Awesome to hear! It’s easier said than done (like always) because I think sometimes we don’t even realize when we’re doing it.

In the first year of COVID my position got eliminated at the company I’d worked at for 16 years. I’d had different positions within the company, but that place was basically my entire career until then.

That shock to the system, coupled with the fact that several months later I realized I was the same person with the same loved ones, finally flipped some switch in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there. Then the next job I got was fucking horrible and served to weld that switch in its new position, lol.

So now I have a good job with good coworkers, and I appreciate that fact every day, but that’s not going to erode the healthy boundaries and mental compartmentalization.

MacOS is literally certified UNIX though.

I’m not a Mac user at all, and I’m lucky enough to be able to run Linux full time at work, but it seems like macs should be alright in many cases.

What has been working for me is not trying to make software my life or my identity. I don’t get home from work just to work on my side project, or my app, or my Arch install, or even watch videos about coding and shit. I hang out at my pond, play with my pets, play with my son, chill with my wife, work on the yard, or just watch/play something that catches my interest.

It’s like we all have a unique user’s manual for our unique bodies and minds, but we don’t get a copy of it and have to do some reverse engineering to figure out what works. Then you have to have the compassion and empathy for yourself to do the things that increase your happiness instead of doing the things that you’re “supposed” to do.

I know teams is probably the most hated product in tech savvy corporate America, but I do at least give MS credit that I can let it live in a Firefox tab and my audio & video work fine for meetings.

But when anybody tries to use a Teams-equipped conference room? Whoo boy!

Yeah, jira is going alright for us at work, but there are a lot of supporting people maintaining it and prioritizing things in meetings that we engineers don’t have to attend.

Everybody gangs up on hating Teams instead!

Fair enough. Thanks!

Fortunately with Linux, choice is the name of the game!

I’m curious why you wouldn’t recommend mint. Is it due to some kind of problem, or is it just a personal taste thing?

I use mint daily so if there are potential issues I just want to know!

As an American, this line short circuited my brain:

Police there still carry guns on the regular

I live in a quiet but growing suburban town that’s closer to rural areas than the nearest city. When I walk my kid to elementary school (how European of us, lol) the police officer working as a crossing guard for the kids still has their gun, taser, bulletproof vest, and all their other gear on.

And it’s not a school-specific thing. You just never see cops without their weapons here. Armed and armored is just part of the uniform, essentially.

I might have the exception to this. I’m able to dual boot my work laptop, as can the other engineers in my department. So it’s effectively a Linux machine under my exclusive administration. The only request from my IT department was how to format the host name.

I’m still not taking chances with that thing though, even when on my home network. The rules exist even if there’s a 99.99% chance they won’t be enforced. I have nothing to gain from doing nefarious shit on it just to prove a point, lol.

Can’t take calls? Don’t threaten ME with a good time!

This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.

Yeah it’s right up there on the list of what shareholders need to survive:

Water

Food

Solid CAGR of investment portfolio

Shelter

Human contact

Etc

(CAGR being Compound Annual Growth Rate)

That’s a good point. AIs/LLMs will exist and will necessarily learn from copyrighted materials without traceability back to the copyright owners to compensate them.

Sounds to me like AIs/LLMs can’t and shouldn’t be proprietary systems owned by private entities for profit, then.

They have LMDE that they maintain so that Mint can continue if Ubuntu ever goes away. And of course, some people choose to just run LMDE now.

Mint is great.

I use Linux Mint cinnamon on a daily basis, typically with one or two command line terminals open at all times (one normal and one in a docker container), and with some kind of code always open too. I use 4 monitors as well, which the same machine can’t handle when I boot into windows.

No apologies and no regrets. Being user friendly doesn’t mean it’s limited. It uses Ubuntu and Debian stuff after all, just with the controversial Ubuntu stuff removed.

The size of Twitter’s user base and its ubiquitous use by celebrities and the media gave the platform an air of legitimacy that is what Musk vaporized his billions to get. He obviously didn’t value the brand or the workforce.

We need that false sense of legitimacy to keep getting chipped away in the eyes of mainstream society.

And WSL is pretty good according to one of the other guys in my department that’s been using it.

The problem for Microsoft is that my entire user experience is better when I boot straight into Linux and use all their software (except vscode) in browser tabs.

If you have a USB stick handy, you could probably be dual booting into Linux Mint within an hour.

No need to fully learn Linux before moving to that. You can do your research using Firefox on your Linux desktop. And by “research” I mean googling/DDGing things as you need to know how to do them. It starts to stick.

Yeah, honestly it’s worked fine without any fiddling around. If it makes a difference, I tend to do things like let mint use non-free components if necessary, and I know I do have the “play drm stuff” option turned on I’m Firefox, even though the privacy and security stuff is all strict.

It’s just a Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia gpu in addition to the embedded Intel one. I think it works fine though with either the open drivers or the closed nvidia ones, but I don’t know if it touches that gpu.

I get to dual boot at work (I run mint btw) and the only reason I ever boot into windows every week or three is to make sure it doesn’t get so out of date that it gets booted from the network.

I guess it’s time to stop that shit! Having windows available is not worth the risk of messing up my work machine. Hell I’m tempted to nuke that windows partition and double the size of my /home partition!

Though I will give Microsoft credit that m365 stuff, including video calls in Teams, work great using the web versions in Firefox. That’s even with the security and privacy stuff cranked up. I only white listed those sites for cookies and local storage for convenience.