Yeah I honestly legit enjoyed my fond time with old Windows machines back when they were fun and user-oriented instead of the user-exploitative SAAS monsters they are now.

Win10 wasn’t even SO bad as everyone says…well, until recently when they started forcing Microsoft Accounts on install and harass you with their ads every 3 forced updates. Ugh.

Now they’re on the Ai bandwagon? Yeah they’re real small in my rearview mirror now.

I think it’s just a different landscape now, and I’m glad Linux was there to jump to after all these companies started losing their collective minds.

“Linux is open source and free! You can do whatever you want with it! It’s our thing!”

Microsoft: “Whatever I want with it?..Free?..Hm…This is my thing .”

XP was totally a wild time, to Dad’s credit though! hahaha

It was that funky era of needing like 4 different anti malware programs, and downloading game patches from various hopefully-trusty file hosts, or nabbing the suspiciously convenient “Linkin-Park-Meteora-FULL_ALBUM.exe” off of Kazaa which would promptly rootkit your whole system.

Routinely running Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG, and CCleaner to combat constantly-reinstalling spyware.

Heck, I consider myself kinda smart but I still had Bonzi Buddy for a while! …I mean, c’mon, funnee purpl monke. Who could resist?

Like wow, now that I think back on it, you really needed a bit of “street smarts” back then. Nowadays security has gotten a lot better and one can get away with just “Not downloading weird Russian Web3 games off the dark web” and they’ll usually be relatively fine. Lol.

TL;DR: Windows XP was compatible with Bonzi Buddy, Mandriva was definitely a more secure choice, seeing as it couldn’t run Bonzi Buddy unless you were determined with WINE maybe?

… It’s cool you got introduced to Linux so early. Cool dad. :)

That’s defo Broadcom’s fault. Unfortunately when Linux is a second class citizen, hardware vendors will make crappy Windows and maybe Mac drivers, but a lot of Linux support seems like it needs to be reverse engineered or something, if the company itself refuses to play ball. :(

This was the case with NVIDIA for a long while. Still kinda is. Hopefully that’s improving though.

Fair disclosure, I personally run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, BUT…

Honestly for this situation I think Linux Mint might be your on-ramp. It’s very familiar from a user experience perspective from someone coming from Windows, and everything can be done with GUI apps.

It updates the entire system smoothly through an “app store” so it stays nice and secure. “Cinnamon” is also a highly attractive and smooth desktop environment.

I’ve switched a few people to it who were sick of Windows on older machines, but NOT computer people at all, and they’ve enjoyed it a lot! The nicest thing is it will feel like your computer again, not like you’re leasing it from Microsoft.

Don’t try and “completely switch over” in one go.

Look up how to try Linux in a virtual machine on your existing setup (so you don’t have to risk anything!) and just try it and play around with installing and using it.

An old laptop or something is also a great way to try it out.

You can always dual-boot if you want. I sure did for a while until Win10 started BSODing for no discernable reason, and refused to let me “refresh this PC” because “Sorry, can’t. Goodbye.”

I still have it, just in case, but it’s been most of the year since I’ve even bothered logging into it.

If you game: you’ll want Heroic Launcher for your GoG/EA stuff, and Steam of course, and maybe Bottles to run your old CD/DVD games maybe. :)

Sometimes things take a little tweaking, but Mint’s community is fantastic and helpful. You really will start to learn a lot about computers just by using Linux a little and trying things, while Windows makes every effort to hide things from you. (“wE’rE gEtTiNg ThInGs ReAdY” who’s “we”?!)

As you start to get comfortable with it, it will grow with you. You can start trying to get the hang of the terminal, or jump to another distro once you learn why you might prefer to.

But you really can’t go wrong just trying Mint out. It’s overall just a pleasant OS.

ProTip: You’ll be asked about a file system when you install any distro. I spent COUNTLESS HOURS on researching this question. BTRFS can be a bit of an advanced file system, but if you just “set it and forget it”, it has the ability to take incremental snapshots without taking a ton of space! So if something really goes south, you can use an app called “Timeshift” to just roll back.

This is great for your root drive / partition, but I wouldn’t suggest it for your home folder. :)

(Just like Windows rollback used to do, but…more reliable lol)

Lol sorry for the ramble but I hope this might help you feel a little less lost at the grocery store. ;)

I’ve heard rumors that some of those troops have witnessed the outside world and are already deserting lol.

