ForbiddenRoot

Installing arch is a pain

While Manjaro is perfectly fine, this is no longer true. With the archinstall script you can have even Arch up and running in minutes. It’s still not graphical or straightforward as a Manjaro installation, but it’s certainly not painful. EndeavourOS may be the closest to Arch with simple installation.

best hope for mainstream adoption

I feel for that the default Linux DE will need to have an UI closer to Windows, due to user familiarity with the traditional desktop metaphor. Maybe Cinnamon or even KDE are more suited in that respect. Neither need hours of configuring either. Personally, Cinnamon with Wayland support would be perfect for me (and I suspect a whole lot of Windows migrants as well).

Gnome is nice of course in it’s own minimalist way for many,but the workflow is very different from other OSes and I think many find it too minimalist requiring extensions to improve usability therefore. However, there isn’t a stable mechanism for extensions causing breakages between versions, which can be very irritating. I don’t know if that’s now changed now though, because I have been reading about a major change in the extension mechanism in Gnome 45.

deleted by creator

Yes, it’s called “Mail” and I guess it’s the successor to “Outlook Express” from the old days. I have never actually used it though, but it’s certainly there.

because if A is the string “-1” and B is the integer -1, JS evaluates A==B as true because reasons

Interesting. If it were the other way around, I think I would have been fine with it (i.e. == used for comparison with type like any other language and === without type). But as it stands now I would hate it if I had to write in JS (but I don’t so it’s fine).

I’m no huge fan of Windows, but it sounds like you had (No offense) PEBKAC errors.

I think so too and no offense meant to OP as well.

I am an early adopter of all things tech and so I had a Gigabyte Xtreme X670E mobo on pretty much day 1 to go with a 7950X. Everything worked fine on both Windows 11 and Linux despite being a pimped-up mobo and brand new CPU. At this much later date, OP’s B650 mobo should be working without a hitch, especially with Windows (and almost certainly with Linux as well).

“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people”

Perhaps its an overgeneralization, but I like the concept behind it and at least it keeps me from gossiping / talking about people behind their backs. I am mostly an average mind though, by this definition.

I wear them only if I have a cold or a cough myself now, or if I am traveling on a plane. I still carry a mask with me at all times though.

In my region (India), for a while, there seemed to be plenty of laptops available with Linux installed as an option. Then again in the last few years that seems to have withered down to almost none, sometimes even if the same model is available with Linux in some other regions. I am not sure what changed. Perhaps some deal with Microsoft. The good part is that the fact that they do support Linux elsewhere on the same laptop configuration generally means its easy to get it up and running yourself even if it does not come pre-installed.

In any case, as an old-timer, it’s very impressive to me how much hardware Linux supports nowadays without any drama at all. Not to mention all the progress made in software especially in supporting Windows-only games, which is truly magical work by the Wine / Proton teams. As far as I am concerned the “Year of Linux Desktop” is here already since I can use it daily without missing absolutely anything at all from Windows.

I don’t want to get sucked into an ecosystem where my choice of what product to buy is so limited.

This isn’t actually the case in my experience, because non-Apple products work just fine with the iPhone unless it’s some Android-specific accessory. No one wants to ignore the iPhone market so they make sure that their product is well-supported on iPhones. For instance, I use a bunch of headphones from various manufacturers, apart from AirPods, and they all work great too.

The actual issue is that if you want to move from iPhone to Android later you may have issues getting some Apple devices you have to work with Android, e.g. I don’t think the Apple Watch works at all with Android.

why do you use iPhone?

In my case, because I had a bad experience with Android phones in their early years. Each model I used had one or the other issues, either battery life, camera issues, screen issues or something else. Around the Samsung S3 days I finally moved to iPhone and “everything just worked”.

I am sure things are better now in the Android world hardware-wise (and software-wise Android has always been able to do more), but over the years I have become firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem with the Apple Watch, Airpods, Macbooks, Apple TV etc so it doesn’t make sense for me to switch again because there isn’t a compelling reason for me to do so.

My first experience with the internet was using a Unix shell account that I used to dial into using “Telix for DOS”. For browsing I had Lynx, for mail PINE, and for IRC it was some client called “irc” and so on. This was in the early 90s, maybe 1991 or 92.

Everything was text only, dial-up with 9600 baud, and it was glorious because before that all we had was BBSes (which were even more glorious in some ways actually).

I swear I am not crazy.

No, you are not. At least not based on what you said above, or maybe we both are crazy because I agree with you :)

are no longer the END USERS. […] The Redditors are now the PRODUCT.

I think this is the core issue I have with the current internet. I am not even rabidly anti-corporate or against reasonable commercialization. But the whole schtick nowadays is so ridiculous: Get users to your site and try to keep them only over there, make THEM generate your content, which primarily means users voluntarily revealing an astounding level of details about their lives and thoughts, and then sell all this information to whoever and / or manipulate your users for whatever nefarious political or commercial purpose.

And people are absolutely fine with all this >_<

I agree. Earlier today I popped in to lurk Reddit to see what’s going on, and as a treat I sorted on “Controversial” on the front page. Overwhelmingly, the users who are still on there do not want to go dark again. Like you said, they just do not care at all.

The issue is that not only do they not care, they do not understand what the protest is about and they do not even want to understand. They do not care for the site’s legacy, they do not care for what made Reddit attractive to begin with, they do not care for users and mods affected by Reddit’s proposed changes, they do not care that a handful of corporates should not have so much control over internet content. Nothing. They want their doom-scroll Reddit fix, that’s it and apparently lose their mind if that goes away even for a couple of days.

Most seem to feel that it’s mods power-tripping over nothing and if they have an issue with Reddit they should just leave. Problem solved. I hope as many mods there as possible just lock up their subs forever and leave. Nothing stops the remaining people from creating new subs even right now or from Reddit (the company) eventually reopening them and figuring out moderation and content.

As the others have mentioned, I found out about Lemmy through multiple posts on Reddit. So at least at the time, a few days back, mentions of Lemmy were not being blocked / banned.

About promoting now: I think what would be better is if the supportive sub mods at Reddit made a community (or sublemmy, or whatever it should be correctly called) here first, and then posted a link to it on their blackout page on Reddit.

All that being said I am not sure I want a lot of the existing Reddit horde to invade Lemmy, but I guess I can’t have my cake and eat it too.