Willingness to independently learn and the capacity to let the frustration roll off of you. You will occasionally want to bang your head against the wall, but give yourself the grace to learn.

KDE for the desktop and xfce for the laptop

Also, how many of you have ridden in the car with someone who experienced or witnessed too many accidents? Some of those people would pogo stick 2 miles to the nearest store rather than sit next to you while you back a car out of the garage. I think a lot of people who have experienced the downside of cars have sympathy for the idea that it doesn’t have to be like this. We could have… options!

I’ve been a Linux user since 2005ish and a DJ since at least 2013. I’ve tried a lot of music players including Rythmbox. I settled on Clementine/Strawberry or Amorok, depending on use case. Haven’t used either of them recently.

With that said, there is no right answer. Find one you like!

I can’t switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit, the switch just reverts. I do think it looks beautiful and has weather stats that I use when I bike but other apps don’t always have (air quality, UV) .

Whisper worked for me. I’ll have to go back through and tag speakers and fox a few spots but you guys have saved me 80-90% of the work. Thank you.

Transcription of numerous voice mails and phone calls for a legal matter. Would like to supply transcripts with the audio files so we don’t have to pay as much time for the lawyer’s paralegals to review and decide what is actually going to be useful.

Recently I found some peertube instances that had good quality content that was interesting to me and had more of a chance to test drive it than I have in the past. Very nice!

Good point. If I know it’ll meet my needs, I’m sometimes inclined to buy tech that’s a few years old, especially if the newer version just adds cloud, AI, or something else I don’t want/need. In many cases it’s still marketed the same so I think end of support dates should be clearly marked on the product itself so the consumer can make an informed choice. Intentionally bricking a device should be treated as littering and the company should be responsible for disposal fees.

Linux is a different story because of the volunteer presence. If anything Linux should get subsidies for keeping e-waste out of landfills after the manufacturer has long abandoned the product.

My laptop is about 5 years old now and still runs as fast as the day I bought it, if not faster. I replaced the battery twice, but this thing could go another 5-10 years if I don’t drop it or spill something on it.

I think when you press the button to cross a spike strip should automatically deploy directly on the stop line. Inching into the ped area with just the front tires will cost you two tires, running the light costs 4 and probably some scratches in the paint.

Facebook/Meta and the like have proven to be untrustworthy. If they were a person, would you let them federate with your friend group? I wouldn’t. I hope they’re not invited to the party because the things that brought me here are the things that drove me away from there.

I live in suburbia and the grocery store on the edge of my neighborhood is accessible via a dirt desire path. This beats so many of my friends neighborhoods, but these numbskulls couldn’t pour the 20 feet of sidewalk to connect the commercial to the residential, even though the sidewalk has a 2 foot long spur where it should be. 100% car brained.

Still, running to the store on my bike is just as fast as driving, if not a few mins faster.

Saw this recently and similar stuff in the distant past. Very cool. Would love to explore these places.

You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It’s the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most “reputable” tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.

With MS enshitifying Windows at an ever increasing pace and the hard work of open source developers, volunteers, advocates, to make Linux better and more approachable, I won’t be surprised at all to see that percentage move up.

“You mean its free and doesn’t try to sell me other products the whole time I’m using it?”

First if all, welcome to Linux. I also found it in my high school/college years and am so glad I did. Things will be weird. I remember thinking “what kind of Fisher Price OS is this?” because Ubuntu was so simple looking back then and I was used to the unnecessary clutter of Windows. There is so much to explore, but I think you are on a good path with Mint. I have also run Mint for a few years and love some of the things it does.

A helpful note: If you plan on sharing files between the two OSes, be aware that Windows won’t typically access a Linux file system like ext4 or btrfs and Linux can handle NTFS (windows) in a lot of cases, but if you have bitlocker running you may have additional hurdles.

I highly recommend getting a big external drive ans backing up regularly (like at least once a week). At some point you will screw up and be glad you did it. I only overwrote a disk partition on accident once, and I recovered the data, but I also learned my lesson the hard way. Don’t be like me!

Nextcloud Calendar is where I’m blocking out my time. I use a proprietary task app with a Linux client because tasks.org/former Astrid/nextcloud tasks isn’t quite there yet… for me. If I was creating a system to keep me on track today, I would center the whole thing on Nextcloud. The one thing I despise about nextcloud is how it handled locales and formats. There is no easy way to move to YYYY-MM-DD and HH-DD without messing up other stuff like day of the week captions language. The thing I love about nextcloud is how it doesn’t spam you with garbage recommendations and clutter and such like Outlook.

I’m a KDE user, but had a great experience using Budgie. I’m glad this software is an option for people.