Jeez. Forget going mask-off. This asshole just did the equivalent of walking in the room naked.

Oh I want those things too. The current size of Lemmy is not my ideal. It’s just really really nice in its current form for me as a unique little nerdy place hidden in plain sight from what most of the internet has become.

It was more the juxtaposition of how the world needs all these open technologies that people band together to create for the good of all, buuuuut if nobody notices this particular one then that will serve my personal interests. And to be clear I’m not hoping for that or trying to hold it back. Just pointing it out. :)

American here, and one who grew up in what is now trump country. Well, I guess I still live in a republican area now, but I started out rural.

Your conclusion about how the society as a whole is sick is 100% spot on.

I don’t do much international travel, but I did get to spend a little bit of time in europe in the past couple years. Most of it in scandinavia of all places!

The difference is crazy, even not counting all this recent crazy shit. On the surface things look similar. But being immersed in it let all the little details sink in simultaneously.

There’s an air of dignity and respect that I am just not used to in american society. Even just the instances of “we couldn’t have that, somebody would immediately ruin it” were constant.

Yep, I’m ready to read the news that this platform surpassed the user base of Lemmy on the first day and never looked back. And I am ready to not be bothered by it.

Good on them for any pain they inflict on reddit. And I do hope the fediverse takes over the global media landscape because that is better for humanity than corpo-governmental gatekeepers. But if Lemmy’s user base just hangs around in the tens of thousands rather than the tens of millions, I am content.

Oh no, the US’s military strikes now have press-only events, information embargoes, and street dates like it’s the damned video game industry?

You have to love it when people whose frickin’ job is the law just stand there and say “unlawful” followed by a word from the bill of rights.

I mean, we are way past that, but still fuck this guy.

So are we living in some kind of Bizarro Eternal September?

Where instead of being flooded with normies, a few dozen thousand of us are walled in behind barriers to entry that the greybeards of old could only imagine.

It’s like a social experiment that would be unethical if we weren’t all self-selected to be here. Will we flourish or will we go mad?!?

Given my experiences so far, I’m gonna ride this thing as far as it takes me. Just today I was inspired by a fellow lemming to format my entire hard drive just to switch to a slightly different Linux distro. On my work laptop! :>

Too bad it will be difficult for us to see all their fancy cheap RAM through all the yummy Venezuelan oil covering this place! It’s totally worth my eyes and skin stinging a little bit all the time. Oh and my lungs of course.

~sad /s~

Because the standard version of Mint uses the ubuntu repositories. You get to utilize most of what makes up ubuntu, but decoupled from the stuff Canonical wants to push. It has some added polish as well.

It was more of an ubuntu-specific reply rather than “what’s the best distro” thing.

But now that you mention it, there is also Linux Mint Debian Edition! :D

I might actually start using LMDE at work, since we have some stuff that’s more focused on debian than ubuntu.

If they want ubuntu, let them Linux Mint! :D

Thank you for this post!

For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.

I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it’s pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.

“You think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him?”

Fuck his feelings.

source: all of your supporters.

I know, right? How am I supposed to take that argument seriously?

This is not a situation where being technically logically correct matters. Of course we don’t AHKSHUALLY know. The world is complex and chaotic. Maybe if Harris got elected and started a reasonable administration the butterfly effect would have led to kim jong un launching all his nukes last month.

We don’t get to try both ways. Sometimes we have to estimate probabilities and acknowledge that all choices are flawed and come with numerous risks.

Just look at the news and be honest with yourself.

Yeah, that’s another fun aspect of our culture. Jobs that many people actually want due to what they are passionate about lead to abuse.

It’s the reason I never seriously considered getting into game development or becoming a teacher.

I am the rare father involved in the PTO (parent-teacher organization) along with my wife at our kid’s elementary school. We were handing out basic cheap supplies to the teachers last month as a Christmas thing. We’d interrupt the class to give the teacher a SINGLE roll of paper towels and then a small box of tissues or some glue sticks or whatever, and they were excited and grateful every time!

That’s the thing that binds together the youngest techbro and the oldest oil baron.

Antisocial “might makes right and I’m going to win” mentalities.

My fellow americans and I look at this concept and tilt our heads to the side like confused puppies.

Your use case sounds perfect for using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement. Opening a Word doc or an old Excel spreadsheet is effortless. You don’t sound like the “I use Excel every day for my job and there is no replacement” folks with very specific needs.

And I will echo what the other reply said: try Linux on your laptop! Not only will it probably work fine, it will probably also feel much faster and more responsive.

Trying most of the big Linux distros is super easy and zero commtment, too. When you boot from the install media, it loads directly into the OS desktop running natively on your hardware! Then once you’re ready to install it, there’s usually a shortcut on the desktop or something.

I recommend trying Linux Mint. It is so simple to install and full featured out of the box, plus being based on ubuntu and being very popular itself, information and help is everywhere.

As somebody who (1) loves the beauty of the natural world and (2) lives in the USA, I’m hearing that NZ might be a most excellent place to retire, or even move to earlier.

Yeah the “shopping around” aspect isn’t even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.

Today the situation is flipped. It isn’t difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you’ll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.

The problem is that right now the “good” prices are crazy.

I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I’m building for my son for xmas. And I’ll have some uses for it too.

I didn’t really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I’m a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.

And man it HURT. The RAM isn’t anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.

I’m tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that’s not a big part of my computer usage.