Crozekiel

My biggest hurdle is honestly that GrapheneOS only supports Pixel phones… I had one once and hated it and honestly don’t know how much of that was because of google’s android or the phone itself and am reluctant to buy a new pixel phone to try GrapheneOS and find out I still hate the hardware. I’ve had a much better “out of the box” experience with Samsung phones (and love that my current one has an sd card slot and headphone jack - but I know that’s pretty much non-existent on new phones) but am finding they are so locked down and closed off by Samsung you can’t really put anything else on it and have it work properly as far as I can tell.

It’s time for a new phone, and I’m honestly not sure what to do… The easy route seems like getting a pixel and putting GrapheneOS on it before doing anything else, but I just don’t super trust that the hardware isn’t going to drive me nuts…

Looks like a taxidermy duck.

I don’t know how common it is anymore, but it definitely was a few years back. You knew a computer was infected with everything when you saw a stupid cartoon dinosaur or something as the mouse cursor as soon as the pc booted to windows… I think it was more about what was bundled in the download from scummy websites doing the damage though, not the actual cursor files. I still cringe though if I see a non-standard cursor in windows, like PTSD-esque flashbacks…

Clunker really doesn’t come close to the cars it referenced though. Not trying to defend it’s use, I understand what everyone is talking about here. There really is no good replacement word though, which is frustrating. Like, that entire era of car culture came and went before many of us involved knew the word was racist (or at least before we were mature enough to care).

“now now, calm down everyone. Let’s see what the Orphan-Crushing Machine really does before we start getting upset. Just because it is fully capable of (and seems exclusively designed to) crush all orphans doesn’t mean it is actually going to crush ALL the orphans. Probably just a few orphans really.”

There is a reason Microsoft stopped caring a long time ago that it is so easy to install and use Windows without paying for a key. You can STILL use any old windows 7 key you have to active windows 10 and 11. You can use the OS nearly in it’s entirety (as far as home users are concerned) without even doing that. It is because Windows is no longer Microsoft’s biggest product, the user is.

The problem is we’ve already kinda seen what that brings to the industry through mobile gaming, and it’s been universally terribly not just for mobile but for the entire gaming industry.

I dunno, maybe this would be different, but to me it is just another test-bed of innovating new ways to dick down the consumers that will eventually spread to the rest of the world again.

Your suggestion for what he should use instead of Signal, is Signal??

One of these things is not like the other…

DeviantArt really caught me off guard… lol

Okay, but what if enough reddit hate floods them now, while the AI is still learning what a reddit post should look like, and THEN we all leave, then the “content” posted by all the bots will just be self-perpetuating reddit-hate devolving into unintelligible non-sentences with anti-reddit keywords? :P

That sucks man. There needs to be less division and derision in the Linux community. Not that there is a lot, but there is enough to drive some people away. It’s not as easy as windows to daily drive Linux. It is SO MUCH better than it used to be, but it still isn’t something you can just dump on a family member or friend and expect to not get calls about it.

And worse, it isn’t the same for almost anyone. I’ve had good luck with Arch derivatives (Manjaro and Garuda), but I’ve got friends that tried running the exact same OS and build etc. on very similar hardware and can’t get half the games working that I play regularly with minimal effort - even following the same steps I used with no issues. They install Ubuntu or Mint and suddenly it works fine… Happy it works, but none of us know why or what to do if something similar happens next time…

And somehow, it seems every problem any of us runs into are so bizarre (or we don’t know enough “likely causes” to google specific and correct terminology) that it seems like no one on the internet has ever had it happen before. Thankfully it’s been going great for me, but one of my friends is just having a rough time of it. :(

TL;DR - Thank you to all the actually helpful people in the Linux community that make this journey possible for the rest of us. To the people being dicks: if you have to swing down constantly to feel good, re-evaluate your life choices and leave us out of it.

I agree with this. Also, vast majority of distros come with an option for live environment from the install media which makes it super easy to test drive a few flavors before picking. I bought like 8 cheap 16GB usb drives and then made a not-so-short list of distributions that people were talking highly of. Boot up each one, tinker around for an hour or so, see what it comes with, how easy it is to get the desktop environment the way I like it, what hardware it sees and uses automatically, etc. I landed on Garuda for now, it’s new and exciting but not so scary unfamiliar. I’ve tried Mint, Manjaro, Kubuntu, Zorin, Drauger, Pop!, and Debian. I wasn’t a fan of Pop! personally, but honestly found a way to like all the rest pretty comfortably.