I still mess this up for lists in Python…

Yes!

Absolutely!

Not sure this has been said yet, but Neocities is a pretty great throwback to GeoCities and the early 2000’s web.

All a bunch of small, handcrafted websites and personal blogs by individuals and small groups.

Exploring feels like I remember back in the early 2000’s as a teen. Crazy and weird sites, hidden links and easter eggs, ARGs, random annon comments you can post to a wall, .gifs all over, pixel art, hacker manifestos, links to other similar sites, etc.

The Fediverse is pretty great too.

I wish there were more site directories curated by communities, that would reduce my reliance on search engines for sure. RSS is great, I’ve been using that to help build my personal content feed.

Snaps are a standard for apps that Ubuntu’s parent company, Canonical, has been trying to push for years.

The issue that most people have with them, is that Canonical controls the servers, which are closed source. Meaning that only they can distribute Snap software, which many Linux users feel violates the spirit & intention of the wider free and open source community.

Appimages and Flatpaks are fully open source standards, anybody can package their software in those ways and distribute them however they want.

.deb files are software packaged for the Debian distribution, and frequently also work with other distros that are based on Debian, like Linux Mint.

“python is the second best language for everything…”

I love that summation! Python has been key for me to learn programming concepts. I hope to move into other languages in the future, but for now, Python does everything I need it to.

I’ve been rolling Debian more and more this year. If you’ve got solid Linux chops, it’s really great.

I also really like LMDE, it’s what I run on my Business laptop.

I love Mint, it has become my workhorse distro. I use LMDE on my personal business laptop. I switched my parents from Windows 10 to Mint earlier this year, and it’s been great on their very old and low power desktop.

Cinnamon is not the prettiest or slickest DE, but damn if it ain’t the most stable DE I’ve used.

I’m a KDE fanboi myself, but when I spin up a machine that I need to just work in a super dependable way and is no muss, no fuss, I usually choose Mint with Cinnamon.

Damn it, why do I want it so bad??

I’ve slowly been decorating my IT office with various Linux trinkets.

I just got a foam stress “ball” Tux recently, and I plan on getting a Debian coffee mug, maybe some Linux/FOSS related stickers lol.

Ventoy folders are next on my list :D

I recently submitted to the Ventoy path, can’t believe it took me so long.

I actually thought I had messed something up after burning it on a USB. The drive mounted an empty folder and I thought, “no way it’s that simple, I don’t just drop the ISOs into the folder do I?”

Yes, you just throw all your ISOs into that folder, unmount, and you’re good to go!

In my experience, Linux folks are just happy to find each other in the wild.

Hell, I’m just happy to meet people that are Linux-curious lol.

It’s mostly online that the distro wars are fought.

Most people don’t care, they won’t even notice sadly. They will walk into Best Buy, get swarmed by 3 sales people, tell them, “I’m looking for a new laptop.”

And the sales people will take them straight over to the laptop section which is all filled with the latest Microsoft swill and sell them one of them.

There will be no discussion of privacy, no discussion of Microsoft’s recent scandals, no discussion of alternatives. They will parrot whatever Microsoft’s talking points are, “it’s safe, encrypted, secure, fast, etc…”

If we want consumers to care, we have to reach them before they buy their new upgrade. This often starts with your family and close friends. You need to inform them, you need to tell them there is a better way.

This is how I got my parents switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint. They were asking me to help with their computer problems, (10 year old computer that was pretty low-power when it was new.)

I told them that Windows 10 was EoL next year and their hardware was way to old to upgrade. I said that I could put on Linux which would be much faster, more secure and private, wouldn’t require a new computer, and would do everything they needed. My mom was nervous, but I went over everything her and my dad used it for, (browsing, email, Word and printing, PDF reading, Turbo Tax, and Spotify.)

Only slight pain point was getting my mom onto Turbo Tax cloud. But she is slightly tech savvy, so it wasn’t too bad.

They’ve been on it for about 9 months now and it works great. Their computer is much snappier, and I don’t have to worry about them getting viruses, (my dad is 0% tech savvy and will click on almost any link he sees.)

Pretty solid extension. It’s wild how nasty click bait algorithms have made the modern web experience.

Eh, fair point. Minecraft early on was more like what I was describing. For years now the devs have added a ton of content to the base game.

Still, most people I know play with at least a few mods, even if it’s just texture packs and some QoL mods for better UI/UX.

So you’re a user that tinkers with your system, breaks it, can’t get it working correctly again…and that’s Linux’ fault?

And you consider yourself an example of a “regular user?”

why can’t we just have a fast, reliable browser with a clean UI that is fairly customizable with really solid extension support?

Extensions/plugins were supposed to provide the framework if users wanted a bunch of bells and whistles.

and I refuse to believe that a company with the resources of Mozilla cannot do that.

Minecraft is basically that in game form. A powerful voxel engine that has a massive amount of support for mods and plugins.

?..It’s a great tool that provides all the security of VPN access without having to struggle with the more technical aspects of spinning up your own VPN, and it’s zero cost for personal use.

You could also use Netbird if you wanted, but I have been using Tailscale extensively and it’s awesome.