That’s true. Most are perfectly fine provided they have a computer ready to use. Straight out of the box. Immediately. The lack of choice itself is comforting. Everything moves forward. No lateral motion.

We must provide them that type of “thing that just works”. Constantly move forward. What is comfortable. What is familiar.

Most people have had great answers coming from the company side of things. I’ll take it from the standpoint of individuals like us helping someone linux curious see the light, while still having the “just works” experience.

Do not give them any choices. None. Put them on your stable distro of choice for a new user, call whatever that is “Linux”, and be on your way.

But why? Isn’t that antithetical to everything we value? Yes and no. We value choice almost above anything else, but that doesn’t “just work” for most people. Which of those do you value more?

This was a lot of what I was getting at. We artificially build our own walled garden. We’ll let anyone in just as much as we’ll throw turds over the fence. Your shit don’t stink if you throw it at someone else

The arch wiki is difficult to use for beginners. Each page is single topic. It is not a guide. Using it daily, it takes at least a month to understand it well enough to “build your own guides”. If you want to do that kind of deep dive, jump on in. If not, you’ll have a better time using just about any distro other than arch.

BTW. If you do decide to take that route. Don’t become one of those miscreants who “uses arch btw” It’s a red flag for someone who doesn’t know wtf they are talking about.

Could you share that script with op?

I did something similar with 4 15 year old optiplexes for a student lab. IT wasn’t happy until the saw how well they ran

It’s something we’ll take for granted. With enough time and experience, you could fire off a one liner to fix a problem in less than a minute. For most people thst could take an hour, and they’d probably give up within 10 minutes

I really wish I could BASH windows 🙂. Per customization, it’s a moving target. How TF do I get rid of the icon asking if I like the picture on my desktop? Registry edits? Go F yourself

More than pedantic. It’s truth reversed to conceal motives.

You forgot Read. As in read answers.microsoft.com. And then just give up

pactl get short sinks

gets you a list of devices with a numerical identifier. And

pactl set-default-sink ID

Sets the default sink to the desired ID. I only ever want to swap between two so I wrots a bash script to do that. I just type ‘aud’ and it does it for me.

As nice as this would be, it seem against the principles of FOSS given you don’t ask homeowners for their consent

IWRITELOTSOFBASH

Probably not the answer you want to hear, but I just use steam and proton db. If something doesn’t work or I can’t fix it, it’s the cost of freedom and I do without.

Bonus points you can be a moralistic douche when your friends give you a hard time. (You’ll have to do without friends too.)

When you say billions of hours, I would keep things in perspective. AI and storage aren’t free. They’ll only save the important stuff. The solution to saving yourself, us, and all of humanity is to never do anything important or useful. So the good news is if we go back to work and slack off as we’ve always done, we’ll outsmart them and save us all!

“anymore” 🤣

I convinced my family by telling them I won’t use anything else. Use Signal or don’t talk to me. Win win

We all have a fundamental right to privacy, which is constantly violated. Not just on a daily basis, but on a minute by minute basis.

But to play devil’s advocate for a moment to assuage some FUD around posts like this, how many of the absurd amount of cookies overlap in otherwise innoculous ways. For instance, product tracking cookies. Say you bought a pumpkin on Amazon, and that drops a gorde cookie, a pumpkin spice cookie, a cornucopia cookie etc.

That’s certainly not the same as buy a pumpkin, track your location around the nearest pumpkin patch, read your grandma’s emails about pumpkins, and collect information to determine your likelihood of buying another pumpkin based on your sexual orientation.

The latter certainly exists, but does anyone know much about the former? How prevalent would they be in that 850?

My sell on password managers is quality of life. You never have to reset your passwords and you can use a hotkey to enter it faster than typing. Gone are the days of fat fingers.

But I get where people have an issue. It’s one point of failure vs. many, but they don’t realize It’s easier to well secure the one than it is to not spread the same vulnerability everywhere.

As Kramer said. Levels. If tou layer your security 2 becomes a non issue. What you have, what you know, and who you are. Which plays into 1. The 3-2-1 of backup. 3 copies of the data. 2 different media. At least 1 off site. Suprising as it might be, writing a great backup is to write your password down. I have a piece of paper with my password in a lock box in my apartment, in a safety deposit box at my bank, and at my parent’s house