Yeah this is the way. Debian stable has outdated packages, debian testing has broken packages. Ubuntu is difficult for beginners because of snap. Linux mint is the perfect just-works debian-based beginner distro. Same for DE: Gnome is hard to use, KDE is bloated and unstable, and XFCE is too minimalist/diy/quirky for beginner users (you need to add a panel applet in order for the volume keys to work? Huh??). Cinnamon is the perfect middle ground between resource usage and features.

Make sure during installation that you create a 4 GB swap partition too

Or at least as large as your RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.

To all the people downvoting: plastering the political compass in contexts where it makes no fucking sense is a kind of ironic humor meant to highlight the reductive nature of judging political ideology by two axes. It’s a shitpost, and a top-tier one at that.

What desktop environment? KDE, right? Just make sure you aren’t using the encFS backend for your vaults, it’s insecure https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm

I don’t use KDE, so they may have already dropped support for encfs, idk. Just wanted to leave a warning for you/anyone else

I think that’s a “no motorbikes” sign. The thick thing above the back wheel is usually how they differentiate motorcycles from bikes on signs.

but I do have encrypted directories for my sensitive data

What do you use for encrypted directories? Ecryptfs?

some people can’t handle that most humans just wanna be friends regardless of gov politics bs

Yes exactly. There are lots of internet weirdos trying to spread culture war nonsense, but if you actually go outside every once in a while, you realize that most people just aren’t like that. I work in a restaurant that has a lot of ukrainian and russian visitors (migrants). At one point, a large group of russians came in for a birthday party, and they asked the owner to put on a playlist of russian music. Like, really cheesy russian pop. After some time, a girl from a smaller table of ukrainians calls me over and complains about the music. I relay it to the owner, and he asks them what they would rather listen to instead. They tell him, and he adds their songs on the queue. The rest of the evening was spent playing and dancing to russian and ukrainian and armenian songs (the owner is armenian, and there were some armenian guests too) and the atmosphere was just generally very chill. Not a single fuck was given about politics that evening.

Can’t believe nobody has linked the relevant xkcd yet

Fake, they’re government surveillance robots /j

Teams is such a confusing app. To start off, what is it meant to be? A frontend for onedrive? A chat app? A videocall app? It’s like microsoft’s attemp to make their own everything app. What was wrong with Skype? Actually, Teams shows up as “skypeforlinux” (complete with a Skype icon) in Pavucontrol, so is the videocalling part of teams just a re-packaged skype? Why does the web version of teams have its own integrated Excel which is slightly different from standard web excel? It feels like the UI was specifically designed to mislead. There is a list of icons on the left that allow you to switch between different contexts in the app. The visual design makes it look like a set of radiobuttons, except clicking on some of them twice does a different action… There is a home screen, and then also a second SUPER HOME screen!? I can’t even get angry it at for being a slow bloated jumble of spyware like the rest of microsoft’s garbage (which it is), I just feel a sense of morbid fascination every time I’m forced to use it. It feels like an AI-generated app from a future where AI is much more capable but still utterly fails at understanding humans. It’s the uncanny valley of user experience.

YAML is good for files that have a very flexible structure or need to define a series of steps. Like github workflows or docker-compose files. For traditional config files with a more or less fixed structure, TOML is better I think

yes.

zipped xml!

At first I though this was just a regular shitpost but then I saw the screen tear edit lol

On a more serious note, is there a way to actually fix screen tearing under x11? I’ve always thought a compositing manager like xcompmgr would do it, but for me it only makes it worse?

It’s an edit. In the original, the TV screen makes it look like the guy on the left is threatening the guy on the right (the foot looks like a knife). It’s meant to be a commentary on how biased media coverage can essentially reverse the roles of the oppressed and the oppressors. And this edit was made to show how in America, republican media coverage tells people that the democrats are “sucking off” leftists, even though democrats don’t agree on a lot of things with actual leftists in reality. The caption explaining all of that has been cropped of, you’re just meant to know it, which is what makes this meme funny.

Finally, many of the items on Temu are factory rejects that would have gone to the landfill otherwise.

Are they really? You got a source? This is pretty cool if true.

It’s hypocrisy all the way down. Microsoft is telling people to run their 144hz screens at 60hz to save the planet while sending thousands of good computers to the landfill with their stupid TPM requirements. Never believed this “carbon footprint” garbage, never will. You are the carbon that they want to reduce.

I find that a large number of conspiracy theories are asking the right questions, just not providing the right answers. Does big tech want to control our minds with 5G towers and microchips hidden in covid vaccines? Probably not. Does big tech want to control our minds with social media and invasive advertising? Absolutely. Is the world controlled by a secret society of lizard people? Probably not. Is the world controlled by a not-so-secret society of billionaires and politicians? To a large extent. Even those awful racist or bigoted conspiracy theories start to sound somewhat palpable palatable if you filter out the racist or bigoted part. Do Jews make life for the rest of us miserable by controlling the economy? No. But replace “Jews” with “the owning class”, and suddenly it kind of makes sense.

EDIT: Is the government putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay? No. Are corporations putting chemicals in water bottles that turn frogs into hermaphrodites? Literally yes

EDIT PART TWO - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Palatable, not palpable. Words are hard.

Is pasting in your signature digitally not an option? That’s what I’ve been doing all my life, but then again the area where I live is quite progressive in terms of technology.

On a related note, someone should make an image filter that makes digital documents look like they’ve been scanned in. Would save a ton of paper and people’s time lol.