It’s amazing how quickly they get it.

My kids use Linux. They are 5 and 7. They do just fine. They are “normal”… as in just beginner users.

The 5 year old only cares where Steam is, and where the games are in the menu.

The 7 year old is a master at it all already. He’s installing Minecraft mods all the time… downloading, unzipping the mods… running java -jar XYZ from the terminal… yeah I had to show him the first time, but TBH, I didn’t show it all to him. He read up on how it works and watched YouTube videos on it.

It’s all about what you’re used to and if you’re actually interested in learning the bits. Normal is what? Someone who treats the computer as an appliance? Yeah… with those users as long as the machine actually works… they don’t care what the underlying OS is… OSX? Windows 11? some Linux distro? It’s all the same to them. The computer is a magic machine that does things and they have no clue how or why.

dye a hero

Yes… but what colour?

The US Regular Army (RA) was founded in 1775. State militias supported the RA through the various wars fought on what is now US soil (including the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). In the Civil War, the RA was supported by volunteers and fought on the side that ultimately won. The Confederate Army was similar to the RA at the time. Currently, the RA has been absorbed into the US Army (including Army Reserve and National Guard).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_Army_(United_States) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Army

So… yes there was a federal military, but it was a different thing than the US Army is now. How that would play out if things went bonkers in 2025… who knows. There are a LOT of people around the world watching VERY closely though… and really hoping (not that confidently though) that sanity will prevail.

Yeah I see it (as a not American looking in from outside the country). Every time I visit the USA, the changes in things are more and more visible.

There’s probably not going to be a civil war.

So… there’s still a chance then…

It’s a problem with Canonical. They stepped up and created the snaps and then abandoned them instead of maintaining them. They still maintain the core that they include with the distro… it’s all the extras they created to pad out the store… and then abandoned. “Look the snap store has so many packages”… yeah… no… it doesn’t.

Why would a company who makes a commercial level open source package want to add snaps to their already broad Linux offering? They typically already build RPM (covering RHEL, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, etc.) and DEB (covering Debian, Ubuntu, all Ubuntu derivatives, etc.)… and have a tar.gz to cover anything they missed. Why should they add the special snowflake snap just to cover Ubuntu which is already well covered by the DEB hey already make?

Sure, show vendors what’s possible, but if Canonical stepped up to make the snaps, then they should still be maintaining them. It’s not a business opportunity… its more bullshit from Canonical that no one wants.

Snap is a steaming pile of excrement. So much of the crap on the Snap Store is obsolete and out of date. Anyone and their monkey can post a snap on snapcraft, and… they do. Canonical is just as bad. They took it upon themselves to package up a lot of commercial-level open-source software 3 or 4 years ago… and then have done fuck all with it ever since. Zero updates to the original snaps they put there in the initial population of the Snap store (yes they do maintain a select few things, but only a small percentage of the flood of obsolete software in the Snap store). The result is people looking to install apps who poke the Snap store, go “oh hey, the application I want is there”, install it, and then get all pissy with the vendor… who looks about in surprise wondering how a potential customer managed to find such an old version (happened with at least 2 of my employers, and I’ve come across many more). Go search Reddit (or Google) for obsolete snap discussions. There’s no shortage people pointing at the same issue.

Personal experience on my part. I deleted 13 years of contributions on Reddit. They are ALL back. My account was deleted… but every single comment (that I checked anyway) is still there. I checked after I deleted them… and they were not visible for almost 2 months after I did the pass to delete… now they’re all back.

And if you deleted all your comments… they undeleted everything.

Sounds like Ubuntu underneath your Plasma. I’ve had the exact same experience when using Neon, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu+KDE. I install any non-Ubuntu based distro with KDE (like openSUSE) and whiz bang everything is working again.

Linux needs more GUIs for managing complex settings.

openSUSE has YaST which covers almost all complex settings… it’s not perfect, but it tries

I wouldn’t go with Opensuse or Fedora for gaming.

Why? I use openSUSE Tumbleweed for gaming and it’s been rock solid. Seriously, I’ve never really had any issues. It has its quirks, but they are easily “fixed” by adding Packman and the Nvidia repos… and running an update.

I’ve tried Ubuntu multiple times and it was always a shitshow disaster. Mint was OK-ish, but had Ubuntu-related silliness.

Kinda depends where you work.

I’ve been working full time in software dev and hardware dev since the mid-1990s. Through that whole time I’ve worked almost exclusively on (in the early days) Sun workstations, AS/400, and HPUX machines. This eventually transitioned to Linux and macOS (once it became Unix based). Over the past 7-8 years, every company I’ve worked for (primarily in backend software and “big data”) has actually heavily restricted Windows within the company. Most have required high level approval to have a Windows machine… you had to have a damn good business reason to run Windows as your primary OS.

Windows is definitely the leader in generic desktop work, but… there are pockets out there of Linux/macOS-only. And… given the strong shift to browser based everything… Windows has lost its shininess for all but the most specific applications - eg graphics editing in industry standard tooling like Photoshop.

Thankfully the school my kids go to doesn’t really give a crap what you run at home on on their laptops they used for school work as long as the kids are able to to their assignments. Almost 100% of what they do is browser based interfaces anyway, so it doesn’t matter what the underlying OS is. I’ve made a point of teaching my kids Linux, macOS, and Windows. They’ve both asked to run Linux on their personal PCs… it was, and remains their choice.

I’ve been using Nvidia with Linux for a VERY long time. Currently I have computers running:

• GT1030 - two older PC
• GTX2060 Ti
• GTX 3050 Ti - laptop

They are all working fine with openSUSE Tumbleweed. I install openSUSE, add the Nvidia community repo (a couple of clicks), run updates once, and reboot. Everything just works after that. I can count maybe 3 times in the past 6 years that there was any issue at all.

Now Ubuntu and derivative… I’ve had a LOT of issues and weirdness… drivers failing, doing weird things etc.

I used a Tampermonkey script called Reddit History Sanitiizer: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23605-reddit-history-sanitizer/code

You can modify it to do what you want… Power Delete Suite works too. There’s a lot more out there, especially now.

13 years on Reddit. I was part of the Great Digg Exodus… now the Great Reddit Exodus.

I deleted all my comments on Reddit, all of my posts, and then toasted my user account just before the API deadline. Not looking back.