And he also is overwhelmed by needing to do things in life but not knowing where to start.

You’re a human and you need someone to validate you. I can’t do that from a keyboard, but I can offer an internet hug.

There’s a lot of good advice here. I have a son not too different in age than you. Your post made me want to give you a long hug. I’m sure you have many things about you that are assets and you haven’t had anyone in your life to help you find them.

As others have said, you sound smarter than you think you are, and your writing is good!

Small steps, and celebrate the small victories. Make one little thing better about yourself or your life every day. No matter how small. And be proud of yourself when you’ve done so.

Go take the good advice from others, but here’s a Dad Hug™.

Was a Gnome user until Gnome 3.

Since Plasma 5, I use KDE Plasma.

I’m just going to share my unvarnished opinions here, I clearly understand that Gnome users feel differently, and that’s okay.

• Gnome 3 performance was objectively worse on every bit of hardware I tried than Plasma. (Unfortunately I had functional gripes with Plasma 4 so couldn’t use it.)
• The years of faffing about I had trying to be happy with Gnome 3 and trying to use other alternatives until Plasma 5 was ready pretty much convinced me of this:
  • Gnome devs care more about achieving their vision of how a desktop should be used than they do about accommodating users who might feel differently. This is my perception, and it’s a deeply held opinion. No matter how strongly you feel I’m wrong, you aren’t going to change my mind. You can come at me if you want, but it’s going to bear no fruit.
  • KDE devs have a vision, but place nearly equal importance on ensuring their users can make different choices if they choose. If this isn’t true, they do a damn good job of pretending it is, and that’s good enough for me. 🙂
• I’m unhappy with the degree to which it appears the Gnome team has actively worked against the ability for users to easily customize, and with various feature removals that at this point are so far in my past that I probably don’t remember the specific things that pissed me off, but I remember their explanations for feature removals being salt in an open wound every last time I cared enough to investigate their stated reasons.

Plasma 6 does everything I want the way I want. I have loaded it (and Plasma 5) on very low end and very high end hardware and found it performant and functional on both, consistently.

You’ll note I don’t claim it to be the best. There are folks out there for whom the Gnome vision happens to be how they like to work, or who aren’t bothered by whatever hoops you have to jump through currently to customize a Gnome environment, and I’m sincerely happy for those people. For them, Gnome is the best.

There are lots of other DEs and of course tiling WMs exist, but it takes me no time at all to have a fresh plasma install working the way I want my computer to work and looking the way I want it to look, and thus I literally have zero complaints. So for the past few years I haven’t even looked at any alternatives. If there’s ever a time that I don’t find the desktop product itself, and the KDE development team’s approach to desktop development, to be absolutely perfect fits for me, I’ll look elsewhere - but honestly probably not at Gnome.

I’m going with serious societal issue.

The first rule of usenet.

Looking at your last couple of posts - you realize this is the “linuxmemes” community not the “troll linux users with kind of offensive, uninformed nonsense” community, right?

That was a joy to read.

I’m sorry to tell you I am one of those people, as is my family. Every so often I have a moment of clarity about it, but it doesn’t last long.

I can’t tell you how much humor I found in this response to that comment. 😁

Let me just say I love an effing Payday. And recently I discovered this, which is kinda like a Payday if the center part was hollwed out into a tube and filled with peanut butter. So damn delicious.

Ah yes, that’s exactly what I said.

That’s all well and good, but can we talk about proper use of this meme template?

Whew. OK man. Have a nice day.

Wow what a dodge. It doesn’t matter the extent of the trauma or whether it’s the worst trauma they have had. You are minding your own business, have done nothing wrong, then the cops show up with a random accusation and “need” to put you in cuffs while they determine if you are a threat. Comply or violence. It’s not right.

And I’m saying, even if they are polite, they are polite because I comply. If I don’t really want to be in handcuffs right then - doesn’t matter. If I’ve got an important appointment or was about to leave to pick up my child from school before police arrived to “make sure I’m not a threat” - doesn’t matter.

Your options at that point, even as someone who has done nothing wrong are comply, or expect violence. THAT is inherently traumatic.

I don’t disagree with you about this specific case, I was reacting to your “people put too much stock in being cuffed.” Removing another person’s bodily autonomy under direct threat of violence is just another day for police, but for the rest of us it’s a pretty fucking traumatic thing to be on the other end of.

Perhaps if you don’t understand what police officers go through, I could see it.

I understand they can pick a different job if it’s too much for them, and that they knew what the job entailed when they picked the career in the first place.

I always felt like people put too much stock into being handcuffed or not

Too much stock? Your bodily autonomy is being removed, under overt threat of further violence if you resist. It’s humiliating if seen in that condition because of assumptions people make. For someone who has done nothing wrong why the fuck wouldn’t they be indignant?

I’ve been handcuffed before, In a similar but not nearly as severe circumstance.

Me too, and I knew that they at least had a reason to think I was up to no good (I was not), it’s not the same as literally minding your own business in your own home and having them barge in. Not really apples to apples to this situation here.

That bump in 2020 is kind of interesting. The reason seems obvious, but correlation does not equal causation and all that. It does make me wonder if a big chunk of people claiming to be unaffilated are doing so because they think it’s the correct answer to give, not because it’s actually true. (My theory being that the pandemic made them decide they better stop denying Jesus for awhile or whatever)

Stupidity doesn’t adequately explain the number of times they have done this. I’m surprised it’s even a headline anymore.

stockholm syndrome