But Linus said he was never approached by the US for a backdoor. He was so sure of it, lol.

Make a beeline for the location of a billionaire CEO.

Very.

Playing tabletop RPGs with my friends. Or just hanging out with them and playing video games.

Install solar panels and plant local flowers (drought resistant in drought prone areas).

I believe I have statimated the people of Iceland accurately.

Yeah I feel this OP. I am always forgetting birthdays, even my own sometimes tbh. I do randomly get gifts for friends and family, but its never for the usual holidays.

I…don’t have many friends, lol. But the ones I do have all understand my stance on holidays and celebrations. It’s just not for me.

Oh dang! Good to see you on here! 🤩

Keep up the great work.

Mobile:

Desktop:

I’ve been depressed…hell I still am, though I cope better than I used to.

I’m guessing its not just the holidays that gets you down. There’s two ways out, and I suggest doing both.

1. Conform to some of the social norms that basically means take some of the classic advice you’ve already seen on here. Get out of the house and participate in activities that you might not initially enjoy, but hold some promise of you at least getting a bit of enjoyment out of, or at least stick around for the socializing. Think of it like taking your vitamins, you don’t have to like it, but its probably good for you and therefore you should consider doing it.

2. Find things you enjoy doing in your solitude that are nondestructive/neutral or even healthy (depends on the context if its avoidance/addiction or not). Listen to podcasts, read books, learn a new skill, listen to music, meditate, exercise, etc. Just something. We can give you ideas all day, but just choose something and stick with it for at least a couple weeks before trying something else.

The harsh truth is that without some kind of existential raison d’etre, life is just a series of activities we use to distract ourselves from our own loneliness or avoiding ruminating on other topics like death.

The world right now has made it hard for people of all walks of life to connect authentically, and so don’t blame yourself entirely for the situation you’re in. That said, when you’re down in the shit, there’s only two choices, you either wallow in it or you clean yourself up and do what you can to make your way up and out of it.

And I hold no judgments on what you or anyone decides to do here, life is hard and yeah, it can suck. But I personally look at it that I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. But I already know what it’s like being damned if I don’t… might as well find out what it’s like being damned if I do.

Take it or leave it, that’s all I’ve got for you or anybody. Good luck out there.

Oh Elon, are you planning on doing the TikTok treatment on Bluesky next?

“Though the grease burns out of the torch, the fire passes on, and no one knows where it ends.” -Zhuangzi

Brilliant rundown. No notes. 👏

Sadly, I’m in very much agreement with you on this. I love the Linux OS to death, but I’m very very much into learning as much as I can about computers right now, and I am not representative of the majority of computer users.

I understand now why updates are required, why they sometimes break things, and ultimately what has to be done either by myself or, usually, others, to fix them.

But most people seem to go absolute ape shit when things don’t work as expected, and I think that has to do more with human societies not cultivating enough patient, non-stressed, curious, people. And that’s what bums me out more than this whole Windows vs Linux thing…

I definitely hear you on that, and in some ways, it’s a shame more people don’t have the option to learn more about how their computer works.

The Linux OS is, in my experience, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever taken the time to learn. In my pursuit of not only learning programming and computer science fundamentals, but also the internals of the Linux operating system, I’ve gained a granular control over my computing devices that has allowed me to be spared the onslaught of forced “AI in everything” that has recently been pushed down people’s throats. I also have minimal exposure to invasive advertisements, and other unwanted features.

But the cost for access to said knowledge was an immense amount of time studying, an equivalent amount of patience, and a strong desire to learn difficult subjects. That’s a cost the majority of users are unable or unwilling to pay. They simply dont have the time and/or desire, and that’s just reality.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s acknowledged enough that it requires a vast amount of privilege to have the time and energy to devote to such endeavors such as learning how Linux, the command line, and Computer Systems more broadly, work. I think this is because to acknowledge such would open the discussion up to the more broader topics of the qualities of our education systems and our cultivation of more positively reinforced learning models, which is a much more difficult topic to navigate and argue about when contrasted with the “It’s easy to install Linux. Windows bad, so just do it.” argument that pervades the discussion space.

That’s fair. I maintain a Fedora installation for my elderly mother, whose Windows laptop is on its last legs. I revitalized a 15 year old desktop with Fedora for her, installed everything she needed (browser, file manager, libreoffice, iscan, brother printer drivers, password manager, zoom meetings, etc.). But yeah, every month I hop on, open up a terminal and run sudo dnf upgrade, and every 6 months run the Fedora major version update.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed my Mom has been able to get all her business done using Fedora, but I definitely am acting sysadmin should anything in the slightest go wrong or confuse her. That said, I think she could run the upgrades if I left her with extensive notes (but if anything went wrong, she’d lose her shit, ngl).

I don’t know, I think a Linux distribution with automatic updates would be a good thing if you could ensure every user would be guaranteed to not be greeted with any issues upon reboot from said update.

But yeah, sadly, even on the most user friendly of distros, you still have to have a decent familiarity with the command line , and have the patience and knowledge of where to look for, and then read and comprehend, the documentation. And I doubt there will ever be a time in the future where 100% of users are comfortable with all that, though imho if you use any computer at all, you should at least try.