There’s something that strikes me as fundamentally hilarious that “good with computers” in the Windows world means “disabling all of Windows’ pushy services that rip control from the user and sell their data.”
Like “I think I’m pretty good with computers!”
“Oh yeah? How much of Windows have you managed to sabotage so it stays out of your way?”
LMAO . It could be such a good OS but its dark and anyi-patterns are truly bizarre.
Yeah, I still remember that ad where he irritatingly looks at the caveman ad in the airport.
Silly ad, but I thank them for introducing me to Röyksopp! :P
Also OP, if you want pretty and Cinnamon can’t do it for ya, you can always install KDE (my fav!) or GNOME or what have you right on top of your existing system.
Research before doing so! But it’s possible. :)
I also love Tumbleweed and rock it as my daily driver!
To complement this point, OP, you can also get that sweet rollback functionality in any distro! Usually the easiest way is selecting BTRFS as your file system on install, and installing a software called “TimeShift” that will manage snapshots for you.
BTRFS can be complicated, but basically, it allows remembering the changes in files, without needing to copy the ENTIRE file. This saves a ton of space. (You don’t need to get into the weeds deep diving if you don’t want to. Snapshots are great, everything else is great, as long as you aren’t doing crazy specific RAID setups or something lol)
Otherwise, on EXT4 for insurance, your rollbacks would just literally be copied files, which can eat your storage fast. :)
Tumbleweed is known for rolling (heh!) this in quite smoothly by default, but this is just an example how any distro can be tweaked how you like! (Highly recommend setting up Timeshift on ANY install.)
I absolutely second the advice in this comment: Try some live USBs or virtual machines and just play around for what feels right. Distro hopping can be lots of fun, but you’ll find one that “feels like home.”
:)
I agree with most folks here that usability-wise, both are truly fine! Mainly I think philosophy is where Mint might have an edge here.
Ubuntu, run by a corpo named Canonical, has had some controversial decisions in the past, such as inserting amazon ads into the system’s search feature, or “opt out” analytics being default, and lately, a system called “snap.”
Snap is controversial because it has a closed source backend, but effectively works just like its open-source counterpart, the “flatpak.” It’s packaged so the software has everything it needs to run.
Some people say they work great, others hate them, but Ubuntu doesn’t make it very easy for you to have a choice in the matter.
If you don’t like the idea of snaps, it’s a bit of a pain to get rid of it. And otherwise, Ubuntu will sneakily use it as the default way to install most software. Philosophically, this can feel a lot like why people left Windows behind!
Long term, that’s why I favor and recommend Mint to most newcomers: It doesn’t play those games, sometimes the drivers work even better, the community is fantastic, and the vast knowledge that works on Ubuntu should work on Mint too.
So that’s mainly where the difference will lie.
Either way, I wouldn’t sweat it too much while you’re learning, as long as it does what you want! And purple-orange is pretty snazzy. ;)
Mint just feels a little “cleaner” in my humble opinion. Most software you’d want the latest of, like GIMP or Discord, will be found as a Flatpak in Mint’s app store.
Hope this helps you get a clearer view!
Microsoft knows this has so much power with a certain computer user demographic and I hate it so much. It was the worst, having to teach people to install certain useful software while also directing them to override big scary warnings…“But just this time! Don’t do it all the time!”
It made me look shady, it made the software look shady, for no good reason.
…And you just know, sadly they’re the same kind of users that will probably repeat that pattern with a suspicious .exe they got in an email.
Let’s be honest, corporate was just mad they didn’t think of it sooner! :p
Yeah you make a really good point there! I was perhaps thinking too simplistically and scaling from my personal experience with playing around on my home machine.
Although realistically, it seems the situation is pretty bad because freaky-giant-mega-computers are both training models AND answering countless silly queries per second. So at scale it sucks all around.
Minus the terrible fad-device-cycle manufacturing aspect, if they’re really sticking to their guns on pushing this LLM madness, do you think this wave of onboard “Ai chips” will make any impact on lessening natural resource usage at scale?
(Also offtopic but I wonder how much a sweet juicy exploit target these “ai modules” will turn out to be.)
