I have the opposite reaction when I see these memes. To me it’s a reminder of how inclusive some of my favorite nerdy communities are, on top of being a fun little in-joke like any meme should be. And I’m an old beardy middle aged dad too for whatever that’s worth.

However, that doesn’t mean the image itself is innocent or appropriate for most audiences. I’m not going to be asking the family’s opinion on this one, lol. But I don’t see it as a manga fetish thing at all. More empowerment than exploitation for the owners of the legs shown.

Well, you can’t say that unless you know what his goals were, lol. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody used their charisma and/or social awareness to hurt society.

Compared with ambitious career politicians, I would expect actors to understand human emotion and empathy better, and I would expect a body builder to understand correlating outputs/results to inputs/tactics.

I don’t see that at all. This meme is referring to some niche application or to a person with their fingers all up in the nuts and bolts of their OS.

It’s common for beginner-friendly desktop distros to have Firefox and LibreOffice installed out of the box. For mainstream use that covers the vast majority.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

I think that’s also the case any time you are the OS installer and administrator for your own system. I haven’t purchased an off the shelf PC for myself since the '90s, and in the years since then I’ve had many more basic “this shit won’t boot” issues with Windows, though granted I used Windows much more during that time.

And even if you ARE setting up your pen system from scratch, I would submit that the install process for Linux Mint is an order of magnitude simpler than Windows these days.

Being simple to use out of the box is NOT a bad thing on its own. We are simply used to seeing the proprietary profit-driven version, which is the path to enshittification. When something works great out of the box but you still own your machine and have access to any damn thing you want that’s hidden from view by default, that is just a good product.

I’ve been an engineer in electronics and software for over 20 years. I have a masters in software engineering. I currently work on C and C++ code every day for embedded systems, including one that’s embedded linux. The terminal is my comfort zone. Screens full of super-legible monospaced text please my eyes.

I run Linux Mint Cinnamon (btw) on every computer of mine, even my work machine, and I don’t care who knows it!

I recommend it to anybody of any skill level who will listen.

A wise man once said

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

Yeah that controller might just have a hardware problem.

I’ve had pretty good luck with Xbox controllers from multiple generations, but it sounds like a LOT of people have problems with them. Even the elite controllers! It’s a shame because their shape and layout work great for me, and I’m sure the same is true of other people with broken controllers and no spares.

Controllers needing to be updated is dumb in a way, sure. But as somebody who has worked in the design/manufacture/test of embedded electronics & software systems, I know the development of those dumb little accessories was a massive project, and there’s so much potential for bugs or security issues down the line. After a quick search it looks like MS claims it was over $100 million in R&D for the xbone controller, and that’s 15 years of inflation ago.

Back around the same time It was part of a $10M project at my job and that thing took over most of the damn company!

I think better questions to ask first might be things like “Can I pass the controller USB connection to windows in a VM?” which is probably yes, and “Can I just never update this controller?” which I would normally say is a yes, but it sounds like yours has issues.

I recommend Mint. It’s basically ubuntu with the controversial stuff disabled (Canonical’s snaps mostly, but I guess also any ads for their pro services) and with an extra layer of polish.

I’m happy with it for both the “I want something that works reliably” reasons and the “I’m an engineer who wants a free system that I can control and modify” reasons.

I was actually going to comment that I now know about this cheap option thanks to the lawsuit, lol.

I don’t watch live TV because I value my time, but every once in a while there’s a reason to tune into that one thing.

I found the perfect set of instructions for enjoying the work that went into Ubuntu without dealing with snaps or canonical.

They can be found in on https://www.linuxmint.com/

Yeah, it is what I’m going to install on my parents’ Win10 machines, but it is also what I use myself at home and work. There are almost no new users I wouldn’t recommend it to.

No distro is going to work for everybody, of course, and having the choice is part of the beauty. The mint project is doing great stuff though.

Yep, looks like it’s based on Ubuntu and specifically targets Windows converts with its out of box experience.

Their website is very commercial and “upgrade to pro now” though. If the distro isn’t pushy about it once installed, then maybe no big deal.

One nice thing with Mint is that it’s still funded by donations and sponsorships, and not any kind of commercial activity. It has that FOSSy aspect of being a good distro just for the sake of being good software for the world, not to be the entry point into somebody’s business plan.

It’s a distro that satisfies the side of me that’s the ADHD software engineer that wants access to the deepest most basic workings of my system, while also satisfying the side of me that’s an old man with a lot of non-computer hobbies outside work who just needs the shit to work unless I actively use my super user powers to break it.

Saw it. Decided not to change it because that’s how somebody doing the “clapping on the syllable” thing would say it.

Yep that’s also an option if using an Ubuntu derivative at all is an issue for you.

LIN 👏

NUX 👏

MINT 👏

I’ve seen plenty of Debian mentions, and no pushback there whatsoever from me.

But if you find yourself frustrated that you can’t just have Ubuntu without Canonical’s snaps and ads and other ickiness, Mint is exactly that. Or maybe better, I dunno. It’s super polished and full featured and stable.

And even better in this era of Windows 10 support ending, the main/default version (Linux Mint Cinnamon) looks like Windows out of the box but it installs, works, and updates at like 10x the speed. (The 10x is an exaggeration for moment to moment desktop work and latency, but for the install and especially for updates I think it’s accurate)

I hope you have fun as well, whether your account is deleted or not!

One note about the complaints and drama in response to your suggestions though: I see your instance is lemmy.ml and that fact alone will make a lot of people respond to you with hostility, regardless of what your personal political beliefs actually are.

And I don’t know the latest of who is defederated with who, but you may also not even see some of the more decent communities.

Im tired of smartphones consuming everyone’s minds.

Resisting the standard smartphone addiction just makes the addiction of some others so much more apparent. My own wife is still pretty badly shackled to hers.