kadup

Yep! Okular is amazing, and it’s available on Windows too. Install it for someone and they’ll never bother you again about PDFs or EPUB documents, it’s performant and everything works: printing, resizing, selecting text, searching, signing, adding comments. Never worry about paid PDF software or shady slow apps that keep trying to gatekeep features.

Honestly, there isn’t much to it when setting up Linux for elderly people - in fact, I find it less troublesome than setting it up for a teenager.

Most often the issues regular users face with Linux are related to installing packages from external sources or broken updates. Elderly people tend to not do that.

Set up a stable distro like Debian, Linux Mint or Ubuntu LTS with KDE Plasma or Cinnamon, install LibreOffice, Okular and a browser with strong ad blocking, and any other applications you think they might need. Enable a simple firewall, hide the root / folder from the file browser’s sidebar, and you’re done. Perhaps set up scaling to make everything bigger on their monitors, disable mouse acceleration and set the speed slightly slower than usual.

I wouldn’t bother with immutable distros, Flatpaks are nice and all until permissions turn using a simple app a confusing chore with broken interactions.

The Coca-Cola thing is just a widespread myth. Red was already used for Santa and Christmas in general before Coca-Cola’s ads.

The N64 is got objectively better graphics - being able to do perspective correction, having actual awareness of the fact that 3D objects have depth (z-buffer) and floating point precision. It’s just extremely harmed by the low storage of the cartridges.

The PS1 can barely do 3D, being forced to calculate polygons but having no idea what to do with them, with warping geometry and textures deeply distorted.

There’s a difference between tech geeks and tech bros.

The tech bro is selling you NFT web 3.0 AR experiences, the tech geek might be learning Docker to self host a Lemmy instance, not because he needs to, but because it’s fun.

Both have always existed: one was selling you some horrendous domain during the .com bubble, a plot of land on Second Life or even a perfect marriage based on a secret algorithm running on his Commodore 64, the other was busy playing muds and learning how to make free calls by ringing weird tones into a public telephone.

We know they do, actually.

All US companies provide the NSA with backdoors. All modern AMD and Intel CPUs have the ability to run remote code signed by their manufacturer and snoop into memory.

Put the two things together and now you know.

That’s a loophole that can be used indeed, but keep in mind zero calorie products actually do exist. As in, they have zero calories at all.

Frequently these artificial juice packets are truly zero calories because they can be made with a simple acid, some food coloring and an artificial sweetener that can’t be absorbed or digested by your body.

Such a product does have calories in the physical sense (you could combust them) but they have zero calories from a physiological sense.