Emacs users be like

Find widely known orgs that use the platform, the BBC comes to mind here. Search for other well known orgs to point out so you don’t just have one example. Highlight the fact that other platforms are cross linking to the fediverse (Meta’a threads for example) so a fediverse presence will give the city a presence on those platforms with no extra effort needed. Point out that Twitter has become an unreliable platform due to ownership change and that that situation could replay itself at any time on any centralized platform. Help people get Mastodon working on phones if needed - the official app is quite good. Basically just sell the platform as best you can, don’t go heavy on ideology and focus on practical benefits.

In my experience many of the people who haven’t quit are self medicating for attention or depressive reasons. Of the folks I know who vape about half were diagnosed with ADHD later in life (30+) and quit after finding a stimulant medication that worked for them. The rest are unmedicated and self medicating with nicotine and coffee or energy drinks. Self medicating is overlooked in virtually every discussion about nicotine and I’d like to see it considered more often when the topic comes up instead of just leaping straight to “nicotine use bad” or “nicotine users should be punished” like most discussions do.

Edit: there’s also some interesting research re: nicotine’s neuroprotective properties that gets lost in the prohibition fervor

Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?

Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.

Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances/provide Mastodon hosting for their employees or members in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well, this enables public discussion with the org in twitter format without a third party controlling the platform.

Write a couple of your own toy services as practice. Write a one-shot that fires at a particular time during boot, a normal service that would run a daemon and a mount service that fires after its dependencies are loaded (like, say, a bind mount that sets up a directory under /run/foo after the backing filesystem is mounted - I do this to make fast ext4 storage available in some parts of the VFS tree while using a btrfs filesystem for everything else.) You can also write file watcher services that fire after changes to a file or directory, I use one of those to mirror /boot/ to /.boot/ on another filesystem so it’s captured by my system snapshots.

I’d start by reading the docs so you have some ideas about what services can do, then you’ll find uses that you wouldn’t have thought of before.

iPod replacement, dedicated smart home device dashboard, dedicated navigation/entertainment system in the car, dedicated UI for something on your home network or weather info or headlines or whatever website you want to check regularly in one place

Yeah same. When he started topping my feed despite me blocking him I ejected from his platform and washed my hands of the whole thing.

When I logged in about six weeks after the ownership change my feed included Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and 2-3 other right wing influencers. I follow none of these people, I have zero interest in what they have to say and I find them reprehensible. I deleted my account and haven’t used the platform since.

+1, I used EndeavourOS

I had to set one of these up for my SO a couple of years ago. I dropped EndeavourOS on it, installed btrbk and configured automatic snapshots on a schedule and before package installation/update in case she managed to bork things by pip installing things into system python.

Fedora would probably work well too if you want a lower maintenance burden. I hesitate to suggest Ubuntu or Debian or their derivatives since you’ll probably want to be somewhat current with your Nvidia drivers.

I wrote simple hooks for my package manager to fire system snapshots before I install or update any package. It’s a nice safety belt that I’ve never actually needed to use, but if I do need it it’s there.

We usually find solutions or workarounds to Nvidia driver issues within a day or two in the Arch community. The absolute worst case handling I’ve had to do was fork the Nvidia dkms package at the prior version (think nvidia-dkms-550) and run that until Nvidia themselves released a fixed version. Still pretty straightforward.

The most helpful advice I can give to anyone running a distro maintained by folks with day jobs is “take system snapshots before updates” - do that and the worst case fix to any update problem like this is still really easy to handle, even if you’re 10 minutes out from a work call and an update just went wrong.

I mean, wouldn’t you if the rake handle had huge bags of cash tied to it? They’ll always step on the rake but they’re practiced enough that they only get hit in the face occasionally.

I take daily work log notes in obsidian, then transclude chunks from those notes into topic notes and attach config files, images, context from the web, etc.

If only they had a safe place to put their money that was protected by law and insured against losses.

Under his eye

You might like Vivaldi, they’re the most innovative chromium derived browser that I’ve used

That matches with our experience from the US to the EU. Long haul is about 50/50 IIRC, you have to hunt a little bit to be sure the flights you book are Airbus