or is it a really good OS for privacy that sacrifices in usability?

Privacy and usability are inversely correlated. Anyone who tells you otherwise either has a relatively weak definition of “privacy” or a relatively exotic definition of “usable”. If you’re at the point of installing an OS like Gentoo just for its privacy benefits alone, I’d say you’re already the latter case, even from the perspective of most fellow Linux users.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily imply very un-private software is always very usable, or that highly privacy-respecting tools with good UX don’t exist. Just that most highly UX-polished software tends to have poor privacy, and most privacy-focused software expects the user to do a lot of hoop-jumping to make up for all the systems and workflows the user can’t utilize due to having some dealbreaking non-privacy-respecting component to them.

I also have trouble crossing wires with the Balkans and the Baltics.

Radio?

Oh, you mean the app with the heart my mom uses?

Distrohopping sounds exhausting. I don’t know why people bother.

How people can just wake up one day and go, “Man, FUCK all my apps and settings, today I want to reinstall and reconfigure 70% of them and then find and learn alternatives to the 30% that aren’t transferrable, and completely disrupt my workflow for several weeks” is utterly beyond me.

It’s like a miniature version of people who get tired of living in a place and just… move. For no reason. All that effort, selling your home, finding a new one, finding a new job, just because you’re… bored?? I am not knocking it, I just can’t relate at all.

I started my Linux life in Ubuntu MATE, and then to Debian when I figured I no longer needed Ubuntu’s handholding and I was tired of dealing with MATE’s abysmal lack of community resources and documentation. Unless and until Debian either becomes antagonistic to me or their support for new software becomes severely crippling, I have no intentions to leave.

It just works. Leave it be. This is my home.

The other thing I try to do that I didn’t think of in the other reply is not mixing mods together.

Most major tech mods are balanced for standalone play. They merely contain integrations with other mods as convenient curiosities. So when you mix overpowered machine from mod ABC that is regulated by some restriction, and combine it with machine from mod XYZ that trivializes that restriction, the progression collapses and it’s boring.

Some people like that. I try to avoid it.

Some might wonder what the point is in playing with all the mods if I don’t actually use all the mods. And my answer is I do, but all separately in parallel. I like being a botanist and a thaumaturge and a blood magician and an astral sorcerer and a pressure mechanic and a mekanism engineer all at the same time, but like… in shifts. When I get bored of one I put it down and advance another. I want to feel like I’ve mastered them all rather than cherry picked the best parts of each. I get all the variety but few of the problems.

All of this context switching means I waste a tremendous amount of time, but it does make the game last longer. But not too long.

Also, in coop, it pays well when players specialize. I do this magic, you do that tech, etc. Share one or two things in common, but also be different. You might end up wickedly out of power balance depending on which mods you picked to specialize in, but imo that’s not really the mark of success.

Yeah, this is inevitable.

My limiter tends to be that anything I make has to do things not only efficiently, but fashionably. I like to be immersed in a factory that looks vaguely like a real factory, rather than laying down a bunch of minmaxxed spaghetti. So I spend a lot of time faffing about with where a thing should actually go and how do I hook it up in a novel way.

Casuals still can’t keep up and tryhards pass me by. Stuck in the middle, lol.

I tend to burn a little slower than that, but yes. Post-scarcity is usually the goal and the game needn’t overstay its welcome.

When you cram it full of tech mods it is.

If you don’t have at minimum 4 GB of RAM to dedicate to the game alone, you are not going to be able to load the packs I want to play. And yet, this is apparently how much RAM a lot of people still have in their PCs total in the year of our lord 2024.

I also have a lot of friends using underpowered netbooks as daily drivers, which will quickly be CPU-bounded in a game like modded Minecraft.

Minecraft, especially modded Minecraft, is almost an anti-game. Unlike nearly every other big game, where it’s a neat and tidy compiled package that stays in its lane memory-wise, loads relatively quickly, and only makes you ask questions about how many pretty settings your GPU can handle and what FPS you’ll get doing it, Minecraft instead is a bloated, memory-hogging dumpster fire written crappily in Java (many of the mods are, anyway) that runs like a dream on integrated graphics but can bring nearly any processor you might have to its knees on single thread performance.

I have asked many a friend to play modded Minecraft with me.

Unfortunately, I am reminded time and time again that the Venn diagram of people I know who are interested in that and people with PCs who can run that is two circles.

My phone has this problem. It’s RAM.

