I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

Eh, technical merit is only one of many factors that determine what language is the “best”. Best is inherently a subjective assessment. Rust’s safety and performance is the conceptual bible rustacians use to justify thier faith.

I also know religious people who have written books about their faith too (my uncle is a preacher and my ex-spouse was getting their doctorate in theology). Rust has the same reality-blind, proselytizing zealots.

The needs of the project being planning and the technical abilities of the developers building it are more important that what language is superior.

I like rust. I own a physical copy of the book and donated money to the rust foundation. I have written a few utilities and programs in rust. The runtime performance and safety is paid for in dev time. I would argue that for most software projects, especially small ones, Rust adds too much complexity for maintainability and ease of development.

I know religious people who could not explain their faith so specifically.

Is it really just old men saying stuff should remain in C/C++ to preserve their nostalgia? What a bunch of petty bullsh!t.

Oh, so that’s where the creator of ReiserFS got the idea.

Software, 1,000%. I love linux and daily drive it. But when I have videos to edit, photos to rework, or collateral to design I have a windows laptop with professional grade tools to do the job.

I’m sorry, gimp is hot garbage. There isn’t a pro-grade, open source video editing tool or anything close. Inkscape is useable in a pinch. Scribus is useless.

Not everyone is a multimedia creative professional, but most software on linux never quite have the features you need, are no longer maintained, or will be useful in ten years.

That said, I’d still rather break out the laptop when doing client work than daily drive MacOS or Windows 11. Either way the barrier for most users is that linux almost works.

The theoretical benefits of Gentoo or Arch are completely negated by the fussy nature of those systems. You have more control, but to get it you have to do a lot more work. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just that’s the main difference between arch, gentoo, and a more streamlined distro.

Really it depends on what you want out of your distro. If total control is what you’re after, then gentoo is only the beginning of a deep k hole that ends in LFS and a ricing habit. Personally I like using my computer as a tool to do other stuff so anything more hands on than debian stable just gets on my nerves or turns me into a ricing addict. But I had to install gentoo to figure that out.

Gentoo is a filter. You either love it and continue diving or learn you want something else from your OS.

Honestly, I think it might be a deal breaker for me in November. I’m willing to put up with a lot of meat-brained nonsense, but dead children so out soldiers can have an easier commute to kill more is a nonstarter.

If I do decide not to vote in a few months, and not voting gives Trump the presidency, it’s what we deserve.

On a technical level, no. You’re right. It would not be possible to capture the protocol entirely. But meta has serious cash to spend on marketing Threads. If they can capture enough of the ActivityPub market and were to collab with Bluesky and use their protocol (I forget the name), or make their own, it’s only a matter of time before the drop activitypub and force users either to join threads or lose access to their users.

Threads and Bluesky are kind of an existential threat to ActivityPub given Meta and Twitter’s track record with Open Graph, bootstrap, and public api’s.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

How hard is it to field a presidential candidate that is not a senior citizen and who doesn’t wish to remain allies with countries engaged in genocide?