Just wanna say, I’ve seen you on a lot of posts and I really appreciate your fervor in trying to reach out with hope and education after this dark turn of events. It’s important work and I’m really glad to feel we aren’t alone.
I don’t know if we agree 100% on a lot of things, but if we win a world where we can keep peaceably debating the merits of various pro-human policies, then we’ve won, and that’s worth fighting for.
Please make sure you’re taking good care of yourself and getting fresh air once in a while too, amigo. All this doomsaying by people can weary the soul. But thanks for putting so much effort into your outreach posts. :)
–Sincerely, A Christian-Anarchist (USA)
Bough it
Twish it!
Pull it!
(Yeah I know this joke is a stretch lmao)
“I work at Burger King making flame-broiled who-ppers I wear pa-per hats…”
It’s so dumb but also that was the joy of the old Internet. Stupid silliness like that lmao.
Dammit, Manjaro. Why you gotta be WEIRD?! I used to love their branding, but they keep doing crazy things that would clearly alienate the userbase that’s left…
NGL on pretty much any install, I’d end up looking up pros and cons of every filesystem AGAIN…
… It’s BTRFS now. Simple. Easy. Lol
But it was a lotta research to reach that conclusion. So yeah I get that newbie apprehension!
To be fair: “For each answer it gives”, nah. You can run a model on your home computer even. It might not be so bad if we just had an established model and asked it questions.
The “forest destroying” is really in training those models.
Of course at this point I guess it’s just semantics, because as long as it gets used, those companies are gonna be non-stop training those stupid models until they’ve created a barren wasteland and there’s nothing left…
So yeah, overall pretty destructive and it sucks…
Okay yeah this is me too. Ideally I’d start working early, get to shut off at some reasonable time but…
Nope, apparently my “Let’s actually do this” brain might kick in around 14:00.
And I wonder why I don’t get to have fun anymore. =
I’m considering just stacking boxes somewhere, if it wasn’t for commuting. I long for independence but can’t seem to manage my own time.
Have fun with that. But last I checked, lots of us don’t have the freedom to just migrate across the globe to a region that isn’t collapsing and this would spell misery and anguish for countless people across the globe.
(Yes, if the U.S destabilizes, further global power imbalances will follow.)
So giving up and pretending to take the high ground over it isn’t exactly in anybody’s best interest.
(The US civil war comes to mind)
I mean hey you’re right, we’re still here…but we’d really REALLY like to prevent a second one of those…From the reviews I’ve read it wasn’t a fun time for pretty much anybody involved.
I also have this weird feeling that there was some assumption of gentleman’s decorum back then even with those one disagreed with.
I appreciate his “forgive them, educate them, and move on” ideal. As if surely, once they’ve learned how things are, they will calm down! I wish it were that way.
But I think he’d be (im/de)pressed with just how low the bar has fallen when it comes to civil human behavior, general education esp. in civic affairs, and practical reasoning. There is no line too far anymore. There is no punishment for violating foundational social contracts or civil discourse.
One half is constantly flabbergasted that the other half keeps flagrantly violating the power of their office and saying “So what? I’m winning.”
We’re just so far past the point of reason now.
Edit: Also remember, Jefferson wrote this long before the Civil War. I believe his point in “forgive them and move on” was optimistically more in the interest of preserving the young Republic at all costs, rather than letting it crumble from the inside with internal feuds. (As is the fate of many rebellions)
We’ve had a GE fridge that’s probably older than about 10 years. But you know, it’s complicated enough that it feels like it’s made to fail at some point.
Well, stuff stopped cooling but all the lights were on and everything else worked. It was really weird. We were thinking it might be a dead compressor or something. Crap, do we need a new fridge?
Nope! What basically amounts to a glorified computer fan with a fancier proprietary plug does all the work of distributing that cold air through the rest of the unit.
The proprietary plug is totally so they can sell it for $45, of course. Lol anyway, works like new!
Also get a dust mask and vacuum + blow out the back of your refrigerators, people. They get grooooss!!!
Not shilling but this is exactly why 3rd party services like iDrive are good: Cloud backup but you have the choice of keeping your own encryption key.
Apple, M$, Google, are all like “just trust me bro BTW a big chunk of our business is data sales” lol