I bought a fancy desktop PC recently so I’m not in the market. Otherwise I would consider it, but only if the desktop environment was usable for general computing. I believe it is, but I’m not sure if its version of Linux would be best for like software development.

Gop is like a clock where only the minute hand is stopped and the hour hand is flapping all over. Sometimes it’s kind of correct, but not for the bigger picture.

I think a lot about the guy I worked with that said he was going to Palantir. We were like “but what if they have you doing awful things?” He was like, big shrug. He was always friendly to people in the office, but I guess that’s as far as it went.

Have you talked to a lot of tech workers? I feel like there’s a set of left wing ones, a larger set of libertarian types, and an even larger set of people who are shockingly ignorant of politics and history.

I think it would be pretty funny if jesus did return and cast all these rich assholes into the lake of fire. Because they fucking deserve it.

may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.

I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.

Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.

I’m pretty sure the browser has more sandboxing than a desktop app running as me. The desktop app could do anything. Firefox tries to prevent webpages from doing nefarious stuff.

When I have to use discord, I use it in the browser. I don’t trust the app not to get up to no good.

Pop!_os worked fine for me out of the box. The UI is a little mac-like (dock on bottom, spotlight like search when you hit the super key) by default.

Steam just works. Heroic launcher just works. It’s simple.

I’ve also used mint, but had slightly less luck with its install working out of the box. All issues fixed eventually but there was some head scratching.

Linux nerds tend to have opinions and it’s easy to lose sight of what it’s like as a beginner.

But ultimately it’s pretty easy to switch distributions. They’re all free.

If right wing people were smart they wouldn’t be right wing. Of course they’re going to believe and share AI slop video. They’re emotional driven fools.

I only buy drm free music and then back it up somewhere myself. Bandcamp at least is drm free, but who knows if they’ll turn to shit after being bought and sold.

Buying music on Bandcamp and similar has been good for me. When I got laid off I kept all the music I owned and didn’t have to pay anymore. All these subscription services suck.

One of the guys at my old job submitted a PR with tests that basically just mocked everything, tested nothing. Like,

with patch("something.whatever", return_value=True):
  assert whatever(0) is True
  assert whatever(1) is True

Except for a few dozen lines, with names that made it look like they were doing useful.

He used AI to generate them, of course. Pretty useless.

Moved to Linux (popos on desktop, mint on ancient laptop). Been fine. Don’t miss windows. Play games and browse the web without issue.

Thiel is a dangerous piece of trash and I’m disappointed he hasn’t… let’s say… been beamed up like kirk.

When I was making money, I’d buy albums from bands I liked. Built up a nice library.

Some people buy albums

Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:

• maps and GPS
• messaging (signal)
• emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop)
• ebook reading
• Wikipedia / quick research
• Lemmy

I could drop lemmy from mobile because it’s just a time waster and news source.

Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don’t need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.

Games are nice. I don’t want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it’s 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn’t fit in my pocket.

I don’t have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don’t find it much of a distraction.

Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.

I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”

Have you tried explaining something to someone lately? A lot of people don’t care and don’t understand. About anything