Libb

Took my first steps last night, I flashed a USB stick with Mint Cinnamon and gave it a spin.

Happily using Mint myself, welcome onboard ;)

There actually is a way, I updated my last reply as you were replying.

Thx so much! I will keep a note for that :)

I think people have to get used to the idea of it being ok to make a space for themselves in the fediverse.

That is indeed hard to realize.

As an average user (50+ year-old and not obsessed with computer stuff), I can tell you that one of the most intimidating things to me was/is the fragmented nature of said ‘fediverse’. Between mastodon, lemmy, the video whose name I constantly forget and the other stuff going on… it’s hard to keep track of what is what. It’s even harder with the supposed portability/compatibility between various services (I have yet to understand how I am supposed to follow a discussion on lemmy using my mastodon account and vice-versa. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine admitting that’s a me issue but still… it doesn’t help me being more active and, to tell you the whole truth, I quit using my mastodon at all because I could not figure out out to use it hand in hand with the Lemmy one or even if it was possibility or I simply understood it wrong :p)

And that’s not even mentioning people like myself who also blog: can it be done inbside lemmy? Is it considered good practice or not to link back to one’s blog? Since I can’t tell, I refrain to share any link to my personal blog ;)

The sad truth is that many of these communities will take months of effort by a single or small group of individuals before more people will join in.

That I’m fine with as I’m in no hurry. I would just not split our already small user base into smaller ones by creating one more community where it’s not needed. Let’s hope the admin of the Journaling community chimes in… but maybe I’m a bit too optimistic?

AFAIK the webui doesn’t have a convenient way of doing this but apps have a way of doing it within a couple clicks. I use Boost, I’m sure others offer similar functionality.

I will check those. I am using both Linux and macOS, I never use my phone to write anything. Hopefully there will be such an app with Crossposting on one or the other.

I understand. On reddit I was a lurker, on Lemmy I’ve become far more active in ways I never imagined. If we want the communities we enjoy to pop up and flourish somebody has to get things going.

Something I am slowly realizing too. I commented quite a lot on reddit, like I have started doing on Lemmy, but starting a conversation? Well, I rarely think any of my questions/ideas are worth discussing and I normally don’t bother. But I’m learning ;)

Those are good ideas, thx.

I don’t know how cross posting works (really not an expert in any way, here), I will have to do some reading :p

There are lots of ways to go about things, the hard part is finding and keeping the motivation!

Indeed, and I must say that it never was my intention to create/moderate a community. I just wanted to revive it by regularly posting stuff in it. But I would also not want to help it get some activities going on without anyone able to keep trolls at large.

I have just posted the question in the Journaling community, will see how it goes… if it goes anywhere ;)

Thx a lot for the insight! I had not thought about any of those points. My only idea was, a bit naively I am afraid, to not create a new community since there was one existing already. But everything you said is very true.

As a downside, creating a new community would imply even less members participating, a lot less, at least to begin with but it may still be preferable if it means being able to shunt any troll.

Here is what I will do: I will ask the question on the existing community, ask members what they think would be best. If I get no answer, well, I’ll fell less… wasteful by creating a new community from scratch. I will also ask the admins on my instance if that would be OK to host it as we’re mostly speaking French, but I think they should be OK to host an English speaking community, at least I can ask.

Whatever I decide to do, I will also ping !newcommunities@lemmy.world.

Thx a lot, again :)

But does/can my idea hold any water? Is it credible? Or am I trying to put too much weight on a twig?

There is no such thing as ‘too much weight on a twig’. At least, in theory. And it’s even worse as far as ‘credibility’ goes. It’s fiction and it’s prose. Anything is 100% credible if it works. Anything becomes a(n abject) failure the moment it doesn’t work.

I mean, it depends on your story (the characters, but also its scope and pacing, the way you focus or chose not to focus your reader’s attention on other details, and so on), your style and mastery. It also heavily depends the type of reader you (want to) write for.

Sometimes neat ideas will work wonders, more often than not they won’t work that well. You need to write it down to see if it works, or not. That’s one of the reasons why, imvho, the process of working on a story should be much more accurately described as editing a story or even better re-writing that damn thing for the umpteenth time! ;)

Not sure if that counts but I decided to spend some time posting and encouraging people to participate in the very inactive Lemmy Journaling community.

I have not posted much so far (started yesterday, with two posts) and, if you’re wondering, I am not the creator of the community, not even an admin.

It’s just that I have been journaling for many decades myself and I know people could gain a lot by journaling themselves. So, it makes me feel somewhat sad to see no activity going on in our community, with not that many subscribers either, while at the same time there are almost 2 millions subscribers to our reddit cousin r/journaling and, quite obviously, a lot more things going on there ;)

Frankly, I have no idea where this will go or if it will go anywhere at all. I just want to try to do something and so, for the time being, I will do my best to regularly post new content, hopefully encouraging other members to participate as well, and then encouraging new members to join and share whatever questions/doubts/ideas they may have too.

