Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "Brodie Robertson"
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@JacksonNick-j6i There's a difference between gender and sex. There's quite a nice book by a Catholic priest and journalist,* called IIRC "The Year Of Three Popes" (the year of the sudden death of John Paul 1). He describes going into the working parts of the Vatican and being surprised that there are everywhere triple shithouses (not the word he uses, but it's nice to introduce a little coarseness into things). They are all iconically identified, and there's clearly a Man icon and a Woman icon, and a third icon representing a figure in a long coat-like garment. And then he realises it's a cassock, and the third loo is for priests. Three genders in the 1970s. BTW, mammals have two sexes (though not every individual is neatly sorted), but other species have more sexes. I know trans (etc.) activists can be tedious to old men like us, but that's an activist thing, not a trans thing.
*Hebblethwaite is, I believe, his name.
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I doubt if there is any OS that doesn't require troubleshooting (I trouble shoot Windows for my friends over the phone -- not without stress), but I have found Mint to be the easiest for me. There's a different version of Mint called Linux Mint LMDE, which is not based on Ubuntu, which might get round your problems. Or if you have a very new computer, it's possible that you need the latest and greatest to work with your hardware, so you could try Linux Mint Edge. It might well be that another distro would be better for you, but I haven't found anything that is easier to get going and keep going than Mint.
It's also the case that, with normal luck, getting stuff going properly is a one time thing. Try entering a search with the name of your hardware, your distro, and a description of the problem, and see what Duck Duck Go or Google brings you.
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@dlsisson1970 You are quite right. One problem in discussions like this is that Linux has two main user groups. There are traditional og users, who at the least are computer hobbyists, and go all the way up to major server wizards in large organisations, and developers. These people want and need the command line, and they want and need to learn the system.
The newer group, and I'm one of them, just want an OS to run their computer so they can do everyday normal stuff, like watching cat videos and writing books and doing the accounts for their business. We're fed up with the Apple way, and have come to seriously mistrust Microsoft's desire to own our data and get in our face at every opportunity. And give or take a software issue or two (mostly spelt A D O B E) we've got that now, in the two or three obvious, big, desktop-environment-centred distros. We don't want, or need, to know a lot of stuff, anymore than anyone needs to know how to run a server with Windows to organise their book club or engage in the collaborative production of a policy document. Sometimes real wizards give advice to normies with the best will in the world, but without realising there's a whole new audience out there. They run the internet, but we're the people who will bring about the year of Linux on the desktop (if it is permitted to speak apocalyptically).
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From my experience in a similar area, I think it's not exactly incompetence but selective blindness and impatience by the talented of what they don't understand. I used to work in a university, as a subject academic, and also as the sort of nerd who works out the rules and regulations. It's an acquired taste, and I could well understand my colleagues who weren't the least bit interested; but some would refuse to admit that this sort of stuff was anything to do with them at all. I'd say "I know what you want, and it's good, but the way you're doing it won't work in the system, and it's affecting your students. Let me design some regulations for you that will do what you want, and the computer won't barf over." "No, I did it this way in my last university and I'm not going to change for some bureaucrat." Well, you can kind of see that, but you need some kind of system: in the FOSS world, legal technicalities are what keeps it FOSS, so you have to respect them, even if they bore the hind leg off a donkey. I never had the nuclear option, but sometimes I'd have used it if I had.
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Off and on Linux flirter for 20 years. User for 10, all GUI, Mint/Cinnamon for preference: easy to do now I've retired, but I'm not sure how I'll go shortly when I'm co-operating again on a book, and might have to go back to MS Word, which means Windows. Also I need a Windows machine for iTunes to organise my music for my iPhone.
The new interest in Linux is because Windows 11 has become so predatory against its users. "Tell us everything about yourself. Entrust all your data to our cloud, where it will all be encrypted so that no one (apart from us) can access it, including you if you let your subscription lapse."
Why Linux won't work for some people:
1: Some people use one or two pieces of software for their professional work: typically Adobe. The decision tree here goes: I need to use (say) Photoshop; what systems (hardware + software) will give me a good experience? The operating system isn't the choice, it's a consequence of prior choices. This is the same as people who have got some very expensive piece of manufacturing hardware which is old but still functional and central to their business, so they need to nurse into life some antique PC with a Centronics port because that's the machine's interface.
2: People who have a lot of experience with Windows or Mac, and know how to do out-of-the-way things, and try to do the same with Linux, and can't. It's partly that a lot of this is what is sometimes called "implicit knowledge": stuff you know without knowing how you got to know it. The charitable reading of the Linus fiasco is that he wanted to set up an advanced gaming rig with his Windows knowledge (the uncharitable interpretation is that he thought a bad-faith video about how Linux is too complicated and broken would be good commercially). This accumulated knowledge can be a real change-stopper, depending on how old you are and what sort of appetite you have for learning new stuff.
For pretty much everybody, changing from Windows is a rational choice, but there are some people for whom Mac is a better alternative. (I used to like OS X in the days of the Big Cats, but too much of its functionality is hidden for me these days -- like menu items that only appear when you hold down the splat key while clicking on the menu.)
And then there's gaming, but isn't everything better on a console anyway? I don't game.
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Hah, coastal boy, eh? In Australia, I lived in Armidale (NSW), and in the nation's capital; and in both places I saw -10 C. It was, admittedly, in the middle of the night in the dead of winter, but it was cold. Also dry, so if you came into contact with any synthetic fabric on a winter morning, there were sparks when you put your hand (or key) near metal. Lovely days, but, +15 and better, but cold as when the sun set.
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