Eh, bring it all on. Part of what is great about FOSS is the vibrant ecosystem. I welcome new stuff, even if I don’t have much use for it.

I do think it makes a lot of sense for certain use cases. Like my Steam Deck, great use case for an immutable distro.

Another is school or work deployments where you just need a herd of identical, generic systems or thin clients that run the same small set of applications.

My grandma used to be, but years of Facebook right-wing propaganda has poisoned her.

Now she spouts conspiracy talking points about the “trans agenda” immigration, and so forth.

My parents have always been pretty right wing but covid pushed them even farther.

They aren’t hardcore MAGA nuts, but they are pretty pro Trump, especially my dad. They also buy the propaganda from Fox news hook, line, and sinker.

You fell for the meme lol.

Arch is great if you want very high levels of customization without having to get into compiling and coding, like with Gentoo or NixOS.

I think of it as the distro equivalent to custom keyboard kit, you get all the parts and can swap them out as much as you want. But you’re not designing and fabricating your own circuit board and microcontroller, writing your own custom firmware, getting a custom case modeled and fabricated, etc.

There’s a reason “I use Arch, BTW” Is a meme.

There was a study done by a university a while back that had hundreds of randomly selected women rate headshots of men from 1 to 10 in various stages of hair, from full thick head of hair to completely smooth bald.

They plotted the results and found that the full head of hair pictures averaged the highest, as you would expect. Then as the baldness increased, the average ratings dropped extremely quickly.

However, once the pictures got to the 100% bald men, the average ratings shot back up nearly identical to the full head of hair pictures.

The conclusion of the researchers: if you care about being perceived as attractive to women as a balding male, you need to commit to one or the other hard. Either get hair transplant surgery, get a high quality hairpiece, or commit to the bald look hardcore and shave it butter smooth.

The worst thing you can do from that perspective is to let the balding hair just kind of grow out all partial/thin.

I guess it’s the classic stereotype, the thing the majority of women are attracted to is confidence. So if you’re going bald, commit hardcore to the bald look, embrace hats, jewelry, and clothing that emphasizes your head shape and face, experiment with facial hair styles if you can grow it.

Keep your skin clean and your head held high. Lots of sexy bald guys out there, your worth as a person isn’t held in your hair.

My balding grandpa dressed like the classic dorky old man; shorts pulled up over his belly, tucked-in baggy polo, socks pulled up to his knees with dad-sandals, and a dirty trucker cap worn crooked on his head with giant yellow-brown glasses. But damn if he wasn’t the most confident man I’ve ever met. Humble, calm, but super hard worker and very driven, also honest as the day is long. Married happily to my grandma for over 40 years until freak cancer took him early.

Hundreds a people from all over the country came to his service, the amount of lives he had positively impacted was incredible. So many people pulled me aside to tell me what a great man my grandpa was, it was powerful.

Lemmy is a federated space. You can join an instance where your views are more in-line with the other users, or you can stay and expect to get pushback.

That’s the cool thing about Lemmy, it’s not a single thing, it’s a federation of many smaller spaces with different focuses, interests, vibes, etc.

But heads up, if you are defending the cop in Illinois that slaughtered that woman in her house, you’re either completely clueless of American policing (which would make sense given that you’re not from here) or you are a nasty cop-simp.

The cop got slapped with multiple charges. Even his own department thought it was fucked what he did, which is rare because pigs generally like to wallow together in the same shit.

Protonmail, it’s fantastic. Sleek design, solid feature set, integrates with Thunderbird if you want to use that.

There is no “original Bible.” Different sects of Christianity have different canons that they consider “scripture.”

Most Protestants adhere to 66 books divided into the “old” & “new” testaments. Roman catholics include several more books commonly called the “apocrypha” or “deuterocanonical” books.

Various traditions in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox sects such as the Syriac Orthodox church or the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church include even more books and depending on the specific tradition, don’t even have a closed canon of official scripture. They don’t really think of scripture in terms of being officially canonized, it’s more of a spectrum from “more authoritative” to “less authoritative.”