I am not a marketing pro, but feel free to come visit the Journaling community, and, by all means, to post stuff on your own if you’re also a journaler (digital or analog, it should not matter). The more of us, the more various content we start sharing, the more likely we are to welcome new members.

Also, if you know of any other like-minded community feel free to share a link.

+1 to replace TM with BTW (and to remove the version numbers, too) :p

The rest of that blog post summaries with a lot more technical knowledge than I will probably ever have the reason why I chose not to go with Tuxedo when I switched to a Linux laptop, after 35 years being an Apple user.

Back then, I had no idea about upstream, sharing of source code or those tech stuff mentioned in the blog post. I’m no dev, I am barely interested in my computer as a 50+ user that was looking for a laptop I could fix/upgrade (I decided I was done with Apple the day I realized all their machines were no more fixable/upgrdable), a machine I would truly and fully own.

Since I was interested in two of Tuxedo’s machines but not at all in their own version of Linux, I started digging around their website to find more info about using their laptops and drivers/apps with any other distro and I ended up with more confusion and questions than I had to begin with. Once again, that’s coming from a non-expert user, no doubt someone else would have had better results, but still not the best experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure Tuxedo makes a nice OS that does its job well, it’s just that I did not care about it. I already knew which distro I wanted to use and it was not theirs.

So, since I could not understand enough I gave up on their laptop altogether and simply purchased a used PC laptop I knew would be working fine with Linux and installed my distro of choice on it. So far, I have zero regrets even though I would have liked to buy one of those Tuxedo machines with their great/bright screen ;)

I’ve seen lmde mentioned on Mint website but if I recall correctly they also presented it like a somewhat experimental version?

• Debian + Xfce on the desktop, because it (mostly, see below) just works, it’s snappy, reliable, and I don’t need my apps being constantly updated (I have very simple needs and use cases)
• Mint + Cinnamon on the laptop, because it’s still debian-based and because unlike Debian, Mint was able to connect my AirPods out of the box and I use them a lot when on the laptop… I also quickly learned to appreciate Cinnamon, I must say.

edit: typos

Imho, the best way to help a beginner should have happened many years before they put their hands on any Linux distro. It should have happened when they were still a small child, at school. In the way they were taught how to… learn and how to get better… aka, by expecting difficulties and by expecting to fail, often.

Failing should be expected as a beginner learning anything new. Like, say, we all learned to walk as toddlers. It was not by being told we walked perfectly but by falling on our diapered butt. Failing at outing one foot in front of the other and falling, over and over again.

That sounds obvious but, to my old eyes at the very least, it also sounds almost like an heresy when compared to what I see kids being taught nowadays. That things should be frictionless and that nobody should fail at anything, ever. That’s such a poor choice that doesn’t prepare them much. Well, imho.

When I switched (from 35+ years being an Apple user) to Linux, it was frustrating.

Even when where things went smooth, it could still be frustrating and it often was. If only, because it required me to change 35 years old habits. And when it wasn’t going smooth, even when I was using the best docs and guides, at times it could be incredibly and utterly frustrating, when not completely maddening. Either nothing on my machine was ever exactly like described in the doc, or the app version was different and some setting had changed, or my issue was a somewhat different, or the solution simply did not work, or I missed a tiny detail or a word somewhere in the guide. Whatever. Frustration was a constant.

That’s what people should be taught to expect and to be fine with. And not just with Linux, btw ;)

I am not a US-citizen nor am I a woman (if I was, I would probably be a little too old to need that kind of help) but, very naively I’ll admit it, this is really not the kind of guide I would have imagined would become so urgently needed.

It seems a very well made guide, with a lot of very useful suggestions.

Which makes me feel even more sad to realize this is indeed useful and very much needed.

like for example, one time i was browsing through some neofetch screenshots and i found out that a lot of them have anime or furry stuff as their wallpaper or profile picture, but they use linux.

younger me would’ve freaked out by the idea of having proprietary files, but i still enjoy linux. what do you think?? please

What should they use in order to not freak younger you? A screenshot of some lines from the kernel source code? A picture of Stallman and Torvalds tenderly embracing (quite unlikely)?

On my Debian and Mint computers, I have countryside pictures (I live in Paris, I miss seeing some real country landscape, mind you) and paintings (oil and watercolors, all works I admire) and some illustrations (comics, manga, whatever I appreciate enough to be wanting to look at it from time to time).

Sorry for younger you but I don’t have a single image related to Linux nor to GNU philosophy, no matter how much I appreciate them.

freaked out by the idea of having proprietary files

I would suggest you read a little more about what the four essential freedoms are and how they relate to code and the user rights, not so much to do with art and wallpaper choice.

I understand. Maybe two things to consider:

• It will depends how you installed your apps, but I have file containing a fe useful instruction in case I need to reinstall my system, one of them is just a ‘sudo apt install followed by the name of every single app I want to use’. I only need to copy and paste in a next terminal window to gat all my apps installed. All except the few that I don’t install using apt, say the few appimages I also use. For me it means three more apps, so it’s no big deal to download them by hand ;)
• Most user settings and configuration should be stored somewhere in you home folder (for example, I know there many settings stored in the .config folders, others (related to the system and the DE you’re using maybe stored somewhere in .local, all my custom fonts are stored in ./fonts, and so on. I’m sorry, I’m no expert so I’m not very precise). All of that to say: by baking up your home, you probably also are backing up a lot of your configuration and tweaks.

