JubilantJaguar @ JubilantJaguar @lemmy.world

European. Contrarian liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. **I nev

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Desktop environment? What desktop environment?

Firstly, yes, what OP wants is absolutely feasible in principle. I've used fanless low-powered laptops as my only device for years now, for same use case as OP - terminal plus browser. First was an 11in Asus netbook, right now a Celeron-powered model with fully 8GB ram. Neither have been "slow" at all, in fact probably faster than some of the Windows machines I've used in the past for work. HD video runs flawlessly, which is as much as I'll ever need. For both of them I paid as little as you'd expect - in the low hundreds, new. To be honest I often get the feeling many people are buying super overpowered laptops. If you're on Linux and not gaming or doing CAD it's a complete waste of money to spend 1000 bucks on a laptop. That's my opinion, backed by very deep experience.

In response to the question, the problem is that the netbook niche is now occupied by Chromebooks. Which are a PITA to get working with Linux due to the bootloader lockdown - although OP seems to have the secret for making that easy. Otherwise you need to go up to around 350 bucks for the lowest-end Wintel devices which are not bulky with horrible fans, or else buy second-hand as others are recommending.

Yuck.

You're walking down a busy street while texting. Oops! You stepped on a kitten! Is it animal abuse? Intention is (almost) everything because it suggests what you would do if you had the means to do so, or if you felt you could get away with it.

Been using Mailbox for years without any issue. German reliability. But the fact that one of Proton's directors revealed that he agrees with 75 million Americans does not mean that a whole company, based in Switzerland and with many other stakeholders, has "gone rogue". I'm not getting into a new fight about this here but I really think American progressives need to drop this religious approach to dissent and heterodoxy and just relax a little. It will be okay.

This is one of the 10% of showerthoughts here that are actually showerthoughts and not... something else.

Yes. And even then I struggle to concentrate. This is what modern life has done to us.

Good job. But don't worry if you have to look up answers. I've been at this for 20 years and I still have to look up and double-check basic syntax like the classic find -exec one. No big deal if only takes a couple of seconds.

This is definitely the sort of thing that LLM AI tools can help with, in theory.

OK so this one is genuinely unpopular (at last!). Well done.

The argument in favor goes as follows. Being a rentier is not in itself a guarantee of having a high income. If the rent is low and the landlord has no other resources (which could be for a legitimate reason), they will be poor. More commonly, if there's a mortgage on the property, the rent will almost never cover that plus property expenses like tax, utilities, insurance and building maintenance. That's only fair - after all, the landlord is technically getting richer. But it does mean you have "landlords" who are really themselves just impoverished renters on a 20-year lease from the bank.

I agree, it's not very convincing.

But the real reason not to tip is that tipping is always a terrible idea in any context IM(U)O.

Bait and switch. What looked like a genuinely "unpopular opinion" (for once!) became just another piece of standard-issue progressive groupthink. Disappointing for people who actually enjoy debate.

Actually, I asked them to consider whether, all things considered, there might not perhaps be a better way to imagine living their life. Big difference. ;)

Sure, perhaps it was the hardware, perhaps I just got unlucky. But Ubuntu worked flawlessly and thank goodness. Unfortunately this is not the kind of experience one forgets.

Interesting. Actively seeking out FOMO. I prefer the inverse of that: amistics

Yes I know but it seems odd to ask the question if you don't in fact want anything.

I’ve been very stressed lately and have been doing some window shopping to calm down

Not to minimize your distress but surely there are less wasteful ways of letting off steam than buying a gadget that you didn't know you needed.

I don’t see any reason to use ubuntu over debian

I do. The last time I tried it, Debian's installer crashed and left me with a white screen. Imagine telling a newbie to wipe their disk before that happens. Linux has lost a user for life. Debian's site is still completely archaic, so the pre-installation funnel is going to be a challenge in itself for most people. No way.

To be clear, I used Debian for years, I love their mission and I want it to be the reference FOSS distro. But beginners need hand-holding and Debian is not ready for that yet.

I'm gonna push back against your Ubuntu disparagement. In terms of "pushing" things, Ubuntu's abuses are really very marginal. Compared to Windows, the difference between Ubuntu and any other distro is vanishingly minimal in this regard. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is undeniably a solid and dependable distro with a 20-year track record behind it. For a beginner that should count for something.

Absolutely. There remains the small issue that Graphene only works on devices made by a certain purveyor of mass-surveillance spyware.

Nobody should be using a bank which requires a mobile app in the first place. iOS is proprietary closed-source software and FOSS Android-based OSs likely won't work because of the the SafetyNet lockdown.

We do not currently have decent privacy on mobile, period. If you can't do everything on the web, change bank.

BTW I did just this myself. Opened a Revolut account and then closed it after discovering that the web app was not fully functional. Here in Europe at least, I believe Revolut is exceptional in its obnoxious attitude to user privacy.

This is helpful and I agree. You forgot Slack and IRC!

I propose this breakdown of the basic software paradigms:

• forum (Usenet, PHPBB, Reddit, YouTube, Discourse)
• blog (Wordpress, Substack)
• microblog (Twitter, Mastodon)
• chatroom (IRC, Slack, Mattermost, Clubhouse if you count audio)

God I hate it when people say "check my Substack". It's a blog dammit.