My phone is literally never not using the full 8 GB it has, and it’s constantly juggling. Even when I have next to nothing open.

What’s eating it all? Fuck if I know. My phone also has a system memory leak that has eaten up 90% of the onboard storage with modem crash dumps I can’t delete without root, and this phone has no custom firmware to do that. Got what I paid for, I guess…

I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.

Pretty sure what they meant is no distros where you have to manually curate and possibly even build every sodding package, like Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, and maybe to an extent Arch. I presume they want a disto that flashes to a live USB, walks through a wizard, and boots up out of the box fully functional in minutes, no fuss required.

Yeah, the notion that “cut” and “delete” are the same operation was an interesting hurdle. It’s quite elegant, honestly.

The only thing it disrupts is the situation where you want to copy something, delete a second thing, then paste the first thing. Oops! Too bad! It’s gone now!

I’m aware we do have access to multiple registers in Vim, effectively giving us many clipboards to bypass this, but I don’t know the commands to utilize them. Without that knowledge, this little quirk remains an occasional irritation. Just not irritating enough to motivate me enough to knuckle down and learn it.

I can never reliably cut/copy and paste what I want in Vim. I’m always either picking up or leaving behind stray characters at the edges of my visual selection, because I find the end cursor so counterintuitive.

Especially true when newlines are involved, it’s always a mystery how many newlines I’ll paste into my document when I hit p to put.

This is not Vim’s fault, it’s just skill issue.

Oh, and it’s also a mystery whether the system clipboard will work properly with Vim out of the box or not. There’s some voodoo setting you have to tweak if it doesn’t.

I like VIM as a casual user.

I barely know any of the fancy shortcuts, never successfully used a macro in my life, can’t remember how to open more than one edit buffer and have to look it up every single time, and I still constantly wrongfoot copy and paste regularly to the point where I consider it a waste of my time to try and I just type things out the long way. I totally get why people feel very defeated by this editor.

But I do feel very slick darting around with hjkl, occasionally throwing in a gg or a G or a $ to leap around. Yeah, there are faster ways to get where I want if I’d only learn them, and I may some day, but this gets me around. If you can build up just the basic movements, that’s enough to at least begin to appreciate the editor.

Not having to touch my mouse to edit text is a massive game changer that is worth it on its own. Not that vim is the only one that offers this benefit, of course. But what it does well that I haven’t experienced in editors I’ve tried is how beautifully it flows if you happen to already know how to touch-type. Y’know, hands on the homerow, certain fingers hit certain keys, building up the muscle memory so you don’t have to look at the keyboard to type, all that. It’s why vim uses hjkl to move the cursor–it’s where the right hand rests in a touch-typist position.

If you don’t use keyboards this way, vim will probably ruin you. I know a lot of people who are proficient typists who never learned standard touch typing, instead home-rolling their own cursed setup that works for them, and god bless them, but they would be hard-pressed to negotiate vim. If this is you, vim may not be the editor for you.

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Man, I haven’t seen a pony in the wild in ages.

In theory, not voting is a protest strategy where you tie up a wealth of votes behind some set of issues, and thus incentivize politicians to platform those issues to court those votes.

In reality, next to none of the suits in power want anything to do with your issues, and they are tickled pink that they’ve managed to convince you to voluntarily self-select out of the process.

I don’t understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists.

Lots of reasons:

• It’s bigger and less fragmented. More content, more diversity, more activity, and it’s all in one easy place.
• No extra conceptual hurdles to overcome like “what is an instance” or “which instance do I join”.
• Network effect. See point 1. Unless you are some kind of FOSS enthusiast or a refugee of every other social media platform due to your vulgar, sexual, illegal, and/or politically extreme interests, your friends, followed creators, and other people of interest have a far higher chance of being on BlueSky than the Fediverse.
• An actual algorithm. Many people who jump to the Fediverse hate it, but a silent majority of casual users actively want it. Meticulously curating your own feed is not a boon to them, it is a chore.

A lot of the crap that the Fediverse did not inherit from its commercial counterparts is precisely what a lot of users are there for. And a lot of the expanded tooling and control the Fediverse alternatives offer are pearls before swine with most of these folks. Overall it just makes the Fediverse appear flakey, underbaked, and devoid of content.

Thus gen alpha, who haven’t been around long enough to develop an identity resulting in a catchier nickname.

“iPad babies” seems to be the closest thing we have at the moment. Only time will tell if that sticks.

step 2 of this process involves making a backup. whether they understand how they did so or not.