my fellow americans: “Sounds pretty awesome, and so fancy and European. Throw it on the pile with all the other imperial units!”

Well at least the photographer probably had plenty of time to get shots of that indecisive asshole.

Windows has had a “fast startup” thing for a while where it hibernates just some parts of the OS.

I used to always disable it because I’ve run into situations where having it off prevented issues that appeared with it on.

Fortunately I don’t have to use any Windows machines on a regular basis now, so it doesn’t matter.

I’m in the US and I park in a large hospital’s parking garage a few times a year because one of my doctors has their office there.

They have automated systems AND a human in a booth. I think the human is mostly there to fix problems because the automated system uses paper tickets to track your time in the garage.

Many times in the past there has been a human standing at the ticket dispensing machine who would push the button as you roll up and hand you your parking slip.

Americuuuuh!

I have a pretty old lifetime Plex pass that I got on sale.

I’m still 100% a Jellyfin convert. Keeping my Plex server while trying out Jellyfin myself lasted even less time than my Windows partition after I had linux installed.

This image hits especially hard for me just because of the specific project. I’ve been medicated for a couple years now and thanks to the work I’ve gotten done in my hobbies I have built up a huge collection of power tools and I have bought SO much lumber.

It makes a lot more sense for portable devices. The idea of a desktop PC that’s nothing but usb-c front and back seems silly. However, my work laptop connects via usb-c to the docking station and that’s pretty awesome. Through the usb-c ports I get multiple monitors, power, ethernet, audio, and of course peripherals and storage and other USB devices.

Generally speaking, that is often not the reality of it, but that is the perception that conservatives have.

Right wing propaganda media has been projecting the greed and desire for totalitarian control onto their opposition for decades.

The meme got me thinking of what modern “eco-terrorism” could look like. Assuming data centers were involved, we would be following along in the exact opposite of terrified.

But your version seems to fit this timeline better. It feels more uniquely American to imagine armed militias assaulting and razing facilities out of desperation rather than conservation.

Oh shit. This is how we get private corpo-militaries isn’t it?

Yeah, but the countermeasures are client-side because that’s what you can control. And some kind FOSS devs out there make it easy to start somewhere decent.

• Sent from my LibreWolf

It’s not KDE, but I think Linux Mint Cinnamon is a no-brainer for somebody who really just wants to use ubuntu.

However, as a long time Mint fan I recently had reason to switch to Debian 13 w/ KDE Plasma and it is pretty great.

This is just as true in my non-computer hobbies that involve physical systems instead of code and configs!

If I had to just barely meet the requirements using as little budget as possible while making it easy for other people to work on, that would be called “work.” My brain needs to indulge in some over-engineering and “I need to see it for myself” kind of design decisions.

Anybody having config issues on their high end machines with super fast on-die unified memory are going to be the new “waaah, my Ferrari has a flat tire” gang, lol.

Literally just today on the drive home I was wondering to myself what would be the best way to generate a list of like 100 songs that are exactly like the handful of best ones that I never skip and that hit every time.

I didn’t know this was an ADHD thing!

What has worked best for me in the past, funny enough, was to discover music the old fashioned way. I started with songs, bands, or sub-genres that I liked, and just loaded albums and discographies rapid fire into my jellyfin server.

I’ll occasionally listen to an album, but when I’m feeling adventurous I typically just hit shuffle on the entire library. Every once in a while, a track that belongs on “the list” will light up my neurons and hopefully I have a hand free to add it. Otherwise, it may be lost to the sands of time.

In my case “the list” is comprised mostly of thrash, groove, or industrial metal that is energetic enough to occupy the music box in my head so I can calmly get some work done or enjoy a stretch of country road.

I used a few different OSs before Windows 95 and I have also used a taskbar for the past 30 years. It’s just a design that I like. It’s like I feel grounded or something.

I just use a single taskbar at the bottom of my left-most monitor though. I ain’t all fancy like you!

I have a good example of “both are useful” on my second screen right now, but it’s a difference in output and not input. I was watching system resource utilization a few minutes ago while running something, so I have plasma’s graphical System Monitor on half the screen while I have a big ole terminal window with htop running next to it.

The GUI side uses the speed and bandwitdth of our visual processing to communicate complex historical data about a handful of values very quickly. It does it with graphs that, while accurate and to scale, are a bit analog and imprecise feeling to the eye.

The text-based side uses the speed and bandwidth of the hardware to show me a huge 2D array of values that constantly updates. It does it with monospaced text in a high-readability font that is very clear and precise.

The GUI does more processing on the computer first to communicate quickly about the targeted values, while the text side leaves more of that processing to be done on my end. But that’s not a negative, because I can search through those hundreds of values as quickly as my eyes can dart around the screen. There’s no navigating a GUI that quickly.

In general when it comes to GUI vs CLI, I like GUIs too. I am just old enough that I remember how awesome it was to start using graphical desktops and file managers and computer mice and all that. But I’m an engineer who uses the terminal every single day, and I often just leave it open when I’m at work with a bunch of monitors. To me, any decent computer must have a powerful CLI and text-based configuration and scripting and all that.

For most USERs, the GUI is all that matters. And since the GUI needs to be simple and rock solid, it can be advantageous to just leave the arcane shit in the text files and not try to cram everything into the GUI. If I want to change my screen resolution, system fonts, or change my network connection, I expect to find that in the GUI and I’ll just go there. But when I want to be the dork customizing the colors on my GRUB screen or tweaking the swap/cache behavior of my OS, I’m quite glad to edit text for those.

I ended up on AnyType and still really like it.

It’s kind of open source even if not proper FOSS, it has effortless cloud sync on free accounts INCLUDING mobile apps, and it is focused on privacy and local first. Like I don’t think I have a login and password - there’s just a 12-word passphrase that gets generated on device and that lets me connect my other devices to my “account.”

I don’t think it directly stores things in plain text, but the interface makes it easy to use it as an organized pile text pages, because that’s what I usually want to do. You can of course export it as well.

I’ve been a fan of the easy to install all-in-one Linux experience of modern distros, being an old guy with a family and a keen awareness of how much I need to maintain some of the non-computer hobbies in my life. Mint has been my jam for a long time.

But just recently I had reason to try out regular old Debian with KDE Plasma, and I think I have found my happy place. I just moved around my hard drives and set up my handful of self-hosted things on this fresh system. It’s so nice to occasionally use as a desktop while it is also a rock solid server.

Gross.

I continue to have my own little cognitive dissonance about the Fediverse:

The world needs more FOSS and information needs to flow in a decentralized, democratic kind of way.

Howeverrrrr… Lemmy is awesome for we few that it clicks with. For the good of the users and especially the volunteer admins who run our instances, I am glad Lemmy is not the big glowing target that reddit is.

Maybe we just hang out and keep the lights on no matter whether it’s for occasional lost Linux users or for when mainstream folks decide to ditch oligarch-tech en masse.

The funny thing is that the biggest practical benefit to most Linux users is not the access to do these things.

It is the secondary effects of not needing to restrict access in order to preserve lock-in and enshittification. It makes the whole user experience better because it is only doing wider you’ve asked it to do. For example, I apply updates more quickly on Linux than I ever did on Windows, even though my Linux DEs are way less pushy about it, because the process is an absolute breeze!

Look at each OS option like you were a product development team, and think “who are my stakeholders?”

The commercial products have long lists of what’s driving the product features and anti-features. Linux has the developers who want the code to be helpful and stay free, and the users who want it to do what it says on the tin, with the option to audit or modify the system’s code. But of course it’s still run by humans, so big personalities and bad actors and whatnot do affect things.