My parents tried this many years ago.

Since then my dad has gotten better- he runs Ubuntu and so far as I know keeps it up to date. My mother on the other hand gets upset if anything at all changes on her computer, and so never updates or anything

Found Rift the other day and was like okay I guess it’s distortion polearm time. Poke poke poke

Yep. I’ve been during linux as my main desktop for maybe a year or two now, and it’s been fine. I don’t tinker with it. Most things just work.

The only thing that’s been a little dicey is mods for games, but I think I just need to figure out how like wine and proton prefixes work. It’s probably not hard, I just haven’t had a need lately.

That’s my kind of game. The “let’s not be political (even though it is political)” flavor is less appealing.

• read Bandcamp’s writeups. Sometimes they do a deep dive into a genre, city, or band. https://daily.bandcamp.com/
• if you find something you like, scroll down and there’s other users who bought it. Peek into their collections
• if you scroll down further on an album, there will be more recommendations
• you can search by genre or tag, too

The thing you need to weigh is the inconvenience of them putting in the effort to become tech savvy. That’s a big inconvenience. So, the inconvenience of dealing with ads and whatnot looks much smaller from their perspective.

Yeah, I can follow the train of thought. They don’t know that like an hour of reading now will save them decades of pain, I guess.

Like, there’s degrees. Learning how to compile Firefox from source with custom changes is way more work than “search: how do I get rid of ads? Search: best adblocker. Click install on ublock.”

Which brings me back to what I was trying to say earlier. People imagine dealing with these problems is way harder than it actually is, so they don’t even look.

Something like this is coming up at work. They’re like “oh it’s going to be like weeks of work to get a linter for our code” and I’m like “it’s fifteen minutes please just let me help you”.

I dunno, a lot of the people in my life that aren’t tech savvy are inconvenienced. The ads pop up and block stuff. But they don’t know how to do anything about it.

I guess it’s easier to just do nothing and suffer than learn what adblock is. It’s easier to use the shitty defaults.

There’s not to my knowledge a good way to run/test GitHub actions locally. So if I want to verify my change uploads the coverage report after the end of the pipeline, I have to run the whole thing. And then I find an error because on the GitHub runner blah blah is different

People have weird ideas about free speech. As if a private org must provide a platform for anyone and anything. But then also they’re not that upset when tits or dongs are removed. So the platform both is and is not allowed to moderate itself.

Well that’s fascinating. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Maybe read the study more carefully when I have more time

Many people have a sort of learned helplessness. They don’t really know computer fundamentals, they get scared and stressed so they stop thinking, and then they don’t want to deal with it.

People aren’t rational. They’re emotional.

Capitalism. The rich owner types don’t like this sort of thing, and they have a lot of power. They don’t really have coherent values except “in-group to protect, out-group to bind” and “no one tells me what to do. i tell you what to do.”

Yeah Fallout4 was kind of bad. I played it a lot anyway (sim settlements 2 is pretty good) but the core of it is rotten.

Just remember it’s basically garbage in, garbage out. I know a lot of folks half-ass it (bad photos, lazy profile, half-assed messages) and then are surprised that they don’t rise above the sea of other half-assed people and the algorithms.

Broadly, where the optimal path is the boring or tedious path.

Imagine an action game where you fight monsters and get coins for defeating them. Coins can be exchanged to buy new moves, advance the plot, and so on. Basic game loop.

Now imagine that you get triple coins if you wear the red shirt when fighting red monsters. Every time you see a red monster, you could go into the menu, into equipment, into body armor, swap on the red shirt, exit all the menus, and kill the monster. Then repeat all that for blue shirt and blue monsters.

This is a made up example but some games do shit like that, where you have to do something tedious for a big payoff.

I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.

I tell people about lemmy and send them links. Mostly people don’t care about anything. Abstract or remote things like “should a platform be owned by one asshole?” just doesn’t even enter their brain.

Where are the comics about people being happy to be social? I guess it’s like they say and happiness writes white

That’s why I did it too, but let’s be fair, dice are supposed to be random.

Yeah, I realized in my older age that I don’t actually like a lot of random. I liked new Vegas where you either had the skill or you didn’t. In tabletop games I like dice pools to make the results less evenly distributed among all possible outcomes, and then options like fate points and “succeed at a cost” on top of that.

Some people I guess really like the random dice effects, but usually it just makes me grumpy. To each their own.

I’ve thought about switching. I do like the password saving and syncing between Android and desktop that Firefox does, and I’m not sure if the forks do that.