Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.

There’s a cool computer game that makes this point as part of the story line… I’d recommend it, but I can’t recommend it in this context without it being a spoiler!

Yeah. It makes no sense. A totally crazy mental block. Irrational and nonsensical. No sane person would ever write like that. No chance anyone would ever want to express themselves in that way unless that had some kind of twisted sinister motive. We shouldn’t allow that kind of thing here. We need to make sure everyone on lemmy knows that it is not what we want in this community. Lets keep this discussion going to make sure this wisdom is heard.

Oh my god! You’re right! I see now! Thanks for clarifying that. It was totally absurdly juvenile and silly of them to write like that. Should we really even tolerate that kind of behaviour here on lemmy? I didn’t understand how bad it was until you explained it to me - but I’m sure glad you did, because now it is so crystal clear that the way that they expressed themselves was ridiculous and possibly even harmful to the community.

You think it’s juvenile to self-censor? Have you never heard and adult use swear-adjacent words when talking? This happens for all sorts of reasons. If you think this is a childish thing to do, then I can only assume social norms are very different where you. I can’t think of any child I know ever self-censoring in this way. They’d either swear, or not swear. But I do know of adults who do it.

Obviously the semi-censored version isn’t the same - otherwise you wouldn’t be talking about it. And the author has told you that it was a stylistic choice to use that different version. That’s enough, isn’t it? And judging by the reactions here, apparently the semi-censored version is even more hard-hitting than the full word!

Swearing is used for emphasis and to invoke a reaction. The attention it has brought here seems to show that it has invoked a reaction and captured people’s attention. Maybe that drawing of attention means it was fit for purpose - or maybe not. In any case, it was the choice of the author to do it like that.

I do.

I’ve got a piece of black tape over the power line on my computer, because it is too bright. And I have masking tape over the caps/num/scroll-lock lights on my keyboard; because they are also too bright. (The light is much gentler through the masking tape.)

I like the meme - but the identity of the villain hasn’t yet been revealed. I’m sure lots of people are keen to see who’s behind the “Jia Tan” mask.

And so the microkernal vs monolithic kernal debate continues…

I’m sure its different now from when I started - because coding is very popular, and the internet is a thing… But I can tell you, that it took a long time before I knew what a programming language was, or ‘coding’… these words were just not familiar to me.

I learnt stuff by just opening random executable files in notepad to see what they look like… mostly it was just garbage that no one can understand - but some of them were readable, and I replicated and learnt from them. (they were .bat files.) I became a bit of an expert in making very fancy batch files. I made customisable menus, and a little adventure game. Then my parents helped me out by buying me a programming book. It was about programming in Visual C++. I was pretty excited - until I quickly worked out that Visual C++ was something you had to buy before you could use it.

Anyway, my point is that it is easy to see what you need from the point of view of an expert; but from the point of view of a novice, you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know which words are important, or what anything is called. The first steps are not hard except that you don’t know which direction you are meant to be stepping in, or where the starting point should be.

My strategy is to just type git push and get some kind of error message about upstream not being set or something. That’s a signal for me to take a second to think about what I’m actually doing and type the correct command.

Holy smokes man. Did you learn your social skills from those same multiplayer games you are talking about?

Wait, you’re saying you like Windows specifically so that you can give miscellaneous companies the highest level of privileged access to your computer, a power which they say they want to use to check that you aren’t cheating. That’s the reason you want to use Windows?

You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.

Too real. I booted up windows last week because I wanted to test something quickly before going to bed… starting it and testing my thing took about 5 mins; but then shutting down took more than half an hour.

Yeah. Timeshift is good. Fortunately, it is part of the default Mint install, and the Mint ‘getting started’ instructions say to set it up.

I personally needed Timeshift on my second week of using Mint. What happened was that I was that I saw some setting somewhere for linking a google calendar to the calendar app or something like that; and I thought “I don’t really want to see any mention of Google anywhere in the OS, even in a setting that I can just not use”; so I uninstalled the thing that lets you link those accounts… what I didn’t realise is that uninstalling that also uninstalled a heap of critical parts of the Gnome desktop. So after restarting, I had no desktop or anything.

Fortunately, Timeshift is super easy to use, and I fixed it in a few minutes. Easy to break, easy to fix.

I agree that this is an easy way to try out Linux; but I wouldn’t advice doing it like this if you have intentions to eventually make Linux your main OS. If you’re using Linux in a virtual machine, then it will always feel like it’s another layer of work, another layer of abstraction, another few clicks to get started… it just adds a bit of friction. So although the virtual machine can show you what the OS looks like and how it works etc. The experience of possibly using it as a main OS will be skewed in a negative way by having to set up and run a the virtual machine.

So I’d say virtual machine is ok if you just want to look around for curiosity; but if you have intentions to make it your primary OS, then I reckon go straight to dual boot, and make Linux the default boot option so that the friction is in switching back to Windows rather than in trying the new and unfamiliar OS.

It’s true. I installed Mint on this computer to dual boot with Windows, expecting a gradual experimental transition away from Windows. But it has been months now, and I haven’t used Windows on this computer at all, other than to just test a couple of things for a minute or so.

Switching to Linux wasn’t perfectly smooth. I’ve definitely run into some problems. But the functionality is there, and the problems are mostly about my lack of experience. I doubt I’ll install Windows on any computer ever again. Windows is getting more and more annoying with nags and ads and bloatware, while Linux continues to slowly but steadily improve.

One advantage of directory-based encryption is for online backups. I use SpiderOak to backup some stuff, and so I can tell it backup my encrypted data without it ever seeing the unencrypted data. I don’t think that’s so easy with full-disk encryption. (I suspect only a handful people in the world still use SpiderOak, but the idea applies to whatever cloud backup thing you might use.)

Similarly, it means I can lend a portable HDD to someone to share videos or something, but still have private stuff stored on there as well if I want to.