confusedwiseman

Can we hate on Windows because of what it is, not because it’s a US company that actually claims(ed) to be an Irish company for tax reasons?

I may be wrong or outdated on the country affiliation, but an everything past windows (arguably XP) deserves hate on its own merit.

Why the pain of Arch? You probably fell in love with the rolling release, wiki, and the AUR.

If their computer can handle running a windows vm on virtualbox, I’d recommend that over dual boot. Windows update will almost certainly cause issues on boot…eventually.

Jump into Linux with both feet. Use the vm as a crutch or a bridge to windows only software.

Follow the advice below… backup everything. If you have a 2nd hd, this makes it easier to keep files and is separated.

If you’re prepared to reinstall, it’s easy to nuke it and try again. It’s part of learning and sometimes easier to troubleshoot.

Bard on my experience, Mint is probably the best gateway distro into Linux from windows. Debian and Ubuntu forums are relevant and useful. My wife and I are both IT professionals, and mint was just “natural”. She couldn’t care less what os, de, or wm is in use as long as it gets it done. She’s got mint on one laptop and Debian with gnome on another.

Once they decide they want something different they can find what meets those needs nice they have their bearings and a “need”.

Ubuntu never really hit home for me for some reason.

I wanted to move off mint, because I wanted the gnome DE. Yes, I did successfully slam gnome on top of mint, more as a can I do it vs should I do it exercise. Then I wanted something further upstream and went to Debian.

Then, I started tinkering with Endeavouros. This has allowed me to learn more about how things really work and WHY they work the way they do. Documentation on arch to me is second to none. Until I had daily driver Linux experience and spent some time tinkering, this was just overwhelming.

Do you know how to install without a helper? Go through the wiki and build the package for a couple apps and then uninstall if you like. I don’t know everything that’s going on, but I can somewhat tell if it doesn’t seem crazy. If you get a component that looks strange, just look it up on the AUR or official repos.

Yes, there’s more risk in the AUR than “official”, but the AUR is one of the greatest parts of arch. I’d the app you’re installing seems active with comments and users, I bet you’re fine.

There’s a lot of people out there doing this waaaaay smarter than me. If it got past all of them too, then I probably never stood a chance to avoid whatever it was. I also understand malware on the AUR to be very uncommon. I happened 1x in something like the last 5-10 years and was discovered and down in under day. (I could be remembering wrong).

I’d also say think a bit. If you find “the official Firefox” first posted today with no comments and a link to some Eastern European language wish-looking version of Git….i mean download that shit. Add to root users group and save the password! * if you don’t know where the last part got sketchy and sarcastic, you may want an os with more guardrails.

I think your biggest issue is going to be getting black listed IPs or other provider marking you as unknown/untrusted. That alone is enough to make it unreliable no matter how good you are at being able to setup, secure, and run your own mail server.

Get your own domain, then find a zero trust provider and leverage their size.

This way if you need to change whoever is hosting your email, it’s and easy lift and shift.

I’m using voyager, and I get prompted to sign in or sign up. I’ll have to try on pc later.

I have to login to Mastadon to see the kitty?

Sounds good. Been playing with some local llms

Thanks!

I certainly hope my post didn’t come off as promotion of this app. My intention was to discuss viability. Decent proprietary software does exist even though that’s a bit of an oxymoron.

Change your world not others. Ask yourself why is your happiness based on feedback from what others think of what you do? It’s terse, but “fuck ’em”. Did you do something to better the world, your life, the life of a random passing bug? If so, that’s a net gain in the world. Take the small wins.

Be moral. Be good. Find what makes you happy no matter what the rest of the world thinks.

Find peace and/in contentment. Realize that happy can be a euphoric high that’s not a constant, but a momentary state.

You didn’t say sudo, so it’ll be ok.