Yes, I’m several years into my de-googling process and a solid email client is not something I’m worried about. K9 is great and, as Thunderbird, we can only hope that it gets better.

I bought my first handheld anything, the Palm Zire 31 in high school. Everyone thought I was weird, but I was also organized. :P

I think this is mostly because people who know about it have a mental block that it’s only for nerds. Millions have been using Android on their phones for years, though we’ll limit ourselves to desktop GNU/Linux type distributions for this discussion.

Actual usage of Linux has gotten much easier since 2006ish when I first tried it out. With all the popups and ads in Windows nowadays, its rapidly becoming harder to use than Linux, something I did not expect. I don’t see a combined Linux User Group/ Bingo Club/ Bridge Group forming anytime soon, but Linux Mint isn’t any harder to use than Windows, even for normies with an average level of tech skills.

Facebook/Meta and the like have proven to be untrustworthy. If they were a person, would you let them federate with your friend group? I wouldn’t. I hope they’re not invited to the party because the things that brought me here are the things that drove me away from there.

You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It’s the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most “reputable” tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.

With MS enshitifying Windows at an ever increasing pace and the hard work of open source developers, volunteers, advocates, to make Linux better and more approachable, I won’t be surprised at all to see that percentage move up.

“You mean its free and doesn’t try to sell me other products the whole time I’m using it?”

First if all, welcome to Linux. I also found it in my high school/college years and am so glad I did. Things will be weird. I remember thinking “what kind of Fisher Price OS is this?” because Ubuntu was so simple looking back then and I was used to the unnecessary clutter of Windows. There is so much to explore, but I think you are on a good path with Mint. I have also run Mint for a few years and love some of the things it does.

A helpful note: If you plan on sharing files between the two OSes, be aware that Windows won’t typically access a Linux file system like ext4 or btrfs and Linux can handle NTFS (windows) in a lot of cases, but if you have bitlocker running you may have additional hurdles.

I highly recommend getting a big external drive ans backing up regularly (like at least once a week). At some point you will screw up and be glad you did it. I only overwrote a disk partition on accident once, and I recovered the data, but I also learned my lesson the hard way. Don’t be like me!

Nextcloud Calendar is where I’m blocking out my time. I use a proprietary task app with a Linux client because tasks.org/former Astrid/nextcloud tasks isn’t quite there yet… for me. If I was creating a system to keep me on track today, I would center the whole thing on Nextcloud. The one thing I despise about nextcloud is how it handled locales and formats. There is no easy way to move to YYYY-MM-DD and HH-DD without messing up other stuff like day of the week captions language. The thing I love about nextcloud is how it doesn’t spam you with garbage recommendations and clutter and such like Outlook.

I’m a KDE user, but had a great experience using Budgie. I’m glad this software is an option for people.

Also, don’t be surprised if that urge never goes away. :-D

I’m not sure I understand. Do you mean hearing codewords triggering actions as opposed to trying to understand the users intent through language? Or is are there a few more layers to this whole thing than my moderate nerd cred will allow me to understand?

Same, I think I might give the System76 Darter a try when I eventually have to replace my Xps 9370. It’s bad enough that my computer comes with a windows logo on the super-key and often windows preinstalled. Shipping with a non-ANSI/ISO layout is a no-buy for me.

I bought a xps 13 9370 and several years and two self-replaced batteries later, I’m not noticing even a hint of age related slowdown. I thought the lack of USB-A ports would be a problem, but it wasn’t. I have run Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Arch, EndeavorOS, Solus, MXLinux, Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and many others on this machine with minimal issues. I don’t know about the models after mine, but the 9370 was a solid choice.

Its crazy to think of a subscription for something like community sourced tabs. They’re often literal text files. You could host thousands of them off a thumbdrive. :)

The mercado had more bootleg DVDs than the entire Netflix library and the watermarks on the busses TVs taught me a few sites I never knew before. :D

At this point its pretty much a moral transgression to buy music from any labels, organizations, or groups filing these lawsuits. If no one bought their music, they’d have to join a mock trial team or debate club and we might finally be able to straighten out the mess that is copyright law. :-D

Bought an eeePC on WinXP that ran like trash and barely could handle simple tasks. Dropped numerous flavors of GNU/Linux on it in a few months. I remember thinking “wtf is this” because the settings and interface felt so bare without the WinXP clutter but things ran much better. Fell in love with the repository model of updating everything with a single command, found the UI was actually simple looking on the surface with a ton of depth available to me when my tinkering became more comfortable and experienced. Stayed because I don’t think everything in our lives needs to be stuffed full of micro transactions and ads.

When I left the church, I started directing what was my tithes to nonprofits of my choice including FOSS projects instead.

Here I am a decade and a half later and if I didn’t have Linux, I probably wouldn’t use computers except in the rarest of circumstances. Its just a high quality experience that commercial software can’t measure up to because they have different goals.

Sounds like a monopolistic scam. Fuck those guys. Good on you for still getting a good exam score though!

I had an awesome professor once who intentionally assigned the old editions of every book needed for the class to save us all a few bucks. If I recall correctly, she called the publisher out on shifting chapters for the whole class to hear.

Another prof photocopied chapters of his own book to save us from the inflated price gouging of academia. He cared more about spreading his message than making money.

Two other profs only assigned historical public domain editions of philosophical texts to keep our costs down, or eliminate them entirely.

Props to all these great profs. I’ll never forget the things they taught me, and one even became a thesis advisor of mine years later.

Sounds like you’re looking more on the download end of things. Nevertheless, if you have unidentified tracks, it may still be worth running them through Picard. It can search its DB using existing partial metadata, or do something like hash portions of the file and check its DB for matches. It really helped me cut down the unidentified and orphan mp3s in my collection.

You could potentially try the app Innertune for the first part of your query.