Remember, it’s all or something, not all or nothing.

For me, I look at each major category of things in my life a few times a year and ask myself how I can improve the ethics of my participation.

So for food, I have been vegetarian for years now, which is good, but lately I have been trying to cut out most processed foods. I also have started shopping more and more local, getting as much of my food as I can from local co-ops, individual sellers, and small local grocery chains.

For software, I’m FOSS everything as much as I can be. 100% Linux on my computers and servers, and I have replaced almost all my programs with FOSS alternatives. Even my phone doesn’t run stock Android.

For work, try to find places to work that roughly align with good principles. For instance, try to get a job at a credit union vs a traditional bank, or try to find an employee-owned establishment vs a traditional top-down corporation.

If you have to work for a corpo, try to pick one that has a good reputation with unions and workers, like Costco, vs Starbucks or Walmart.

Capitalism is a machine that grinds us all down, so don’t feel guilty about not being perfect. But do the best you can to reject it, little steps at a time. Always be improving, bit by bit.

Looks pretty clean as is, I would need to see without picsto fully know, but looks good as is imo.

Hell yeah! Love seeing old hardware like this still running a modern OS.

With Linux, if your hardware is a decade old, you’ve barely even reached middle-age.

Meanwhile Windows 11 won’t even allow an official install on hardware that’s 4-5 years old.

Long live Linux & FOSS ✊

This is the way.

Well over a decade now, married for about 10 years.

I’ve been settling on Linux Mint more and more as my generic workhorse distro. I have the least amount of issues with it out of the box compared to any other desktop distro.

It’s clean, relatively low bloat, includes codecs and drivers for basically everything I’ve ever needed to use/do, and Cinnamon’s only crime as a DE is looking kind of boring. But it’s easy to select a new theme, so not really a huge issue either.

I use a bunch of different distros for different purposes, but if you held a gun to my head and made me pick a distro I had to use exclusively for the rest of my life, it would be Mint with Cinnamon.

If something was to replace it, it would have to be even cleaner, simpler to setup, and have even better general stability and compatibility.

Cool!

Valve doubling down on Linux as the default OS on the Steam Deck was such a great decision. It obviously has given them a massive competitive edge. Windows has become so horribly bloated, and Microsoft has almost zero interest in making it run more efficiently.

In my early teens, I got really into computers, built my first PC when I was about 13, started learning Windows batch scripting and using GameMaker to make goofy PC games.

Along the way, I found Trinity Rescue Kit and was also introduced to Fedora Core by a nerdy guy who worked at my local YMCA.

I didn’t actually enjoy it too much back then, so I left it alone for years until about 5 years ago when I started to get back into the free software movement and related interests.

I’ve been 100% on Linux for about 4 years now and never looked back.

It’s designed to be more compatible with MS’ .docx formats, less weird formatting issues when converting between them. But the actual features it has is less than LibreOffice.

Two different focuses, LibreOffice is designed with more powerful features and uses the .odf file format by default.

OnlyOffice is lighter weight and designed with MS Office compatibility first and foremost, although both suites support both file formats and in my experience, both work great with either file types and for basic users, have all the features you would need.

I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.

My current company uses brand new $1,500 HP enterprise grade laptops and they frequently freeze up, stutter, and get really hot from basic office work.

My old Debian servers I used to have there were running butter smooth with KDE Plasma on 12 year old hardware.

+1 I used LibreOffice all through university, wrote dozens of papers, did class presentations, résumés, etc. Never had a problem. I use it at work too and collaborate with O365 users often.

Such an awesome piece of software. I used OnlyOffice as well, really nice if you don’t need the fancier features that LibreOffice has.

Read “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, it’s free online.

He lays out a brutal critique of the modern mathematical curriculum in the Unites States but in summary:

We teach mathematics to children as a huge set of rules to memorize and use to get good scores on standardized tests so that they can “get into good colleges.”

We don’t treat mathematics with any reverence or care, like we do with the arts. Math is taught as a bunch of arbitrary brute facts that old wise men came up with centuries ago and we spend all of elementary and high school relentlessly drilling them into students heads no matter how much pain and suffering it causes.

There is no actual exploration of mathematical beauty, or mystery. There isn’t any discussion of the underlying philosophy of mathematics, or how any of the rich and fascinating history of its development as a field. It’s like if we taught music as just a way to write notes on a page in certain time signatures and keys, but never actually let students listen to a piece of music or discuss the great composers or cultural movements of music through the ages.

Of course that seems ridiculous to people, but for some reason when we do that exact same thing with mathematics, nobody bats an eye. In fact, people think it would be strange to do it any other way.

I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.

I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.

In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

Depends on the use case.

I use Nobara on my gaming rig because I wanted up-to-date packages without being on the cutting edge like Arch. And I also wanted all the lower level gaming optimizations without having to set it all up manually. Plus, KDE is soooooo nice.

Debian on my servers because I want extreme stability with a community-driven distro.

Linux Mint on my personal laptops, because I like having the good things from Ubuntu without all the junk. Plus the Cinnamon desktop environment has been rock stable for me. It’s my goto workhorse distro. If I don’t need something with a specialized or specific use case, I throw Mint on.

Arch on my old junker devices that I don’t use much because I like making them run super fast and look sexy and testing out different WM’s and DE’s.

Void on my junkers that I actually want to use frequently because it’s super performant and light on resources without needing to be built manually like Arch.

Ubuntu server if I am feeling stanky and lazy and just need something quick for a testing VM or container host in my home lab.

Happy to help!

Holy crap…you literally just unlocked that same memory for me. Idk what episode it was either, but I totally remember that part.

Edit: Found it! It’s the episode “Gary Takes a Bath” Season 2 Episode 13.

At one point, Spongebob attempts to hypnotize Gary into taking a bath, and one of the telepathic images is that weird hillbilly girl laughing.

The clip from that episode

Fair, however a balanced vegetarian diet is as cheap or cheaper than a cheap meat centric diet, and certainly healthier.

A can of beans is about a dollar, less depending on where you shop. Potatoes are a few dollars a bag, and for most people, a bag of large russets would last them several days if not a week. Same for leafy greens, frozen fruit and veggies, bags of rice, etc.

I agree that there can be other factors, but impoverished communities around the world for centuries have lived on staple foods like those.

I think some personal responsibility is necessary still. Sure the megacorps are the ones doing the most harm and push people to be more consumerist, but that doesn’t absolve people of all their personal autonomy, otherwise you justify all kinds of “just following orders” arguments.

We ought to still resist the corpos and try to live our lives in ways that are better for the world as a whole. Sure, me recycling cans and trying to buy local isn’t going to save the planet, but that doesn’t mean I should just throw litter around in the street and buy everything from Amazon and Walmart.

Large amounts of the population starving is not the morally correct option. Eating meat is many times more inefficient for resources used than eating plants. The infrastructure needed to sustainably mass farm vegetables for the whole world would be far less resource intensive than our current omnivorous factory farming system.

Your personal anecdote, assuming it’s true is completely included in my original critique. I specified factory farmed meat as the problem. I am fine with sustainable hunting if that’s your only option, because it requires genuine effort by the hunter, and it provides a generally less painful death for the animal vs what they would experience out in nature from any other predator. Also, there are some people who have medical situations where eating zero meat does cause them some issues. That being said, it’s a very small percentage of the population, and I suspect many folks (not necessarily you) are lying or mistaken that their health suffered when they gave up meat. Most of the time, it’s because they simply weren’t eating a balanced diet.

Eating less meat is better than eating more meat. Something is better than nothing, it’s good to cut down on meat consumption, even if you aren’t cutting it out completely.

Nothing we do is perfect, even the most hardcore vegan has slapped a mosquito or patronized a business that uses fossil fuels, etc. But it’s about trying to be better. Trying to equate the harms of the meat industry to harms that vegetarians/vegans cause is like trying to equate Ted Bundy with a kid who cheated on their math homework. Sure both did something bad, but one of those bad things is far more severe.

And as my personal anecdote: I am not vegan, I’m vegetarian. I get attacked by more hardcore vegans for eating honey and eggs. I have cut down my consumption of both, I drink almost exclusively non-dairy milk, and I bike and use public transport when I am able. But I’m not perfect, not possible to be.

If you eat factory meat, you’re doing something morally wrong that can’t be justified.

And the vast majority of people who get defensive about that, deep down know what they are doing is morally dubious at best, but they can’t/won’t admit it, so they lash out at vegans/vegetarians instead.