As always, I’m not going to be able to play half my usual games without touchpads.

Analog sticks do not make a good mouse replacement.

I would have thought that “y’all” is even more so gender neutral and therefore less offensive/more accepted. It’s a contraction of “you all” right?

Well this is just off the top of my head, but… bribe the captain with beer and cooking.

The Arch derivatives, CachyOS and EndeavourOS. They’ve really done a good job with Arch and cultivating their own communities. It’s paid off for them and Arch isn’t really seen as just a hobby distro like 15 years ago, or a meme like the last 5 years.

Bazzite, for both general desktop use or dedicated for gaming. Just strength to strength from the project. I hope Fedora’s proposal to remove 32-bit libs doesn’t hurt them. By far the best, just untouchable, atomic distro.

Linux Mint for the first time in about 10 years is being seriously recommended to new users and not laughed off as a Linux Windows clone. That team has never stopped putting in the effort and deserve it. I don’t know how they’re going with/plans for Wayland, but I hope smoothly.

Fedora. I’ve never used it personally. But since starting with Linux in 2006 I’ve only ever seen or heard of it as kind of “being there” but not really talked about much. People are talking about it now as being a reliable and solid choice for new users and intermediate users.

Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years. I think people generally are becoming more satisfied with the idea of a stable OS, ages not writing it off as being left behind, constantly out of date, can’t run latest AMD graphics, etc. In my mind, flatpak helps that a lot, since you don’t need to wait years to get the latest versions of programs, but I don’t know for sure that is helping this current wave of success.

On the other hand:

Tumbleweed seems to be stagnating. They’ve made some changes and moving away from yast for the first in forever. The switch to selinux has affected proton usage in a way that it’s not super “new user friendly”. Even amongst people wanting to try out Opensuse, you often see “I’ll give Slowroll a try.”

PopOs’ cosmic desktop is still in early stages, and you do hear good things, but popos seems even less talked about now. They might have hit their peak 3-5 years ago, or maybe it will come around again for them like some of the distros above.

Nobara was massively talked up a few years back. But not so much now. And you do see discussions like “Nobara had too many problems on this machine, I just went straight-up Fedora”.

The other main hobby/enthusiast distros that were getting discussed more in the last few years - NixOS, Void Linux, Alpine. Not so much anymore. NixOS definitely did take off a lot more than the others, but it still just doesn’t come up as often as a couple years ago.

Sex workers deserve to get paid. But there are plenty of people offering free porn out there, and those sites aren’t hard to find.

My job. I resigned earlier this week after 8 1/2 years.

As others have s pointed out, it looks like as a relatively new user you’ve tried a whole lot of stuff meant for advanced users and managed to completely avoid the tried and trusted Linux mainstays that have been around forever. Like KDE, Gnome, xfce, and most user friendly distros like Linux mint.

Tiling WMs for example are best for people who want to spend weeks if not months working in their configs and dot files, and are privately designed for keyboard and not mouse use (hence the WM you identified as not having a button to close the window)

But I’m curious for you end up doing these things as a new user. Is there a lot of bad advice going on out there?

Everyone here thinks their shit tier 2018 laptop is made of gold or something.

One of the things you can do is run Steam from the terminal. When the game crashes/fails to load; the terminal read out could be telling you what’s going wrong.

I love how excited the red person is.

This is pretty simple though right?

Healing factor - always-on healing.

How about don't implement it and when California realises they need computers then they might change their mind?

When I entered the workforce in the early 2000s, I struggled to get a job. To get unemployment payments I had to attend a weekly session at a local job agency to prove I was actively trying to work.

I remember the advice from there clearly - “Just think of a place you want to work, go there with your resume, ask them what positions they have and offer to work for free. Then they’ll hire you if they like you.”

I was owed 30 cents or something by a TelCo about 20 years ago. So they sent me an invoice stating the debt every month. I asked them if they can just cut me a cheque or something and they said they wouldn’t for such a small amount.

So I received a -30c payable invoice monthly for years until the company went out of business.

I love it. In this world the lows are so low, when someone notices something about you enough to say something nice like that then it becomes something we want to hold on to forever.

You know, sometimes I wish I did a little more with my life instead of hanging out in front of places selling weed and shit. Like, maybe be an animal doctor. Why not me? I like seals and shit. Or maybe an astronaut. Yeah. Like, be the first motherfucker to see a new galaxy, or find a new alien lifeform... and fuck it. And people'd be like, "There he goes. Homeboy fucked a Martian once.

No comment on the software because I have no use case for it, just wanted to note that GearLever can “install”, and integrate your appimages into your menu quick and easy, and in most cases keep them updated too.

What? He guesses at the price, and if he’s wrong then he’ll eat a cake? Reward himself for being wrong? Is that it?

I was confused, but I think they might be asking why Veracrypt isn’t available as a flatpak

Shit job from 10 years ago. Getting too drunk at the office Christmas party and talking so much shit about my horrible fucking boss to a couple of influential senior managers who are close to the CFO. Freaked out all weekend about it, severe anxiety attacks. That mixed with the hangover I was just vomiting all weekend.

And then: Run into one of those senior managers early in the office on Monday morning, apologised for being inappropriate. Get a response “oh, we all know how bad she is, can’t believe you haven’t quit yet”.