“python is the second best language for everything…”

I love that summation! Python has been key for me to learn programming concepts. I hope to move into other languages in the future, but for now, Python does everything I need it to.

I had a cheap automatic in college, sadly lost it in a move.

But I loved it so much, kept itself wound up without issue, and it was amazing to look at all the tiny parts that made it work.

If you eat meat, the breakfast crunch wrap supreme is made by angels.

If Taco Bell ever releases a Breakfast crunch wrap supreme with impossible sausage, I will eat it 5 days a week and balloon to 400 pounds.

when they are available, the nacho fries are incredible also.

Depends on the pizza. If you are eating a traditional pizza just like mamma mia made back in the old country, skip the Tabasco.

If you’re eating greasy sloppy pizza from a dirty little place called, “Joe’s” load up that Tabasco and the chili flakes, and add some of that artificial Parmesan powder that comes in little packets!

So you’re a user that tinkers with your system, breaks it, can’t get it working correctly again…and that’s Linux’ fault?

And you consider yourself an example of a “regular user?”

Really sad about this, because Rust Desk has been the absolute best remote access tool I’ve ever used in the IT world, and that includes many different professional tools like Ninja& Teamviewer.

It’s so clean, easy to install and run, fast and low latency, handles multi-monitors great, runs on mobile, Linux, Windows, etc.

Such a shame that it is mired in controversy.

It’s pretty incredible how well it works. I installed Arch with Plasma 6 on a 2015 T450 thinkpad and it was so crazy how fast everything was.

Felt like a brand new machine, almost a decade old, and bottom of the line specs for that model, but it still ran cutting edge Linux like it was meant to.

My other desktops are even older, but it’s the same with Debian 12 and Plasma, they are super responsive and stable. It’s pretty wild to see a desktop that’s over 10 years old feel smoother and snappier than Windows 11 on a 3 year old, enterprise grade laptop.

It’s important to acknowledge that desktop Linux was much jankier even 5 years ago. I don’t think Windows 7 & Windows 10 would have been worse experiences on average than desktop Linux back in their heyday.

But times have changed pretty drastically. Desktop Linux has improved massively across the board. With so many applications going into the cloud and becoming web-based in recent years, Linux is more viable than ever.

Combine that with the fact that Windows 11 has become so bloated, so clunky, and just straight up unpleasant to use and maintain.

Historical precedent makes a big difference too. When an OS is dominant for so long, the ecosystem around it morphs to fit.

People are raised using Windows, go through school and college using Windows, get a job where their apps are all on Windows. Companies write software for their largest install base…which is Windows. And because the vast majority of companies and orgs use Windows, the IT ecosystem is based around managing Windows systems.

I worked at an MSP a few years back where almost every sysadmin there was far more experienced than me, I was the greenhorn. But when one of the sysadmins had their client’s Xen hypervisor go down, they called me because, “We heard you’re a Linux guy.” At that point, I had less than 3 years of Linux experience at all, and had almost zero actual Linux admin experience, I only used it personally and as a hobby. But I fixed their issue in less than an hour, got their client’s Xen hypervisor running which their entire ERP system ran on, all because I knew enough Linux basics to figure out what was going on.

Point is, people tend to become experts in what they use all the time. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Microsoft experts and admins are a dime-a-dozen where I live, but Linux/Unix admins, I rarely see a job posting that isn’t offering 20-40k more for people with those skills.

At my current company, roughly 50% of folks could be switched over to Linux without any issue. Their jobs all require basic document editing, email, Teams, and web browsing. All tasks that desktop Linux can handle now with zero issues.

As an IT guy who has worked at a bunch of companies with exclusively Windows environments, Windows absolutely doesn’t “just work.”

I can’t begin to list all the random problems I have with Windows in my day-to-day job.

Driver problems, hardware compatibility problems, software crashes, OS freezes, random configuration resets, networking issues, performance issues, boot issues, etc etc etc…

New hardware causes problems, old hardware causes problems.

Almost everything is harder to troubleshoot on Windows than Linux.

I have several test servers set up at my current workplace, they are old decommissioned desktops that are 10+ years old. I use them for messing around with Docker, Ansible, Tailscale, and random internal company resources like Bookstack and OpenProject.

All run Linux, all are a head and shoulders more stable and functional than the majority of much newer and more powerful Windows machines at our company.

Debian, Mint, CatchyOS, they all are far more dependable than most of the Windows machines. They install fast, on any hardware I use, decade+ old Quadro cards and Intel CPUs, doesn’t matter, they all run nearly perfect. And the rare times I have an issue, it’s so much faster to figure out and fix in Linux.

I switched over one of the computers in our department to Linux Mint. Threw it on a random laptop I had laying around. I did it just as an experiment, told the guy who was working on it to let me know if he had any issues using it. I planned on only having it out there for a week or two… It’s been 4 months and he loves it.

He says it’s super fast and easy to use, he doesn’t have any problems with it. Uses Libre office for documents, Firefox for our cloud-based ERP system, Teams and Outlook as PWAs installed on Mint.

I use Ansible to push updates to it once a week, Timeshift in case something ever breaks. It’s great. About a month ago I told him I would probably need to take it back because technically, it wasn’t an official deployment and the experiment I was doing had long since passed. He put up such a fuss that I decided to just let it stay. I’ll probably clone the drive, put it on his old tower, and take the laptop back, and let him keep using it indefinitely.

Linux absolutely isn’t perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.

I try to make everything Pascal case. It’s easy to read in a terminal and pretty easy to type.

Truly humble beginnings.

Been 100% Linux on all my personal devices for about 4 years.

I just got tired of being treated like I was either an idiot or a criminal by Microsoft. Plus the way they kept forcing their bloatware and trash ads on the OS that I already paid for!

