If you wanna try Arch + KDE without hassle, well Arch has an easier installer now, but I use EndeavourOS. It’s a lovely smooth Arch experience!

Very easy installer with lots of options to choose from. :)

Yes! Great way of putting it. It’s hard to explain how just using an OS can be a fun hobby in itself.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed does it all for me. I work and play games on it and stuff, but my laptop is less mission critical, so I run EndeavourOS on it and experiment with fun layouts and everything is all “frutiger-aero-esque”. It feels like how I nostalgicallyremember those WinXP-7 days!

Snapper rollbacks with BTRFS are incredible for letting you play around with an OS you actually use, and still giving you a cushion to fall back on. :D

My little media streamer / guest PC has Mint. Nice, maybe a little boring, predictable, reliable. Ahhh simplicity. :)

That’s what I was thinking!

Yeh yeh, I get it, Lemmy, we’re all wageslaves now and religion is Absolutely Always Bad™ /s…but objectively here…

Things like churches and temples were for everyone to commune and worship and gather. They were, and still are, architectural marvels!

Any of us would be so lucky these days to feel any kind of attachment to our community, and to do some kind of work that we can look at and say “That’s there because of us.”

It’s hard for most of us to imagine, I think, because alienation from the results of our labor and each other is so wildly beyond reason in our lifetimes. Even building is essentially factory work anymore. Architecture as art is mostly dead in favor of brutalist templated concrete cubes everywhere.

Not to mention, we’re all constantly burned out and exhausted from meaningless grinds that usually amount to “Have a pulse (optional), deal with people, send emails to nowhere in particular. Produce nothing but Co2.”

But I like to think this was a positive thing. Building wonders, being a part of your community, having something to be proud of doing, like a collective hobby.

Lol I know I’m waxing romantically whilst likely being very inaccurate, I’m not historian, but I also think we can take the best notions of the past to make the future less awful…

To everyone down voting and assuming this is ragebait, I would ask we take a step back. I think this is a genuine question and I can’t help but feel a bit heard that someone is asking it.

In the midst of all this ridiculous culture-warring, creators have a ton of anxiety now. It’s one thing to be afraid your creation will get you laughed at for being cringey, (as if that’s not a huge barrier already).

But it’s another entirely when it feels like in this era of “all art is political”, writing anyone who has recognizable human qualities will forcibly put you, the creator, into some ideological category where you’ll be scrutinized and judged personally based on your work’s perceived “agenda.”

The right with their relentless “woke-hunting”, the left with their “purity tests” to blame you for not championing their particular social cause. Showing your art seems to inevitably involve chumming the waters to the terminally online. This can also produce anxieties of being doxxed or something if it’s high profile enough.

That being said: My heart is warmed by all the overwhelmingly level headed responses in this thread. Seriously. It gives me hope.

Please notice I said FEELS a lot up there…Our perception is definitely muddied by how social media tends to megaphone the worst of society, and it tends to discourage us from being seen or interacting with others.

I’m glad threads like this demonstrate how genuine people can be. It provides quite a contrast.

While we’re at it…

Don’t make life choices based on the opinion of white supremacists.

Now your great life advice is even more universally applicable! :D

Not shilling but this is exactly why 3rd party services like iDrive are good: Cloud backup but you have the choice of keeping your own encryption key.

Apple, M$, Google, are all like “just trust me bro BTW a big chunk of our business is data sales” lol

There’s something that strikes me as fundamentally hilarious that “good with computers” in the Windows world means “disabling all of Windows’ pushy services that rip control from the user and sell their data.”

Like “I think I’m pretty good with computers!”

“Oh yeah? How much of Windows have you managed to sabotage so it stays out of your way?”

LMAO . It could be such a good OS but its dark and anti-patterns are truly bizarre.

Yeah, I still remember that ad where he irritatingly looks at the caveman ad in the airport.

Silly ad, but I thank them for introducing me to Röyksopp! :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H02iwWCrXew

It’s gonna have to be “Linux From Scratch” at this point…starting with the hardware.

Also OP, if you want pretty and Cinnamon can’t do it for ya, you can always install KDE (my fav!) or GNOME or what have you right on top of your existing system.

Research before doing so! But it’s possible. :)

I also love Tumbleweed and rock it as my daily driver!

To complement this point, OP, you can also get that sweet rollback functionality in any distro! Usually the easiest way is selecting BTRFS as your file system on install, and installing a software called “TimeShift” that will manage snapshots for you.

