leadore

You wouldn’t expect to be able to run Windows software on a Mac, why expect to be able to run Windows software on Linux?

Having said that, it’s true that you actually can run some windows software through Wine but it’s a hack and it’s not going to work as well as it would on the OS it was designed for.

But there are also things like Java and Electron applications that run natively on linux and just as well as on windows.
As for Minecraft Java edition, I just downloaded the Minecraft launcher .deb from minecraft.net and installed it, and it runs perfectly. You can’t really complain that your pirated stuff isn’t work right, lol.

edit to add: An easier way for your friend to try out Linux would be to either run it on a virtual machine within Windows, or boot from a live USB (that’s slower though).

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No, those are not part of the definition of fascism.

Try this link and this one to start, if you want to educate yourself on the topic. Then if you still believe the Democratic Party fulfills the definition of fascist, come back and tell us which characteristics you think makes it so.

The only thing to be careful with about building a brand new computer is sometimes the linux kernel takes a little while to catch up and support the latest hardware for some things. So maybe if any components you’re planning to use are very new, look them up and see if they are supported yet.
As for a distro I always recommend Mint. Your plan to try out a bunch of them on a VM is a great idea.

I think the idea is that you won’t even leave the Google page at all, they want to keep you on their site and serve you their ads instead of sending you to someone else’s site and giving someone else that sweet sweet ad revenue.

Thank you for understanding the reality of the situation and voting accordingly.

I agree, Neo-liberal is a more accurate label for the democrats. Thanks for taking the time to educate about the difference between the parties. Unfortunately, unless these “democrats are fascists too” people learn to understand the differences and act accordingly [1], they’re going to learn the hard way what fascism really is, and we’ll all suffer for it. For a very long time.

[1] “accordingly” means, accept the reality that either the D party or the R party will be in power in less than a year, and vote for the lesser of two evils (the non-fascist, but yes neo-liberal, D party).

This is a divided country. Almost half the people this country are right wing, and they vote. They vote for who they want in the primary, then they vote for whoever the R is in the general–and it works. Their party has moved more and more to the right.

But too many progressives don’t follow through in the general if their preferred candidate loses the primary, considering the winning candidate not “good enough” to “deserve” their votes, so the D either loses or barely wins. D politicians have learned well that they can’t count on left wing voters, so to have a chance of winning they must move right to capture more center or conservative voters, and thus the D party as a whole has also moved right. If the D party instead learned that standing for progressive values would get them enough votes to win, that’s what they would do.

We started to see that in 2022. They had actually been afraid to stand up for abortion rights until they saw some election results showing they could win on it, now they’re loudly standing up for it. Show them they can win with a progressive stance on other issues as well, and things will start changing. Slowly at first, then quickly.

Fascist is a word with an actual meaning. I know it’s fun to call the democrats fascists, but that’s incorrect and ridiculous.

Now that you have Mint, next time you want to make a thumb drive for installing a distro all you have to do is plug in a thumb drive, right-click the .iso file, and select Make Bootable USB Stick. (or from the Menu choose Accessories ‣ USB Image Writer)

And here’s a nice intro to Mint for you. That site has lots of other helpful stuff too. Enjoy!

I prefer to watch videos via peertube, not youtube, whenever possible. She has a peertube channel so here is the same video there: https://tinkerbetter.tube/w/g8K2zBgwwwE1xukkT6EmSo

Mint has an auto-upgrade tool so you don’t have to reinstall each time. It used to be only for minor version upgrades but now you can auto-upgrade to a new major version as well. In any case there are plenty of great distros to choose from.

And yes! whatever distro (and other FLOSS software) you use, support them with a donation if you can! When you consider the value you are getting for free vs. what you’d be spending on proprietary software, it’s not so hard to do and feels good too.

I gave up Ubuntu when they switched to the Unity desktop. ugh!

Ubuntu has long suffered from NIH syndrome, constantly inventing its own non-standard components (snaps, Unity, etc) and trying to make them “win” by forcing them on their own users. Reminds me of Microsoft with its non-standard Internet Explorer, its own non-standard version of Java and others.

The lesson is to use a Community distro, not a Corporate distro. When the distro’s goals align with its community’s, even a distro based on Ubuntu will usually be better than straight Ubuntu. For example Mint keeps the good things about Ubuntu (in Mint’s opinion of course), removes the bad things like Snaps, and adds other features that the community wants that Ubuntu won’t (like built-in Flatpak support among other things).

Just like Debian which it is based on, you can get AntiX in either 64 or 32 bit, whichever you need for your processor. It’s a very good lightweight distro. I’d recommend it, as well as Crunchbang++ for something like this. (edit to add that Crunchbang++ uses Openbox window manager, very lightweight but easy to use–something to consider for whichever distro you decide on).

Sleep should be the same as hibernation, I think? Or is sleep/suspend and hibernate different?
It works for me but I’m using the standard Mint based on Ubuntu, not LMDE, so maybe there’s a bug with it on LMDE. You might want to check in the Mint forums.

In the Screensaver settings you can turn on “Lock the computer when put to sleep”.

My Brother laser printer + scanner was plug and play on Linux Mint, but I saw that Brother also has their own drivers for Linux that you can download if you want.

Personally I hope they never do, though it does look likely. Like many pre-November '22 old-time Mastodon et.al. fedizens, I came to the fediverse specifically because I didn’t want to have anything with FB/Meta/Twitter or the other commercial, “engagement”-based, enshittified social media.

It feels like the fediverse is being gentrified, with half of it eagerly welcoming their new overlords (why don’t they just join Threads?) and the other half resisting. The half that doesn’t federate with Meta will move on, like people priced out of their own neighborhoods by gentrification, and become the new “real fediverse” where people can go to live free from corporate interference.

I don’t consider being on Threads as being “on the fediverse”. My definition of the fediverse is servers that follow the Activity Pub protocol to interact with each other. You might disagree with that definition, but Threads only lets us “follow” (view-only) certain of their accounts (only about 2000 out of millions) from Mastodon. Those accounts do not see any replies to their post from the fediverse, or any fediverse posts at all for that matter–we are invisible to them. So no, he’s not “on the fediverse”, he’s on Threads. I doubt he knows the fediverse even exists.

You could go for the best of both worlds and use Mint LMDE (Debian Edition). But if only using it as a server, plain Debian should be all you need.

I use the Menu key for my compose key, since I never used it for anything and it’s conveniently right next to the right Ctrl key.
BTW if you want to see the combos that are possible with the Compose key, look in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose