Honestly, it sounds like you’ve been spending too much time in some online communities that are doom posting about everything. Do things suck right now? Yes, but they’ve literally sucked for as long as human society has existed. Things can always be better, or always be worse. However you can’t just sit around passively waiting for the times to change, or your life will suck.

The single biggest factor in whether your life is good or not is you and your actions. Don’t let things outside of your control convince you to give up. Do the best with what you have, and I promise you that you can find fulfillment and happiness in the life available to you.

It can be very harmful to act on an uninformed opinion. There’s also simply too much out there to be informed on everything, so logically there should be lots of things you aren’t able to have a valid opinion on.

People frequently get around this by finding people they think they can trust, and borrowing their “informed opinion” on things. But this can also be risky, and easily leads to groups with highly polarized opinions (political parties, etc). Even borrowing scientific/expert “opinions” on things can lead you astray, as we’ve seen with many of the funded studies on food health. Two experts can easily have conflicting opinions on something, with strong arguments/evidence to back up their stance.

So basically having completely uninformed opinions is dangerous, it’s not possible to learn everything well enough to have a good opinion on it, and borrowing others opinions on things only works some of the time. So it’s probably best to accept that you shouldn’t have a strong opinion on most things, and to be always willing to re-evaluate your opinions if you run into evidence that refutes your current opinions.

Many new PCs (generally the cheaper priced ones) come in S mode now, where you can only install Microsoft store apps. You can turn this off to allow regular PC programs too, but they require you to set up the Microsoft store before you can disable it.

If you’re trying to set up a new PC without a Microsoft account (which is getting increasingly hard), you can’t disable S mode. There was a workaround that involved booting into recovery mode and running some commands/registry edits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has blocked that too by now.

This is also the biggest reason Valve supports Linux and ChromeOS. Microsoft really wants full control over what software people can use on Windows, and Valve is worried about getting pushed off the platform.

Yes I’ve seen it before. Once Microsoft even updated their virus definitions to auto-delete the chrome installer when downloaded. Thankfully they reversed that one pretty quickly, but I had to completely disable all Windows virus protection to install chrome for a relative.

This will probably be an unpopular take, but this my best guess at why Trump won.

On the election coverage I was watching (ABC), the biggest point they kept coming back to were questions of if people thought that the economy is better now vs when Trump was in office, and if people feel like they’re better or worse off financially that they were during Trump years. If I remember right, the poll data they showed had twice as many people say that things were worse economy/financially then they were during Trump era, vs people who thought things were better financially now.

I know that matches with my personal experience, I live in a rural area, and my company primarily does work for other small businesses. The Trump years had a huge amount of negative news, but my business grew a lot over those years. In comparison, the last 4 years have been very stagnant in growth. We’ve picked up some new clients, but many of the small businesses we did business with have closed down or had to sell to new owners. I wouldn’t say our business is doing worse, but everything costs more and our company profit/wages haven’t kept up. And I know it’s worse for a lot other businesses, at least from seeing how many I’ve seen go out of business.

A lot of the economic troubles came from Covid, so it’s not fair to place them all on the Biden administration. But I think a lot of the country is unhappy financially right now, and they think Trump has a better chance of changing that. I’m guessing a lot of the “undecided voters” that decided the election picked the option they thought would help them financially over all other considerations.

Playing with it on my own computer, locally hosting it and running it offline, has been pretty cool. I find it really impressive when it’s something open source and community driven. I also think there are a lot of useful applications for things that are traditionally not solvable with traditional programming.

However a lot of the pushed corporate AI feels not that useful, and there’s something about it that really rubs me the wrong way.

No, I straight up had two different installation media’s fail until I went back and shut down windows fully. I’ve never run into that before on an install before.

First I tried ZorinOS, and it would fail to even boot into the live environment. I tried multiple times and even made a new install media. Then I tried fedora silverblue, it would get into the install environment but couldn’t do any kind of partitioning etc to the drive. I then rebooted to windows, shut it down fully, and tried again. This time fedora could edit the drive partitions, and zorin could load the live environment and install.

Previously I’ve had issues with shared drives being locked by windows, but this was the first time I’ve ever had an install fail because windows wasn’t shutdown fully. I don’t usually dual boot these days either though (I was setting up this computer for family) so I figured maybe something had changed with newer versions of windows or device security.

Make sure windows was shut down all the way. Normally when you shutdown windows, it only hibernates and it locks it’s partitions to prevent editing. I tried installing Zorin for a family member recently, and it couldn’t install until I booted back into windows and shut it down fully.

To shutdown fully, in windows you need to either hold shift while clicking the shutdown button, or open the run box and run the command shutdown -s -t 00

Recently ran into an issue with Endeavour OS where the built in printer program would give errors when trying to add my network ecotank printer.

Tried using cups terminal and it worked the first time, and is still working weeks later.

So some of the GUI printer apps that distros ship with have issues apparently, but I don’t know the extent of it.

There’s a big difference between doom scrolling and education.

AI is starting to get really smart

Clearly this shows that North Korea is the peak example of a successful society, and that the rest of the world should aspire to mimic them in all their wise practices.

I live in the US, and I have dozens of people from my contacts who have it installed. I don’t know how many are actively using it, but it’s definitely a common app for people to have.

Telegram is a messaging app, if you install it you’ll be presented with a list of people from your contact list that have it installed as well. You can message these people through the app, and that’s about it.

Telegram also supports group chats, and several apps/etc use these group chats for support and discussion. There are also some group chats used for illegal activity, but you can’t discover these through the app itself. You would have to get in touch with these groups on another website, and be given an invite link to their telegram chat. The only thing that makes telegram more popular for illegal activity (afaik) is that you can have private group chats without government/telegram oversight.

insane platforms like Telegram

Is telegram considered insane? It’s basically just a messaging app that people can form group chats in.

Yes, but Duck and Scotch are both brands here. So you can buy Duck brand duct-tape or Scotch brand Duct-tape. They’re priced about the same but the Duck brand is much worse than Scotch.

I’m mostly complaining about their clear packaging tapes though, that’s where the Duck brand tape is truly awful.

Not the best source, but there was a reddit survey with about 1000 people, and it was roughly 1:2 for standing vs wiping.

Interestingly enough there wasn’t much difference between men and women when it came to standing vs sitting.

Roughly 1 in 3 people stand while wiping.

On the toilet paper debate, as far as I can tell it largely has to do with whether people stand up or sit down to wipe. People who stand up want the paper unrolling on the front (because they can’t easily reach under the roll), while people who sit down and wipe can go either way.

For my petty hill, “Duck” brand tape is awful and should never be bought. It’s just slightly above generic dollar brand tape in quality, and should absolutely never be bought if you have any other options. Go with Scotch or anything else really.

You can kinda already do that, apps like rdx, Stealth, and Geddit pull reddit content without using the API. You can’t vote/comment, but you can still follow communities that have worthwhile content.