Zink

Mint takes all the good work that's been put into Ubuntu and keeps a bunch of that while not including anything Canonical-specific like snaps. Almost all the typical "how do I linux" webpages new users will stumble upon will have instructions that will work for them. And of course there's a lot of added polish in the Mint distro.

I also like to point out that, unlike we expect to see with non-free corporate enshittified tech, the fact that Mint has a nice layer of polish, looks like Windows out of the box (talking of the default version with the Cinnamon DE), and installs in like 1/10 the time and clicks as Windows... basically, being friendly on the surface doesn't mean it is restricted under the hood. Mint doesn't get weird on me if I have half my monitors covered in terminals, ya know?

At first I was going to disagree and say "hey at least they are still looking up information, unlike most people" but then I did a 540° on that idea when I realized that I myself was a great example of how the OP is right.

I have been building things in my back yard like crazy this summer. I am currently working on a purpose-built little lego/craft tray for my wife to use in the house. I have gotten to plan out every detail in my head and sketching on paper, including convenient geometry knowledge like multiplying by the square root of 2 to find lengths for 45° supports or the good old 3-4-5 triangle for getting a right angle in a pinch. I have been able to discuss the table's use with my wife to figure out the perfect features. It will be a little wooden table that's ~2'/60cm wide like a TV tray but it will be held up by cantilever legs that are long enough and tall enough to hover the table over her lap with the footrest up. And it will have other features like little segmented bins for pieces/parts, and an instruction holder.

It's a great activity for numerous reasons. It gets me outside, it gets me physical, it gets me interacting with my wife and excited to give her the finished product, it gives me opportunities to practice new skills/tools, and it engages the senses as well as the mind while I spend hours in a calm almost meditative state and not seeing anything that's happening on my phone (though it will read texts to me through my earbuds).

It's a pretty funny look. I'm wearing a big round brimmed sun/fishing hat that looks almost like Gandalf's but without the pointy top. From the outside the sound of the scene is 95% the sound of falling water and birds chirping, interrupted by the 5% of the time spent actively cutting or planing some wood. But if my earbuds are in my ears, they are blasting my playlist of various high-tempo Thrash and Industrial Metal songs! (at 45-50% volume. I'm responsible here, lol)

So if I take all that and compare it to some schmuck who pulls up ChatGPT and types something like "design me a sturdy two foot wide table, create a list of the pieces I need and the cuts to make them, and generate detailed assembly instructions with pictures." Yeah you might still get a functional table but your life has missed out on the vast majority of the potential benefit of the activity!

This is the way I started looking at these tasks once I really internalized the whole "life is about the journey, not the destination" thing.

We also have mechanisms of communication, propaganda, and control that were beyond imagination 249 years ago.

I mean, a second Trump term means that any "but surely they wouldn't accept somebody who-" is out the window. His two impeachments weren't for affairs or for perjury. They were EACH for betraying the damned country in totally different ways.

And taking that one step further, it is absolutely horrifying how many of them also assume that being any kind of LGBT "other"-ness also clearly implies that one is an actively predatory pedophile.

As a Gen X male (I prefer the term Oregon Trail Generation for those of us close to the cutoff) I echo your statements.

But on top of that, I think there's obvious context here that we're talking about the dummies, not 100% of males of the generation.

The comment that started this subthread was like a funny sarcastic comment I could hear in real life. Something like "I read about how male gen z trump voters feel duped by him" followed by "well it sounds like male gen z trump voters have bad judgment, lol!"

I don't know if that kind of retort is a regional thing or is uh, how do I say this, one of those things that you learn when you are raised by angry conservatives whose primary form of communication is complaining about other people.

To me this looks like something potentially worse than just an ad. It looks like this text might be configurable by the dealership. I wonder if all of that gets screened and approved by people that work for the carmaker. Otherwise we will eventually see some funny stuff show up in people's trucks.

Whoa whoa there, slow down. You're talking crazy. Let's be reasonable.

The only way to get any sort of reliable data is to let BOTH camps go nuts and see which one gets more attention and results.

It must be nice to be so rich that you can fit an entire living room set in your walk-in closet.

At this point it seems like half of them became billionaires just to be the ones harming the children.

I agree! I only heard it in recent years which is pretty recent relatively speaking, but it instantly made complete sense.

I think the most recent memory I have of playing it in school (not emulated later or something). I did a search to look for dates, and I found this awesome short article about the creators. The origin story makes the game even better in hindsight.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-you-wound-playing-em-oregon-trailem-computer-class-180959851/

The thing is, one of the big root causes behind those fights is also a root cause of what makes Linux and FOSS so great: The devs care about the software and its users. Their priority is making the right decision for the application and its users. That's a pretty stark contrast to certain other mainstream operating systems where the primary stakeholders are not the devs or the users -- it's some third party a thousand miles away who only cares whether the dev teams' decisions sprinkle a few more dollar bills on top of their cash mountain.

I'm not part of those fights and defending them, btw. I just use Mint and appreciate their efforts!

back in my day, there weren't smartphones

We of the fabled Oregon Trail Generation had the unique experience of an analog childhood and an adulthood in the digital hellscape we all know and love.

So when we wandered off into the woods for hours, or even once I could borrow a car and head over to a friends' place? Completely unreachable. The only exception was the house phone at a friend's place if we were there.

When I was in college, Wi-Fi was just becoming popular. The equivalent to walking down the sidewalk with your face in your phone was the couple grad student TAs who were busy or nerdy enough to walk between buildings holding their laptop open in front of them. Wi-Fi was not built in of course. It was a PCMCIA card sticking out of the side.

When we were home or in our dorms, we didn't sit on our phones, we sat on our PCs! And now decades later I've transitioned back to sitting on my PC at home and it's great, lol.

My first personal cell phone of any kind was my dad handing me down his old work phone when I finished college and moved a couple hours away. It was a Motorola Startac motherfucker! Look it up and be jealous!

It's funny because I'm only in my mid 40s and have very little gray hair. I don't feel like an old, but I have absolutely hit the point of the "back in my day" attitude. I usually don't actually say anything unless I see a good joke in it, because that would be cliched and obnoxious.

I bet there's something about being the age where you could be a grandparent. There's something pretty damn wholesome about watching people who are young enough to be your children having their own families and careers and stuff. We had our kid about a decade later than we wanted, so I think my son gets to benefit from me being half chill grandpa and not 100% frantic young parent.