Fun, fun, we skip along together!

Swirling towards the center…

Where there is no pain and we are truly together, forever.

…

Eat at Arby’s

I don’t think the point was supposed to be that Valve is good.

I think it was supposed to be that it is possible for a profit-motivated company to do something that legitimately benefits the rest of us even though the motivation was their profit goals.

Maybe more of the credit for that should go to the original creators of the FOSS licenses than to Gabe Newell, but it’s still nice that it happened either way.

Because the standard version of Mint uses the ubuntu repositories. You get to utilize most of what makes up ubuntu, but decoupled from the stuff Canonical wants to push. It has some added polish as well.

It was more of an ubuntu-specific reply rather than “what’s the best distro” thing.

But now that you mention it, there is also Linux Mint Debian Edition! :D

I might actually start using LMDE at work, since we have some stuff that’s more focused on debian than ubuntu.

If they want ubuntu, let them Linux Mint! :D

I’ll proudly wear my Space Nerd badge all day long!

It does look like an artist’s rendition of the Milky Way galaxy like it’s an alien meme pointing at us. But, wouldn’t you know it, it’s not pointing to the right place. :D

It looks like we are half way out between the core and the outer rim. (very sci-fi sounding sentence, but I like it)

Everything is a wave if you dig deep enough.

At least, as far as we know right now. But the standard model and quantum field theory have been really solid with really precise predictions for many decades at this point. (not any kind of expert here, just find it interesting)

That couldn’t be a picture of Andromeda though, since that is not the perspective you get from our galaxy. Andromeda is facing us more with the edge than being broadside like in this image.

I’m not complaining though. Thanks for including the alt-text!

I think you are completely right, but that doesn’t invalidate the point behind the OP even if the specific comparison doesn’t fit great.

Having a cozy dark indoor day won’t kill you, but it does seem to be good for us to get ample exposure to the natural world.

I remember it well…

The smell of the gunpowder. In the play room.

My fellow americans and I look at this concept and tilt our heads to the side like confused puppies.

Fuckin’ hell, I feel like a kid in 2226 reading this on some kind of wall plaque after it was discovered in the cautionary history archives that survived the great fires. I think it struck me when I read this line:

the rot is far too deep, and the purification of chaos is, unfortunately, the only remedy

It’s just a very elegant way to describe the btshit craziness of living in “interesting times.”

Oh and hey future people who have presumably learned to be excellent to one another: put me in the plaque! It’s a thing we used to do on this old internet here with screenshots, you see.

Your use case sounds perfect for using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement. Opening a Word doc or an old Excel spreadsheet is effortless. You don’t sound like the “I use Excel every day for my job and there is no replacement” folks with very specific needs.

And I will echo what the other reply said: try Linux on your laptop! Not only will it probably work fine, it will probably also feel much faster and more responsive.

Trying most of the big Linux distros is super easy and zero commtment, too. When you boot from the install media, it loads directly into the OS desktop running natively on your hardware! Then once you’re ready to install it, there’s usually a shortcut on the desktop or something.

I recommend trying Linux Mint. It is so simple to install and full featured out of the box, plus being based on ubuntu and being very popular itself, information and help is everywhere.

I appreciate the juxtaposition between your username and this comment wanting to beat one of the universe’s most useless life forms.

Wilhoit’s law:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

In looking up the exact text, apparently it is often attributed to the wrong Wilhoit, lol.

Ouch, that line sure as hell would work on me!

But I’m not just an American who watched his show. I’m local to his area and I’ve been to the actual studios at WQED multiple times, on top of all the show artifacts I just saw the other day.

I found myself among some Mister Rogers quotes and artifacts yesterday, of all possible things.

So just for today I’m gonna push back on this one a little bit. I think the goodness is out there, but unfortunately much of our society is kinda designed to separate us from our humanity and mental peace.

Yep! The most expensive equipment they might need is a magic smoke compressor, if that.

The Democrats really suck. Our FPTP 2-party system is really some bullshit. However, it is really difficult for me to buy into the validity of the slippery slope you are describing when the people around me keep voting for the option that is #1 worst by a whole fucking lot.

And the further that #1 worst keeps surging and lapping #2 on the evil-dex, the further their psycho supporters seem to like it! We’ll see if the pedo shit can finally reverse that.

This would be a different conversation if we’d elected democrats over and over to avoid republicans and somehow still got dragged to the right. At the end of the Obama administration, for instance, there was the concern of the bait and switch.

But no. He gets impeached a couple times for betraying the US in different ways after being openly terrible for years, and dozens of millions of people still turn out to vote for him. He tries some light coup and all the daily otherwise career ending craziness, and they turn out to vote for him AGAIN in HIGHER numbers.

The fact that the democrats are the good cop capitalists to the republicans’ bad cop capitalists is definitely a problem, yes. Any of us who get to vote in the US should be keenly aware of that. And there are multiple things we can try to fix in parallel. But sometimes you have to fix things sequentially too.

I can imagine a future device with an e-ink page that’s so thin and flexible that it looks and feels like a paper book with magic changing text. I don’t know how many consumers would pay a premium for that, but I would definitely buy my wife one.

I’m just here to point out that the fact you genuinely care about your carbon footprint probably puts you ahead of 80% of the population, and the fact that it has materially affected your device choices probably puts you ahead of 80% of the remainder.

There’s definitely a unique satisfaction that comes from filling tech needs with hardware that already exists, and which does a great job at it too.

That goes across hobbies and mediums too. I just finished a big outdoor carpentry project where I was able to find perfect long-term uses for pieces of wood from The Initial Build in the construction of The New Hotness.