I actually didn’t know you could nest Virtual Desktops within activities, so that was nice. Now I can make my setup even more absurdly complicated for anyone who’s not me to use lol.

Yeah I have the Libre Colour and it’s great! The pen feels good, it lets you do what you want with it (eg. using Calibre to strip the DRM off your books and loading them via USB, installing KOReader etc.) and it works well with Libby for getting eBooks from the library (at least in Canada.)

I have had exactly one HP laptop in my life, which luckily was a hand-me-down so I didn’t spend any money on it, but it was enough to convince me to never get another HP product ever again.

20-odd years and the boycott is still going strong lol.

The usual tech support search:

• First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.

• Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say “Solved” with no record of what was done.

• Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.

• Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you’re trying to fix break in a different way, but it’s progress at least.

• Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.

So to answer the question, I can usually tell I’m getting close to the solution when I say “Oh for fuck’s sake” as I’m closing tabs lol.

Yeah I was gonna say, I dunno if my distro is the best (Arch BTW) but it’s the best for me. Doesn’t give me any nonsense and lets me tinker as much as I want. Other people just want their OS to get out of their way, which of course is equally valid. Whatever works for you!

Isn’t that just the way things work in general though? If you have a worse computer, everything is going to be slower, broadly speaking.

As a side note, a couple of things that might be handy for you:

Bottles is a GUI for running Wine things that might make it a bit easier to navigate. It’s helped me out a few times.

Also there’s an AppDB on the Wine site where you can search for specific software to find out how well it runs/tweaks that people have used etc.

ALSO yeah games are in a pretty good place on Linux nowadays. I have a Steam Deck and it runs a surprising amount of stuff, even things that aren’t listed as being compatible. I think the main source of trouble is the online AntiCheat stuff, that’s not always compatible with Linux (although sometimes those work too, I think it just depends on the game.) There’s also protondb for checking which games work in Linux.

Hopefully some of that is helpful!

Smashing Pumpkins 1996-05-15 at Brixton Academy, London

It starts off kind of low-energy and then for whatever reason about halfway through they just start blasting it.

Sample

For me, I find it handy because it catches a bunch of stuff I always forget, like updating Docker containers. Also if you have Am installed it’ll even update your Appimages.

I use Topgrade, but I use the alias update to run it lol

I guarantee they’re also adding AI slop trained on other people’s work into their own content, while simultaneously suing anyone who does the same with theirs.

Fuck Disney

Since OP mentioned that they used Plasma in the past and don’t like GNOME, it might be worth mentioning that KDE is developing their own OS which should be immutable.

Might have to wait for a little bit though.

I have a few personal rules about it, eg. I’ll try not to pirate smaller, independent things where it might conceivably screw over the creator, but other than that it’s all fair game IMO.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to grow up hearing non-stop from the corporate world that piracy is evil and is killing art or whatever, only to watch them do a full 180 in the last couple of years now that they need to pirate the entire internet to train AI.

Calibre can do this! If you go to ‘Edit metadata’ there’s a button to download a cover. There are also plugins that expand the search, so you can include Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Amazon etc.

I got curious and had a quick poke around, seems like it’s called “Prue Leith: Journey With My Daughter” from 2020, but the only copy I managed to find is in Chinese on the Internet Archive. If I find an English copy though I’ll let you know!

I have some mapped to super simple aliases too like e1 to reboot, e2 to shutdown etc. I don’t remember why I started doing that, but that way I only have to remember which number does what lol.

Yeah that was it for me. Just keep regular backups and bear in mind that you’ll probably break stuff at first. But once you get the hang of it, it’s like a whole other level of control over your system.

Also I’m not dyslexic but would things like tab completion and aliases help maybe? I sometimes shorten often-used commands with aliases just for convenience (as an example, I use rsync a lot, particularly the command rsync --ignore-existing -ravwhich I just shorten to rs to save time) so maybe that could also be used to avoid mis-spelling?

Yeah my VPN (Mullvad) is super affordable and I just leave it on all the time so I never have to worry.

Also maybe a seedbox could work for this sort of situation? I’m not overly familiar with them but I assume that would also just be running no matter where OP is.

Not the above poster, but for me: it’s a slight concern but AFAIK the profiles are interchangeable so it’s pretty trivial to just switch back to Thunderbird if anything does happen.

For me it’s handy because I have multiple email accounts so I can just open Betterbird and check them all at once without having to log into several different pages.