I decided I didn’t care what I had to give up, it was worth it to be rid of Microsoft’s clutches forever. Switched to Linux and I’ve never looked back.

Turns out, I actually didn’t have to sacrifice much at all, and the few things I don’t have anymore are nothing compared to the benefits of using Linux and FOSS software.

Everything works better for me too, more stable, updates are rarer and wayyyyy faster when I push them. No more fighting with AMD driver hell in Windows, no more weird lockups or crashes, a million times more customization options, and zero bloat or spyware installed by default on my system.

Flatpaks aren’t perfect, but they are really solid in almost all cases.

For the general user that just wants a simple way to download apps on Linux, it just works.

For power users, they will know already the upsides and downsides.

Build dual power. The state will persist until capitalism inevitably destroys itself and the state that props it up.

We must have strong and well-networked communities that can survive and thrive when that happens.

In the meantime, it’s easier to have a liberal squishy government in power than a fascist one. The libs will attempt to placate and pander to us with little concessions here and there.

That’s better than fascists who will do as much as possible to crush us into oblivion and suppress any rumblings that sound even slightly left-wing.

Both parties are statist and against any true vision of socialist structures, but don’t pretend the republicans and dems are equally bad. Dems are bad, but the right-wingers are Satan. I’d much rather fight the mini-boss than the main boss if I had the choice.

My grandma used to be, but years of Facebook right-wing propaganda has poisoned her.

Now she spouts conspiracy talking points about the “trans agenda” immigration, and so forth.

My parents have always been pretty right wing but covid pushed them even farther.

They aren’t hardcore MAGA nuts, but they are pretty pro Trump, especially my dad. They also buy the propaganda from Fox news hook, line, and sinker.

You fell for the meme lol.

Arch is great if you want very high levels of customization without having to get into compiling and coding, like with Gentoo or NixOS.

I think of it as the distro equivalent to custom keyboard kit, you get all the parts and can swap them out as much as you want. But you’re not designing and fabricating your own circuit board and microcontroller, writing your own custom firmware, getting a custom case modeled and fabricated, etc.

There’s a reason “I use Arch, BTW” Is a meme.

There was a study done by a university a while back that had hundreds of randomly selected women rate headshots of men from 1 to 10 in various stages of hair, from full thick head of hair to completely smooth bald.

They plotted the results and found that the full head of hair pictures averaged the highest, as you would expect. Then as the baldness increased, the average ratings dropped extremely quickly.

However, once the pictures got to the 100% bald men, the average ratings shot back up nearly identical to the full head of hair pictures.

The conclusion of the researchers: if you care about being perceived as attractive to women as a balding male, you need to commit to one or the other hard. Either get hair transplant surgery, get a high quality hairpiece, or commit to the bald look hardcore and shave it butter smooth.

The worst thing you can do from that perspective is to let the balding hair just kind of grow out all partial/thin.

I guess it’s the classic stereotype, the thing the majority of women are attracted to is confidence. So if you’re going bald, commit hardcore to the bald look, embrace hats, jewelry, and clothing that emphasizes your head shape and face, experiment with facial hair styles if you can grow it.

Keep your skin clean and your head held high. Lots of sexy bald guys out there, your worth as a person isn’t held in your hair.

My balding grandpa dressed like the classic dorky old man; shorts pulled up over his belly, tucked-in baggy polo, socks pulled up to his knees with dad-sandals, and a dirty trucker cap worn crooked on his head with giant yellow-brown glasses. But damn if he wasn’t the most confident man I’ve ever met. Humble, calm, but super hard worker and very driven, also honest as the day is long. Married happily to my grandma for over 40 years until freak cancer took him early.

Hundreds a people from all over the country came to his service, the amount of lives he had positively impacted was incredible. So many people pulled me aside to tell me what a great man my grandpa was, it was powerful.

Lemmy is a federated space. You can join an instance where your views are more in-line with the other users, or you can stay and expect to get pushback.

That’s the cool thing about Lemmy, it’s not a single thing, it’s a federation of many smaller spaces with different focuses, interests, vibes, etc.

But heads up, if you are defending the cop in Illinois that slaughtered that woman in her house, you’re either completely clueless of American policing (which would make sense given that you’re not from here) or you are a nasty cop-simp.

The cop got slapped with multiple charges. Even his own department thought it was fucked what he did, which is rare because pigs generally like to wallow together in the same shit.

Protonmail, it’s fantastic. Sleek design, solid feature set, integrates with Thunderbird if you want to use that.

There is no “original Bible.” Different sects of Christianity have different canons that they consider “scripture.”

Most Protestants adhere to 66 books divided into the “old” & “new” testaments. Roman catholics include several more books commonly called the “apocrypha” or “deuterocanonical” books.

Various traditions in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox sects such as the Syriac Orthodox church or the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church include even more books and depending on the specific tradition, don’t even have a closed canon of official scripture. They don’t really think of scripture in terms of being officially canonized, it’s more of a spectrum from “more authoritative” to “less authoritative.”

There was no defined canon for any of the early Christians for several centuries. Early Christians circulated many different epistles, religious poems, stories, legends, sermons, and parables, often just by oral tradition.

Some, like the gospel of Mark, are considered fairly historical by many scholars, others are more fantastical or don’t have as solid historical attestation.

There is active debate amongst scholars about authorship of the now canonized Biblical corpus and the level of historicity.

Take the Bible for what it is; an impressive and important historical work, really a small library of ancient literature. It’s not a magical text though, it was written by people in very specific sociological and historical contexts and should be studied and examined with those in mind.

If you find it enlightening and inspiring to your life and it helps you be a better person to others, that’s great. And if you attach special spiritual or religious meaning to it, that’s your call. But that doesn’t change the nature of what the Bible is and where it came from.