We somehow avoided that, luckily.

I had the pleasure of getting sold a cheap power supply though. It was rather fascinating to learn that, indeed, even burning hardware can still provide sufficient power to play games (for a few seconds).

I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.

Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.

During some practical school training (basically two weeks where pupils are send to work in companies full-time without pay) at an electronics shop, someone brought in a Windows XP machine that caused problems. Heard that sound so often…

Turned out they still ran it without any Service Packs. Windows Update also refused to work… and it was registered to those fine people called “Skidrow” (the cracking group). 😅

At that time those registration cracks already supported Windows Update, they should’ve updated that one!

Congrats! Be aware that Windows loves to wipe foreign bootloaders though. If your computer suddenly can’t boot Mint anymore but goes right into Windows, that’s another way of MS screwing with you.

Look, an insult to life.

Boomer don’t know how to do shit 'cause computers were so rare. Zoomers don’t know how to do shit 'cause big companies profit from people who can’t help themselves and have low standards.

There was only a small timeframe where computers were available, accessible yet not enshittificated for profit like today.

That sounds like Debian with extra steps (and a fancy kernel).

There are two different “efficiency” and “simplicity” perspectives clashing here. If you already are proficient with the CLI it’s arguably more efficient and/or simple than GUI solutions. If you are not then there’s literally a steep learning cliff in front of you, something many in the first group apparently either forget or otherwise want to ignore. It just sucks, some people in the community do have a lot of knowledge but a complete lack of understanding for people outside of their tech bubble.

Think this is more of a accessibility thing. No one denies the CLI is really efficient to use if you’re a professional, it shouldn’t be the norm that you have to be proficient with it to use your computer to the fullest though. Nor to receive help if you don’t feel comfortable using it.

It would be nice if everyone could enjoy free and trustworthy computing, including people who either can’t or won’t learn many dozens text commands and paradigms.

That’s a good argument for Snaps & Flatpaks, not for putting an alias in place so “apt install Firefox” gets translated to “snap install org.mozilla.firefox” (or whatever the exact app name is). Corporate clients manage their systems as a fleet anyway, if the IT department sets it up a certain way their employees don’t fiddle with this stuff. There’s no good argument to redirect a users’ CLI commands to whatever Canonical believes is better.

I find it absolutely baffling how an equal amount of people voting on this comment seem to honestly believe that it would’ve been a realistic option for the majority of people (or even everyone) to get one of those Linux books and read hundreds of sites to fully understand everything necessary to manually setup a LAN party in a reasonable time. On 4 to 16 computers. Are all gamers expected to also be interested in IT enough to read such books? Are they supposed to magically know the existence of manpages? Of course not, 90% of private LANs in the early 2000’s would’ve simply not happened without easily navigable GUIs. At least not with computers.

The ignorance by so many in the Linux community regarding GUI is both baffling and infuriating.

In terms of polish Ubuntu is excellent. Problem is their policies and stupid decisions over the years, resulting in really unnecessary tech problems for anyone who wants more than just install apps via their App Store. Not to mention the inbuilt ads for Amazon, like, 10 years ago… or them recently deciding that it would be a good idea to alias some apt commands, so if you’re a power user and try to install f.e. Firefox with your CLI it would instead execute the command to install it as snap. Shit like that is just outright disrespectful to the user.

It see’s the US as AI slop?

For the sake of this meme I’ll just assume it’s meant to be meta as fuck.

We already do that, it’s simply covered up by capitalism and distance. Those who die mostly are in the poorest regions of Earth while everyone else complains about higher prices.

With the Ukraine invasion the grain supply also took a hit, yet western shelves (and garbage containers) were always filled to the brim. Those who died because of it died in the shadows, at least from most people’s perspective.

Cinnamon, most commonly known from Mint. There are also Fedora and Ubuntu spins for it.

I was answering your last point. I didn’t react to the first one because implying the big Linux DEs of user-friendly distros (usually Cinnamon, KDE or Gnome) were bad is just utter nonsense. Incomplete at times in regards to very specialised administrative tasks, sure. But the features and menus that exist are generally well made.

I also think navigating is easy, doesn’t mean anyone asking for initial help using a GPS app to get on track should from now on use a book with relative directions explained in text.

What are these “Burritos”?

You’re the only one rambling about coding right now, Apocalypteroid just used the word once; given he’s a self-described novice it’s safe to assume the word was used in a generalizing manner to describe any kind of bash, command line magic or config file syntax (as little as there is, there still is more or less basic syntax you have to adhere to. Enthusiasts might not even realize this anymore). Your comments do make a good example of the communication problem between novices and Linux/IT enthusiasts though. Your expectation towards people who aren’t into a topic to use perfect terminology in their questions is both naive and inconsiderate. It’s no wonder people got angry with you.

To answer your last question regarding “understand filesystem (paradigms)”: Coming from Windows people rarely, if ever, had to learn about any kind of filesystem; if they had to most people just right-clicked and formatted a disk. While saying that “ext4 is standard” would be rather straight-forward, more and more distros come with btrfs. Additionally it’s important to know about exfat to not let them run into awful situations with incompatible USB sticks and such. Of course this can and should be shown using their distro’s native Disk Utility, i.e. Gnome Disks, KDE Partition Manager or whatever comes with or at a minimum a common tool like GParted so they can safely interact with their own devices.

Too many people expect you to know and understand gnu-utils and all the common config file, filesystem and folder structure paradigms though. Which is the problem.