Cool story, goog.

I’m just going to keep waiting for a linux/foss phone so that its features and capabilities are actually predictable year to year.

But maybe I’m just too picky about what features and capabilities I want. I admit I’ve gotten used to some pretty outlandish stuff like… lemme check my notes here… “the device does the things I tell it to do.” Real galaxy-brain shit!

Spoken like a true trouble maker who should relinquish your home to make room for 1% of the NEXT casino parking garage!

That seems like a law enforcement issue, and boy howdy do we have people for that already!

Like if you’re arrested and you are in the country illegally, you could be deported after you’ve been processed and/or served a sentence. That’s already been a thing for a long time. And we could argue in good faith about what the most fair and just policies are surrounding that.

(aside: populations in the developed world are not growing like they used to, and are shrinking in many places. The US is driving away our most respected minds and our most disrespected laborers RIGHT when other nations are going to start treating them even better than before. So even aside from the “be kind to humans” angle it’s pretty strategically stupid.)

But what the United States is supposed to be about, as in the Constitution and amendments, is that decent people just get to do their thing to just live life and pursue happiness. You don’t get searched or evaluated or judged unless you break the laws we collectively built. Therefore, nobody would going door to door checking people’s papers.

The tools that law enforcement would need in order to simply deport all people here illegally are the kinds of things our laws were designed to prevent from ever existing!

I think I would agree with the “liberty” side of that one. It seems much less bad for my family that some folks in town working tough jobs are “ILLeGaL” versus living in a surveillance-state, police-state, fascist dictatorship.

Yeah but then that potential wake-up call gets put through the 2026 filter and out the other end comes… “Trump claims Harlem should be carpet bombed and casino parking garage built – midwest gang violence the last straw even if it was Law Enforcement gangs this one time.”

Holy crap, I think you’ve cracked it.

LLM AI is the trillion collar costing, terawatt consuming rubber ducky for the new millennium!

Yeah, there are good places and bad places everywhere. That’s why we invented statistics, to figure out the differences (or lack thereof) between big messy groups of data points.

I live in a very pleasant suburban neighborhood in the US. I don’t ever see addicts zoning out like in the OP. But that doesn’t mean I should pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. That’s what my conservative family members like to do.

I can only hope that THIS time, with the sheer amount of information available, that future historians will convince society that it’s better to run society based on evidence and progress and humanity.

We have the old boys club running our companies, grifting and building a giant economic bubble to make a quick buck they have no use for, and casually destroying some of the most valuable brands out there.

They are running many of our governments too, and that’s not working great.

The head-to-head comparison between the update user experience is so incredibly lopsided against Windows, that it kind of seems silly.

I bet if both have a big yearly update, I could format and install an entire fresh copy of the linux distro before the windows machine would be usable.

I didn’t say there were no issues.

My 4-monitor setup at work functions considerably better in both ubuntu and debian based Linux Mints than it does in Windows. Just your standard corporate Dell laptop & docking station.

No computers have zero weird stuff wrong with them. But over time the design intent has mattered more and more versus just the bugginess of the execution.

In my experience though, Linux has pulled ahead in both. And by a lot.

Yeah, my old machines (and work laptop!) are all nvidia, and it’s nice how seamlessly it works.

With the main version of mint that’s based on ubuntu, you get a driver manager so that you can choose between driver versions if needed.

With Linux Mint Debian Edition, it worked fine for general use out of the box with the open source driver. I went looking for info about the nvidia driver out of curiosity, and after stumbling upon some forum discussion I went ahead and tried “sudo apt install nvidia-driver” and it freaking worked!

• note I might be slightly off on that command, this is just from memory. And I probably enabled non-free software previously, because I know nvidia’s reputation with linux enthusiasts.

edit to add: it did a LONG setup process to enable the nvidia driver too. I think it compiled some kernel modules and stuff too. But I like reading all that lovely monospaced terminal text scroll by with those details most users can ignore.

Go install Linux Mint and you might just realize that line is already way behind microsoft.

I’m not sure where to start here, so here are two equally important building blocks.

First, aside from other reasons the Nazi/minority is wrong, you are comparing a label somebody gets for existing the way they were born with a label somebody gets for actions they take that harm other people.

Second, some kind of mishmash of the terms “social contract” and “paradox of tolerance.”

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. :)

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.

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! :>

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

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

Fuckin’ hell, I feel like a kid in 2226 reading this on some kind of wall plaque after it was discovered in the cautionary history archives that survived the great fires. I think it struck me when I read this line:

the rot is far too deep, and the purification of chaos is, unfortunately, the only remedy

It’s just a very elegant way to describe the btshit craziness of living in “interesting times.”

Oh and hey future people who have presumably learned to be excellent to one another: put me in the plaque! It’s a thing we used to do on this old internet here with screenshots, you see.

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.