and works with Linux, so I’m gonna try that out!

Oh shit, this I did not know. I just Googled the price and I guess it only showed the paid version. Sweet! Thank you! If this works, I can officially uninstall Windows! That’s literally the last thing holding me to it. :D

It was 8 gigs. Someone else suggested boxes over a VM, would 8 gigs be enough for either of those?

Thank you for the advise! YouTube tutorials, here I come!

I looked into it, but I can’t afford it out of pocket. The school pays for final draft, but won’t cover anything else :/ If I could, that would definitely be my go-to

They require a program called Final Draft. I looked around but couldn’t find an alternative

I will do this. Thank you!

I’ve never run a virtual machine, because I’ve always had, frankly, really shitty laptops. Like… Cheapest of the cheap without being a Chromebook. Only decent computer I’ve ever bought got broken within a month. :(

Can I run VMs on really low end specs? The screenwriting software is the only thing I need it for, and I’m assuming it’s pretty much the same as running a word processor.