Oh yeah, the DNC is crappy controlled opposition that normally exists to make conservative ideas seem liberal/leftist to americans.

… But that still means tens of millions of people actively choose the nightmare over the boring uninspiring candidate. Both things are true and both are bad. :/

My version of this, and I bet I’m not alone here is more like

Windows -> Linux Mint -> Debian

[ Picture of grumpy yet somehow friendly old graybeard with one foot into his “goose farmer retirement” equivalent ]

Yeah but it’s a poll so the evil people get to vote too.

Yep. I enjoy hypothetical discussions about how to fix our shit to benefit humans as much as anybody else.

But that’s the wall I mentally run into every time: dozens of millions of people voted for the obvious greater evil THREE consecutive times.

And these weren’t some kind of bland Romney v Obama elections that were very much two sides of the same coin. They were random politician v dementia predator Hitler and roughly half of voters were smashing that pedoHitler button.

My main original Skyrim play through on desktop was 100 hours.

My Skyrim VR play through was 200 hours. I think in 2019. So fun.

Yeah now it’s “will it speedrun DOOM?”

I recently had a similar experience. I used Linux Mint for the longest time, which is ubuntu based. And I tried LMDE for a little bit recently.

But then I decided to try straight Debian 13 w/ KDE Plasma. I absolutely love it, and I’m old enough that seeing

starting Debian GNU/Linux

just feels cozy and correct. Plus like you said the speed and stability are somehow even better, but that I had issues before.

I thought with them it was more about the entire device than just the OS. People might say they love their mac but nobody is telling friends & family to just install macOS on that old PC that’s losing Microsoft support.

It isn’t necessarily a linear correlation where you can pick the cutoff that best suits your personality and politics.

The technology and the act of surveillance don’t just slide you up the safety/privacy slope. They carry their own risks that can REDUCE safety while still paying the privacy trade off. And it is not predictable.

And that (plus caring about people) is why I don’t support the Leopards Eating Faces coalition even though I’m an old white educated native-born male USian.

There are a lot of people out there, so many things can be true at once.

I think it’s inevitable that some people use labels as excuses just because awareness of those conditions is so much higher. I also think it’s inevitable that there are a lot of people who struggled all their life with things that are difficult to diagnose or weren’t on the minds of parents and teachers 30 years ago.

And there’s probably no way to ever say definitively, with evidence, either way on this – but it would blow my fucking mind to find out that Lemmy didn’t have a neurospicy percentage of participants significantly higher than the general population.

And even if that were known to be untrue, I think Lemmy also attracts people who are more aware, open, and accepting of that stuff in themselves and others.

Ohh noooo!

Now my backlog of games that should be shrinking is only going to grow by 10% next year instead of 12% like it could have!

The tech companies haven’t driven me to the point of utter contempt for consoles like they have for phones, but at the same time I have multiple PCs and more games than I will ever play.

Each one of those F-22s cost as much as a Level 1 trauma center hospital, and it’s specialty is filling up entire hospitals in the other side of the world!

My Windows partition at work went unused for several months before I wiped it.

At home it took about two weeks before I reclaimed that space!

Except if THAT is a 12 o’clock flasher, in which case it is correct about 30 times each day.

That’s an angle that more people should talk about, honestly.

The mistreatment of the American populace isn’t just to keep a steady supply of cheap labor for the rich people’s investments, it’s to keep a steady supply of cheap lives for the government to do their dirty work.

My generation’s dead and disabled veterans fell in service to that sweet Iraqi oil. Oh and the Saddam hidden underground meme, can’t forget that one!

I had two different reactions to your comment simultaneously.

First, yeah the meme is political but you went hard on the American angle. But the image is of israel, it says israel in two places, it’s joking about the pope which is not an american thing, and then it mentions the name of a dead american.

Second, I just don’t think Lemmy has enough users and enough content to be picky and granular about categorizing all memes into the appropriate community. And that’s before we even get into the realities of federation and how there could be multiple active “memes@*” communities.

If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.

But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.

I think it’s more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?

I’ve spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!

Ooh, a headline that might get me to pay attention to an upcoming phone. How fun!

Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)

I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.

I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)