Get her a Raspberry Pi! Lol.

I’m pretty sure that if you use elevated privileges to run commands you don’t understand, you can break Windows just as much as you can break Linux.

I can confirm.

Source: I learned most of what I know about computers (which is genuinely quite a lot), by doing dumbass stupid stuff I didn’t understand yet.

The big thing that changed side 2010 is that most distros are perfectly usable on most hardware.

I keep tossing Linux onto random stupid hardware I have lying around, and lately it just goes spectacularly well.

I should be ashamed of even asking if Linux will run on it, but Linux ends up running well on it.

Around 2010, I used to tell people that if they did their research and used Mint, for simple web stuff, they’re going to be fine.

Lately I end up telling people “I don’t know how to do that advanced thing you’re debating which Windows product to pay for, because, of the last three random Linux distros I tried, all thee provided it for free and pre-configured with sensible defaults”.

I’m sure there’s still plenty of interesting reasons to need a paid operating system. But for the simple practical stuff, I find Linux so much easier, even on my random poorly researched distros and hardware combinations.

I might well have just had an incredibly lucky streak, of course.

Thanks. I’m aware of that…

Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn’t being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking ‘intall’, all without enough permissions to harm her computer.

Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.

Considering how difficult it still can be to get root on Android, I understand the shade, though.

You’ve perfectly summarized my own feelings toward the best versions of Windows. Thank you. I feel more centered seeing it summarized so well in writing.

I’ll add that I found Vista cool and interesting on a technical level, even while the practical outcome was pretty awful.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

I agree with you in principle, but I kind of liked XP. It had some great features for retro gaming, which I don’t recall seeing before then.

Same, a 15 minute video is way too long. I would rather spend 15 hours debugging

I want that on a shirt…but if I buy the shirt, I’m afraid of the burn when my life partner will probably set the shit out for me to wear on certain weekends…

Linux From Scratch.

Which honestly might be necessary to actually get a fridge running a free operating system, anyway.

Well that just got added to my interview question bank…heh.

I hope GIMP is able to do the same!

That would be amazing. Gimp hating user design has been a joke punchline for so long, I can’t even say where I would start fixing it.

but how do people have the patience to deal with all of that in the beginning?

Whenever I was frustrated with a stupid undecipherable error message, I would just tweak my vim config a bit.

Within a few minutes, my rage at the error would be completely replaced with rage toward vimscript.

Then I would revert my vim config change, and return to the undecipherable error message with a fresh perspective. mainly relief that at least it’s not vimscript.

Joking aside, I really did learn vim mostly during coffee breaks or while waiting on some long running build process.

“There are still the billion other footguns built directly into bash that will destroy hopes and dreams, but”

That’s well put. I might put that at the start of all of my future comments about bash in the future.

Yeah, I mean. If I unlock the basement door, I don’t suddenly regain all the trust I lost, either.

(Edit: In my hypothetical example. I cannot stress enough that there is no one trapped in my basement. I just watch too many horror films.)

I love it. This made me laugh.

But, as this month’s chair of the of the Linux User Group for Letting Everyone Know We Hate Snaps (LUG LEKWHS), I want to clarify that we don’t have a problem with Ubuntu users.

It’s Canonical we have a beef with.

it seems weird to attack Canonical so much over it.

I mean, on the technical side, sure. Canonical’s technical choice is just weird. Plenty of fully open app store environments have almost no competition, because self hosting is still hard work.

But all of the business reasons - for having a closed proprietary sole app server - go against everything that Canonical used to claim they stood for.

Canonical’s business choice not to open source the snap servers is an open declaration of war against the FOSS community who have previously rallied around them.

It’s like inviting someone into my basement and locking the door with a key as they get to the bottom step. The action isn’t illegal, but the probable motive is creepy as fuck. (Maybe I just watch too many horror movies. Lol.)

Nah. As a die hard Vim user, I can explain all day long why a flexible shared common editing experience across a team is a great idea, and why VSCodium is the obvious choice.

And I’ll explain and agree in principle all day long from the familiar beloved comfort of my Vim editor.

I had a hard time choosing a link. Searching GitHub for “F-Droid” reveals a long convoluted back-and-forth about meeting F-Droid’s requirements for reproducible builds. Signal is not, as of earlier today, listed on F-Droid.

F-Droid’s reproducibility rules are meant to cut out the kind of shenanigans that would be necessary to hide a back door in the binaries.

Again, this isn’t proof. But it’s beyond fishy for an open source security tool.

Edit: And Signal’s official statements on the topic are always reasonable - but kind of bullshit.

Reasonable in that I alwould absolutely accept that answer, if it were the first time that Signal rejected a contribution to add it to F-Droid.

Bullshit in that it’s been a long time, lots of folks have volunteered to help, and Signal still isn’t available on F-Droid.