I have no idea how those settings are portable between two completely different distros, but I have once reinstalled my system and got most of my settings instantly back just by copying my home folder over to that fresh install. That plus the single line ‘sudo apt list-of-all-my-apps’ I was almost completely operational in mere minutes, including all my customer menus, panels, text size, themes,… The one thing I remember not working from that backup was my SSH keys. No idea why.

I wonder whether all species or even just one actually have a (shared) purpose? As humans couldn’t we all just try to find our own?

Not sure to understand what you mean here? Would you care to develop?

In a way we are just a very complex system

We are.

Life is very good at persevering but does that make it our purpose?

If I were to define them, I would separate life (as the yet-to-be-understood ‘force’ that make some things being alive), species (all the various kind of living things, arbitrary grouped and separated in categories by science), and the individuals (be it that plant on my desk, you, or I). I don’t think they all need to have a purpose, nor that this purpose is the same.

To me, life has no purpose beside maybe being what it is. Like fire has no purpose, it simply burns and converts some types of maters into light and energy (heat). At the very least, I cannot imagine life as a ‘conscious’ being wanting something. It just is a state of thing/fact (being alive) that science still can’t explain or reproduce.

Species on the other hand they all share a same purpose, which is to thrive as a whole (grow in numbers, but not too much in order not to endanger the very space they need to live in). At least that’s how I see it.

And then there are individuals. They may or may not have whatever purpose they fancy within a somewhat restrictive 'species limitation’.

I mean, as a butterfly I would not be able to live more than a few days no would I be able to mate with a whale, no matter how badly I would want it. And we, as humans, we may have managed to push our species limits way beyond what they were (we can fly, dive underwater, even go into space, we can also live much longer and if we still can’t mate with any other non-human species we do have learned to manipulate their genome, who knows where that could lead us?) but all of that is still very fragile and very limited (flying is a thing as long as we have access to enough energy and knowledge, we live longer but we all still have to die no matter what we try). So, within those boundaries set by what our species is, I would say we’re more or less free as individuals to be what we want to be. We’re less so in certain countries than others, and in certain times.

On the other hand, I have no idea what the idea of the individual could evoke in a bee’s mind? Or ‘personal desire’?

For me it would be to be a net positive to society in certain ways (that I’m not sure how to put into words and the bits I know how to could get long) before departing.

Imho, that is a very nice objective to pursue. No matter how you would manage to achieve that goal.

Wow. I hate that.

Well, it’s not like Debian hides it in any way or form. Quite the contrary.

It’s positively terrible but it explains so much.

Depends what you’re looking for in your distro. I love that stability and lack of updates outside of security issues.

And worst of all, I am in far too deep to switch distros at this point.

May I ask why you don’t think you can change distro? It’s just a matter of installing Linux (which takes a few minutes) and, if it’s not done already, of backing up your personal files and settings (most of them probably in your home folder, already).

The rule is that apps are only updated for security reasons. Not because of new features.

So, new versions of apps may (or may not) be added to the next version of Debian.

Hi. I’ve been thinking about trying out Linux for a while now (haven’t used it before).

Welcome :)

I have 1 PC which I share with my son. I mainly use it to browse the web, listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, Office for work, etc.

Depending your 'MS Office ’ expectations, you should have no issue using LibreOffice. 100% compatibility doesn’t exist, though, but for most users it should work more than fine. For the most part, it is only a few advanced features and tools that are lacking, and some layout stuff. I write books under Linux as easily as I wrote them under, well, not a Windows PC in my case: it’s a Mac.

I am not a gamer. So, for that I can’t help much, but you have the ability to dual boot your PC and chose between Windows and Linux when it starts. Maybe that would let you use Linux while keeping a small Windows partition for your son games?

Here is one guide among many others (I have not used it myself, it’s just an example there are plenty more): https://opensource.com/article/18/5/dual-boot-linux

FYI, you can try Linux directly from a live CD (or a USB stick) without even have to install it on the computer. It’s really cool.

As for the distro I was considering Ubuntu.

You can use whatever distro you fancy, you can easily try a few different ones either by using the live CD/USB I mentioned, or by running them in a virtual machine — something I have never done myself as it’s a bit too intimidating and techy to old-and-not-much-of-a-geek me :p

I use Debian (on my desktop) and Mint (on my laptop). Ubuntu is based on Debian, and Mint is based on… Ubuntu (from which it has removed stuff I’m not happy with in Ubuntu and added a few others I like). There is no good and bad distro, only those that you like and those that you… like less ;)

Edit: to a beginner, probably more than Ubuntu I would suggest Mint, at least if I can judge on my own personal experience: everything worked out of the box, including my stubborn Apple Airpods.