-i live in the country, power outages happen, I cannot reliably prevent things from turning on all at once.

-my other mixers make noise when turned on, but they are not loud enough to kill speakers; even so I do try to turn things on in the proper order. This one is dangerously exceptional and won’t be used if this can’t be fixed.

The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.

All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”

And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.

People can help you, but there is a way to ask, and learning how to ask is part of learning the OS. We are fascinated by problems actually.

The problem is that people come and say things like “I tried to setup a fleegbat server and it doesn’t work!” and so for the helper it becomes a process of pulling the information out of the asker in a long and painful process of interaction and we just move on. Users who say things like “here is the error message I’m getting when I try to start up my fleegbo server, anyone understand this?” get way better help.

Those who really want to learn it come to understand these things, those who just want to do something neat and not work their ass off will complain that it’s too hard.

Those who do the work are rewarded in many ways. I drove a dump truck ten years ago, now I make twice what I used to, working with people who aren’t racist sacks of shit. They were my motivator to learn, I was tired of being among pigs every day.

I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>

I must be the fortieth to advise you to install Linux.

This is reach Kim levels.

They are frequently up to no good. It’s like boys having a sleepover, more or less, they run and play, get into fights over toys, etc. Marlo is actually very possessive of pretty much everything. Bo is very cuddly and likes his pats, and here’s what happens ten seconds after Marlo sees Bo getting attention.

I suppose I do complain when I have to use Windows lol

I hear you, and I have nothing against good graphical tools, for the record. Sometimes it is the quickest way when you’re already working in a gui context, which let’s face it, is most of the time, unless you run servers.

Which is the one case where I would double down on pushing you towards the terminal: Are you learning about Linux for the sheer joy of it and to be on the future-facing edge of things, OR are you hoping to improve your career situation? Brief self-bio: I am a lifelong geek, but in 2014 I was a trucker with a CCNA and a lot of aches. In 2015 I became a sysadmin for an animation studio based on that and my knowing Linux, but I didn’t do linux servers, I did FreeBSD servers, which at the terminal level is similar enough that I could handle it, because I focused on console skills when teaching myself more than getting my gui right. But I was intentionally seeking to make more money and stop torturing my body every day while surrounded by fucking klansmen. If you’re thinking about job at all, then I double down on the “stick to the console and get better at it,” because that will make you the wizard at your eventual job, surrounded by people enslaved to the gui. (puffs on a bit of the finest Southfarthing, which he frequently wafted an odor of at his coworkers after coffee break. People do not meddle in the affairs of effective wizards.)

That being said, you’re actually touching on the main reason we don’t have wider adoption (not wide, that is questionable if it will ever happen, but we’ll see how thoroughly capitalism implodes over the next few years, who knows) - in a nutshell, there seems to be very little active intention, and quite a lot of active resistance, to the idea of a Linux Desktop that “just works” for your grandma, as they say. I guess Red Hat was trying to be the Linux version of a Windows Server, but pretty soon they’re not gonna be much of anything if you ask me… anyways, I consider myself a native these days and let me say, Linux geeks are a bunch of fucking ASSHOLES. I try to be one of the ones who isn’t, but even I succumb to the urge to snark at lazy thinkers sometimes, which is not what is happening here and now for the record, I’m having a pretty good week and I’m hoping this all helps in some way. But I want to acknowledge the toxicity of this culture.

One might argue that Plasma or Gnome or Mint or whatever does a great job of crafting a smooth and easy UX. And that is true - I quite like the Gnome vibe overall. But let’s face it, Gnome’s bundled gui tools are indeed mostly second rate, and the devs have a bottomless well of cultural support for responding to complaints like yours with “learn the terminal then noob lol”. You also, of course, have the option to install the text editor or file manager of your choice, but then you run the risk of needing a whole bunch of extra dependencies and there goes your responsive desktop.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this culture changing until the general culture in tech changes, and that won’t change until the general culture of our economic priorities changes. Let’s see how far this implosion goes. It’s a very slow moving one.

Becoming a developer was a bit like walking into some pastoral fantasyland where everyone is extremely nice and endlessly seek to support and help you as you learn to milk the cows and such. I have experienced the extremes of workplace culture now and I never want to leave this role. If you are dissatisfied with what you do and are willing to work your ass off for a few years becoming good at things that not many people have worked their ass off to become good at, you can definitely make your life better, and I don’t just mean by having more money. I would do this job for my old trucker wage rather than leave the job. Don’t tell my boss.

I kinda said that too actually, just maybe in a little more of a supportive, you-got-this way. You came to Linux because you wanted something different, and while the Linux desktop does continue to improve overall, what you did is always where the action will be for operations like the one you did.

It’s not that it’s the easiest way, full stop - it’s the easiest way to do very complex and powerful operations on the fly, very quickly. If you lean into it for a while it does actually get easy, even.

What I find befuddling about this is, you figured out what you needed to do, ie, you had a victory and discovered something new, and you find that somehow bad. You just did some practical console magic. By design, GNU/Linux can do a whole lot more with just the console and piping. Dive in.

Sounds like she’s just an old grumper. Good luck reasoning with her to you as well :>

Did we ever have it in the first place? :>

There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.

But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.

Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.

They repealed that anyways.

Not expert, just adopted my first big dog, year old labradoodle who wasn’t getting enough time from his previous family - they had two kids and then had twins and right now he needs a lot of attention and training which they didn’t have the bandwidth for. Wonderful people though and they did the right thing finding us. He has a few barking and playing-too-rough-with-the-tiny-chihuahua-and-cats issues we are figuring out, but overall it’s always clear where it’s coming from when he’s misbehaving and he’s a good loving dog in the end. He’s also only been here slightly more than a month and I’m told it takes three before they’re really settled, so we have high hopes.

Is this when your parents aren’t home? Or when they’re around? Could mean different things. Some dogs tend to be one-person dogs who tolerate those who live with them and have no interest in anyone else. Breeds affect this kind of thing too.

It is true, as a white man in North America, I have the luxury of pretending I exist independently of all the labels. It’s a delusion of course; all politics are identity politics. That being said, to purposely put one on yourself as a conscious choice seems like putting the yoke on yourself.

I identify as James from Arnes (Not James Arness, I have no gun).

I have a number of other “identities” that are applied to me due to my particular set of circumstances, but I’m James.

Did I say halfway point? I think I specifically said something more resembling the tiny domains of delta that come into play as you endlessly approach the speed of light but never reach it. One can endlessly approach Atheism, but until you can somehow use logic to prove a negative, in the end, you are the one who is trafficking in false knowledge. If you were so sure - if you were as sure as I am that no deities exist - you wouldn’t be wasting your time in this way, and particularly not resorting to deliberate mischaracterizations of what I said.

If you’re in need of one and an old chunk of coal will suffice for now, by all means :>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqDUnHv_g70

I remain atheist at my deepest heart, but I understand after many years of wasting my time being wrong that anything which doesn’t exist, also doesn’t deserve any time wasted thinking about its finer details. In its own way, this deep dive into biblical archivism is just the Atheist’s version of The Courtier’s Reply.

Any honest Atheist, when pressed hard, has to concede the final thousandths of an inch to uncertainty and give the highest and strongest ground to the Agnostics, and that’s really the one that allows for the most freedom. I use chemicals, some from my doctor and some from the store, to boost my mood and my productivity. Some people use Jesus or Allah or Idontfuckingcarereally, as long as they don’t try to take my weed or my Vyvanse.

edit: we all do what we do to get by. If you’re not harming anyone with your drug of choice, I say you should have as much of it you can handle without burning out.