BTRFS can be complicated, but basically, it allows remembering the changes in files, without needing to copy the ENTIRE file. This saves a ton of space. (You don’t need to get into the weeds deep diving if you don’t want to. Snapshots are great, everything else is great, as long as you aren’t doing crazy specific RAID setups or something lol)

Otherwise, on EXT4 for insurance, your rollbacks would just literally be copied files, which can eat your storage fast. :)

Tumbleweed is known for rolling (heh!) this in quite smoothly by default, but this is just an example how any distro can be tweaked how you like! (Highly recommend setting up Timeshift on ANY install.)

I absolutely second the advice in this comment: Try some live USBs or virtual machines and just play around for what feels right. Distro hopping can be lots of fun, but you’ll find one that “feels like home.”

:)

I agree with most folks here that usability-wise, both are truly fine! Mainly I think philosophy is where Mint might have an edge here.

Ubuntu, run by a corpo named Canonical, has had some controversial decisions in the past, such as inserting amazon ads into the system’s search feature, or “opt out” analytics being default, and lately, a system called “snap.”

Snap is controversial because it has a closed source backend, but effectively works just like its open-source counterpart, the “flatpak.” It’s packaged so the software has everything it needs to run.

Some people say they work great, others hate them, but Ubuntu doesn’t make it very easy for you to have a choice in the matter.

If you don’t like the idea of snaps, it’s a bit of a pain to get rid of it. And otherwise, Ubuntu will sneakily use it as the default way to install most software. Philosophically, this can feel a lot like why people left Windows behind!

Long term, that’s why I favor and recommend Mint to most newcomers: It doesn’t play those games, sometimes the drivers work even better, the community is fantastic, and the vast knowledge that works on Ubuntu should work on Mint too.

So that’s mainly where the difference will lie.

Either way, I wouldn’t sweat it too much while you’re learning, as long as it does what you want! And purple-orange is pretty snazzy. ;)

Mint just feels a little “cleaner” in my humble opinion. Most software you’d want the latest of, like GIMP or Discord, will be found as a Flatpak in Mint’s app store.

Hope this helps you get a clearer view!

Microsoft knows this has so much power with a certain computer user demographic and I hate it so much. It was the worst, having to teach people to install certain useful software while also directing them to override big scary warnings…“But just this time! Don’t do it all the time!”

It made me look shady, it made the software look shady, for no good reason.

…And you just know, sadly they’re the same kind of users that will probably repeat that pattern with a suspicious .exe they got in an email.

I like that idea, although I think we need some simpler guides as to what exactly one might he getting into if they’re setting up an instance that’s not just a domain name. (Costs, potential usage blowing up, legal issues with content, etc…)

Also, I really think there needs to be a smoother way to navigate between instances. I guess, so you’re still aware of “jumping nodes”, but also don’t feel locked in there. (Although maybe I’m just a newb still haha)

Truuue!

I probably engage here a little much too, but I’m glad there’s not a ton of “You also might like based on where your mouse hovered 0.4 seconds longer” panels on every single page!

Let’s be honest, corporate was just mad they didn’t think of it sooner! :p

Yeah you make a really good point there! I was perhaps thinking too simplistically and scaling from my personal experience with playing around on my home machine.

Although realistically, it seems the situation is pretty bad because freaky-giant-mega-computers are both training models AND answering countless silly queries per second. So at scale it sucks all around.

Minus the terrible fad-device-cycle manufacturing aspect, if they’re really sticking to their guns on pushing this LLM madness, do you think this wave of onboard “Ai chips” will make any impact on lessening natural resource usage at scale?

(Also offtopic but I wonder how much a sweet juicy exploit target these “ai modules” will turn out to be.)

Just wanna say, I’ve seen you on a lot of posts and I really appreciate your fervor in trying to reach out with hope and education after this dark turn of events. It’s important work and I’m really glad to feel we aren’t alone.

I don’t know if we agree 100% on a lot of things, but if we win a world where we can keep peaceably debating the merits of various pro-human policies, then we’ve won, and that’s worth fighting for.

Please make sure you’re taking good care of yourself and getting fresh air once in a while too, amigo. All this doomsaying by people can weary the soul. But thanks for putting so much effort into your outreach posts. :)

–Sincerely, A Christian-Anarchist (USA)

Bough it

Twish it!

Pull it!

(Yeah I know this joke is a stretch lmao)

“I work at Burger King making flame-broiled who-ppers I wear pa-per hats…”

It’s so dumb but also that was the joy of the old Internet. Stupid silliness like that lmao.