I would agree, although a human with an AK is still a human with an AK. Even unskilled, undertrained, under supplied infantry should be taken seriously because they’re still a large number of bodies that can pull triggers.

I’m pretty sure they also thought he’d get spanked relatively quickly, and backpeddle within like a year after he lost enough war criminals and starving peasants who participated in his “special military operation”.

And it’s still going.

We really would be foolish at this point to make any more “It’s unlikely that…” assertions at this point… It’s all out crazy town now.

So basically as long as they SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS… They just keep going. Lol

Reminds me: In the roguelike game Cataclysm DDA, there’s fungus monsters. Basically once they’re on the map, the best strategy was to just run and keep running until they were out of the game’s “simulation bubble.”

They would spread fungal colonies uncontrollably, creating fungal towers, spawning more spores, and fungal versions of monsters, which would spread more spores…

You could hack away at them or burn them sure, but all of them? Unlikely. You could also get infected with spores! They’d rapidly take over the entire game basically lol … Dunno if that’s been nerfed now.

Spores are freaky. Really freaky…

Some of them (maybe all? Idk) have a venomous beak. So. There’s that. :|

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq_wYOGRG7I

I’m really surprised nobody else posted this. My first thought was Goldeneye 64’s snow level soundtrack. 😮 Like I could hear it just looking at this image lol.

You’re not wrong about how they operate.

But there’s absolutely far reaching consequences to major decisions by leaders in power. Don’t fool yourself thinking “It hasn’t burned down yet” just because it’s not a Hollywood societal-collapse movie before your eyes.

Work sucks more than ever for us now. Know why? Long-dead Reagan absolutely destroyed workers’ rights and established precedents that put bosses much higher on society’s totem pole. Recessions happened. People get desperate and forget that they even HAD rights as workers. Clawing this back is the battle of our time at home.

Before that? FDR’s New Deal actually secured quite a bit of prosperity for people amidst a complete disaster. People still benefit from Social Security to this day, even if only a little.

Teddy Roosevelt established the National Park system. Now we’re happy we don’t have luxury apartments in the middle of Yosemite or Yellowstone, or fast food chains all along the Grand Canyon. (Or it hasn’t been used as a landfill or something because the hole was already dug so it saves costs!)

Citizen’s United is why we have trillions of dollars in shadow-money funding “both sides” of a broken system. (Although that wasn’t put up to vote, the people in charge were sworn in by people that were elected.)

TL;DR: I get it. It’s all stupid, we’re all constantly lied to. That’s super lame. We know and we hate it.

BUT:

Votes. Have. Consequences.

Oo! Or had the supreme court declare it’s okay to commit any crime you want as long as you’re president. That’s new!

I’m also sick of the hyperbole from campaigners too but you’re right. A LOT has changed that can undermine a lot of fundamental freedoms we take for granted.

Everyone knows capital-first politicians don’t actually care about us. We get it.

I’m all 'bout that fancy praxis and mutual aid and all those lofty but pure concepts we definitely need to be working on. But we live in a society here.

Not voting right now is giving an out-and-out fascist a ridiculous amount of power to start crushing and punishing anybody with a different opinion.

We’re doing what we can with what we have to soften the blow, so we can actually have the chance to work on the higher concepts like “changing the people involved in it.”

I’d much rather be on the ground convincing people to form unions to safely backtalk their bosses, rather than rallying up guerilla units amidst a “boogaloo” because a bunch of hateful and uneducated people put a screeching orange baby on a throne who refused to leave and became “holy immortal emperor.”

Lmao hyperbole aside. Seriously. Standing on the sidelines and going “hmph” is basically a vote for things that are likely Very Bad For You™.

“More now than EVER”

– Every political ad til the end of time.

“Walked back at the threat of trump”, can you explain what you mean by this a little more? Sorry I’m just not sure what it means.

A gentle reminder that the Socialist Rifle Association is a thing! No personal experience with them, but I like that they’re an underdog foil to your typical “American gun culture” stereotypes.

I should really be more active about this. I don’t have the money to dump a ton of brass on the regular but I enjoy the freedom to do it while keeping my ideals!

Ha!

— Former Okie, now Nevadan, proud 50-somethingth in education for many years running

(Are we not aware of how many states there are or are we counting outlying U.S territories? Anybody’s guess! 😉)