There was no defined canon for any of the early Christians for several centuries. Early Christians circulated many different epistles, religious poems, stories, legends, sermons, and parables, often just by oral tradition.

Some, like the gospel of Mark, are considered fairly historical by many scholars, others are more fantastical or don’t have as solid historical attestation.

There is active debate amongst scholars about authorship of the now canonized Biblical corpus and the level of historicity.

Take the Bible for what it is; an impressive and important historical work, really a small library of ancient literature. It’s not a magical text though, it was written by people in very specific sociological and historical contexts and should be studied and examined with those in mind.

If you find it enlightening and inspiring to your life and it helps you be a better person to others, that’s great. And if you attach special spiritual or religious meaning to it, that’s your call. But that doesn’t change the nature of what the Bible is and where it came from.

It’s not about being “obvious.” It’s about understanding the most basic concepts involved with using a piece of equipment that is central to their job and has been that way for decades.

I wouldn’t want ride in a car with somebody that couldn’t remember what the difference between red, yellow, and green traffic lights are, or couldn’t remember how to activate their turn signals or windshield wipers. And I certainly wouldn’t want them operating a vehicle as a core part of their everyday job.

Now I’ll grant that in general, a car is far more dangerous than a computer. But the principle still holds, these are not tough concepts to understand, takes literally 5 minutes to explain at most. Plus, they haven’t changed in at least 30 years, so it’s not some new fangled techno-babble.

I’m mean, it’s literally in the name. These are not concepts that require a degree to understand, much less an hour long meeting.

Logout means ending your user session, restart means your computer turns off and then comes back on, and shutdown means it turns off and stays off.

The buttons are all in the start menu, they are clearly marked, and these concepts have existed for 30 years at least.

It’s like driving a car for decades and not knowing what the difference between reverse, drive, and neutral are.

“X is down/broke.” No, Kelly, the internet isn’t “down.” You typed the URL wrong in your browser.

People will state it like the entire company has lost internet connectivity, or an entire department cannot access files or run a certain program, when actually, only a single user is having a problem.

Also people not knowing the difference between log out, restart, and shutdown. Even after explaining it to them.

Defs use a P2P VPN solution like Tailscale, Netbird, etc.

It’s more secure anyways and allows finer control.

As much as I can get it, and more every year.

All my computers run Linux exclusively. Gaming desktop, personal laptop, Steam Deck, work laptop, and all my servers in my home lab.

Hypervisor is XCP-ng, VMs are a mix of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and some random other Linux distros for testing and experimenting.

My NAS is a TrueNAS Core box.

I’m in the process of switching my router to PFSense.

Phone is a Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS.

Email, VPN, and cloud storage is Proton.

Password manager is Bit Warden.

Office docs are all Libre Office & Only Office.

The only non-FOSS software I use constantly is Discord and Steam, and of course, most of the games I play. On my phone I have majority FOSS apps for everyday stuff, but some things are still proprietary.

Pretty pessimistic, short term (the next decade or two.)

I am optimistic about socialism and anarchism very long term (the next 100-1000 years,) maybe just because I try to remain hopeful on stuff like this.

Humanity has created some incredible things, we have so much potential to be a boon for the planet, for the animals, and for each other. But we must oust Capitalism, corporatism, statism, and fascism to even have a chance.

Interesting. Seems like my situation is pretty specific to the US. Lots of folks from other countries that seem to have much cheaper options by default.

Right on. I do need unlimited, as my job requires me to be on the road a fair bit and accessing lots of data.

But that’s a good idea, I’ll see if my carrier offers that option.

I’ve been thinking of using Linkwarden for a while now. As my computer usage spreads across more and more devices, having a single place to go for all my bookmarks would be fantastic.

Interesting, seems like Europe has some really cheap options, much cheaper than the US.

Nice! Maybe Europe has it better, (wouldn’t be the first time lol.)

Almost everybody I know has something like this, growing up as a teenager it was the same too.

Nice, over here $45 a month is pretty cheap, at least in my circles. Most people I know are paying close to double that.