Anything I need to actually write code on, Gnome, because I’m addicted to mac-style gesture controls, but hate the holier than thou design philosophy Jony Ive bullshit; anything casual, KDE; but I am planning to try out Cosmic on something soon

I had my mom on Ubuntu for most of the 2010’s, and then the macbook it was on had catastrophic hard drive failure around the pandemic, but then I was like, you don’t work anymore, why exactly do you NEED a computer to begin with? So now she literally doesn’t have a computer and just lives mobile/tablet OS life, which in a nonprofessional context seems perfectly serviceable these days.

I had issues getting kernel versions on Debian seeing hard drives back when it got bad in the 2010’s (which is why I switched to Fedora, which was what I used as my primary distro before Debian). For experimental purposes, I’d try something with bleeding edge driver support like Fedora, not even to install, just to see if it sees the drive. I’ve even seen issues with kernel v various hardware things on Ubuntu/Mint v Fedora. I am currently very mad at Fedora because 40 is ass, and I’m having PTSD about Debian getting bad (I do hear it gud now) so I’m in no way recommending Fedora rn, but it will see the hardware if it’s a nonproprietary driver newness issue

Yeah, you’re risking a bad experience with the pi. You can probably get a cheap PC sans OS on eBay with a real drive. SD cards just crap out in an instant at random, so if your whole OS is on one… One day he’s gonna turn it on and EVERYTHING will be gone. Every SD card I’ve ever relied on for OS purposes in a Pi or Android situation has just died within a few years.

Give them time with the full modern web experience. I know someone I’ve been trying to get to switch for years whose computer died right around the cutoff, so the new Chrome they installed on their new computer had no real ad blockers via being v3 only, and she switched within a week.

I ran OS/2 Warp as my primary for like a year, I loved it, and it could even play many Windows/DOS games with fiddling

There was still real competition in the x86 OS space back then, also. Like IBM had OS/2 and DOS 7, and made hardware, so they certainly wouldn’t want it locked to a Microsoft OS.

I’d consider a Pixel with GrapheneOS, not Linux per se, but with FDroid it’s probably the best FOSS tablet experience

YES, I recommend rewarding the good capitalists, but… At this point I just assume if I pay money for it, it’s a scam and there’s SOME way to fuck me

True, but I won’t lose the ability to play a game or movie when thepiratebay.org is acquired by Google or Apple or Microsoft solely to shutter it and their DRM servers go down.

I am of the mind with anything digital – if you didn’t pirate it, you don’t own it

This is what I’ve been using but I’ve never actually had to recover using it…

I’ve been using btrfs for x years now and it’s never occurred to me to use the snapshots 🤦

Not of which I’m aware. Transmission is more intended to run on a server though. You certainly can just run the local GUI, but it can run as a daemon on a server and then you can use a web interface or app, so its working more on a server v user app paradigm (Everything on a modern server like that is gonna run as its own user)

Lemmy.world is a trash instance, run by the bullies real mods would boot, but they ARE the mods. Total lunatics running the asylum shit. Your life will be richer blocking the whole instance

It’s more the situation where the torrent/magnet string itself (or some peer connection) has some clever hack that exploits a bug in Transmission, allowing it to execute arbitrary code AS transmission. I’m skeptical there’s a big risk of that, but the security theater kids LOVE sand boxing these days

I use Gnome as my main driver, have for the last 7-ish years, and on and off before that, so I’m no Gnome hater by any means, but I’ve been using Linux since 1996. Part of what I LOVED was absolute control. I used 1990’s themeable Gnome and then VTWM as my primary window manager because you could script EVERY aspect of your experience (I got rid of title bars for example). Modern Gnome meets my daily driver needs best, but I use KDE where I can elsewhere because it’s just fighting against me less for ideological reasons. I get you need a like philosophy for a project like Gnome to not go crazy, but like… I’d honestly be fine if you could reliably have your basic extensions survive updates, but a random set of extensions that make your desktop how you like die for x months (or maybe permanently) with EVERY new version, and yes, eventually an equivalent or better extension will come along, but a lot of why I like open source is NOT having my preferred windowing settings killed by committee whim with updates. I lag behind updating which helps, but it’s no panacea. If the extensions for basic window manager features that should be there like theming and such, it would be a better user experience because you would have things you can rely on not changing per release.

I hate needing to resort to third party extensions for EVERYTHING, but this looks awesome

Oh no, I had totally blocked out the 3D card driver trauma! The external VGA cables running card to card! It’s all flooding back! NOOOOO! 😱

God, I’m soooo glad you don’t need to compile anything anymore. I spent my entire early 20’s debugging C compile errors building LAMP stacks… I had forgotten (blocked out?) how many things you used to need to compile yourself…