I’ve used KDE for more than a decade, and then about 1.5 years ago I decided to give Gnome a try. A few months ago I wanted to see KDE again, but I quickly switched back to Gnome.

KDE:

• Feature-rich desktop with feature-rich tools by default. Everything is so advanced and customizable, I really miss this.
• Lately I’ve encountered many annoying bugs (this was the main reason why I tried Gnome in the first place). Crashing while trying to unlock the screen, fractional scaling issues, and random crashes here and there (although these are rare). And I would love to dive into it and fix them, but there are so many other stuffs I wanna do, I don’t have the capacity for this.
• Setting color profiles for monitors is not trivial.
• There are many annoying UX issues that are really negligible, but if they worked well, my experience would’ve been much smoother. Here’s an example: start to type your password on the lock screen, while the monitor is sleeping. On most OS and also on KDE, the first interaction must be to wake up the screen, and then you can type your password. On Gnome, just start typing and hit enter. The screen might wake up halfway while you’re typing, but it still does what you’d expect. These kind of small things make my experience so much smoother and so much more comfortable.

Gnome:

• It just works. Flawlessly and smoothly, to my surprise. Sure, it’s easy to accomplish when it’s so minimalistic, that almost nothing is in there. But whatever there is, at least it works.
• Fractional scaling is a pain in the ass here too, but in a different way. It’s still an experimental feature though, so we could say this feature doesn’t even exist, which is a huge disadvantage.
• Feature-rich software can be installed afterwards. So it’s not really bothering me that the pre-installed tools are too minimalistic.
• Setting color profiles for monitors is very straightforward, but there’s way to improve here too.

To sum up, my preference is less bugs over more features, so I pick Gnome.

Ever since I got my own place, I’m significantly less stressed. So much, that my health condition pretty much got back to normal after living with a colon disease (AND my mom) for a long time.

Folks, do not underestimate the power of stress.

Everyone should invest that time.

You can do just that. Before you begin the quiz, there’s a link to skip the quiz and directly enter your preferences.

I’m not from the US, so I don’t know how accurate this is, and I also don’t know if this thing has ever been updated (I found it a long time ago), but there’s this tool that might help with deciding: https://www.whereshouldilive.co/

I’m using Qwant. Works better for me than DuckDuckGo.

Oh there’s a lot.

• When I was a kid, parents and teachers used to teach, if you have sore muscles a day after an extensive workout, you need to work out even more in order to reduce the soreness. In fact, however, you need to rest those muscles.
• I thought, pepperoni was pepper. (Like bell pepper, just smaller; similar to chilli). Then my girlfriend enlightened me after a confusing conversation, that pepperoni was a kind of salami. And then recently, at a company event before ordering pizza and after a very confusing discussion of what toppings we order, it turned out pepperoni was actually a kind of a salami, but not everyone agreed. So by now I’ve learned that pepperoni is neither of them. It doesn’t exist. It’s listed on pizza menus, and when you order it, you’ll get something for sure, but you won’t know in advance what it would be.
• This isn’t new, the realization was several years ago, but fits this list nicely: I thought, perfume was something for women. It turned out, there was perfume for men too.
• Parents used to teach, if you read in the dark (on paper, not on a screen, I must add), you’re ruining your eyes. But if you think about it: wtf does low light do to your eyes? By that logic, you’re constantly ruining your eyes while sleeping.
• For some reason I used to think, you could simply delete related entities bound by foreign key constraints in postgres, if you ran the query in a transaction. Once when I finally needed to do this, I learned the hard way I was wrong.

There’s a lot more than this, probably I’ll update this comment in the future. Or not.

Milk chocolate without any nuts.

At first I wanted to say sushi, but basically anything I order online, because they’re so expensive. But during those few occasions I really feel like royalty.

I set the timer on the dishwasher to finish approximately when I get home after work. However, that day I didn’t really know what time I would get home, as there was an after-work BBQ event.

When I arrived at home and stepped into the kitchen, the timer showed 0:00 and shortly afterwards it switched off.

My proudest achievement in like two years.

And do Israeli people actually approve of this genocide?

There are! FediTips usually shares some channels on Mastodon that they consider interesting. It’s worth looking their posts through: https://social.growyourown.services/@FediVideo

I respect everyone’s wrong opinion.

I’d rather pick that, than starve to death.

I can’t imagine stopping to work. If I retire, I’ll have no money. I cannot count on pension either.

But I have an IT job, it’s just sitting in front of the computer all day; it’s not like a physical job I wouldn’t be able to do at old age.

Water; yes.

End of the day, nothing you can do will change what’s happening half way across the world, so why let it change you?

I beg to differ. Here are a few things you can do. I agree these won’t make an impact, but if enough people are willing to do these, it could work:

• Donate money if you can afford it. (Just carefully check where you’re exactly donating to.)
• Promote non-propaganda, factual information. Muscovy spreads disinformation through social media and propaganda websites using their trolls. So why can’t ordinary people step up and upvote, share, publish, and promote factual information? Sure, the algorithms of social media platforms favor the disinformation, but again, if enough people are willing to overcome what’s happening, I believe, it could make a change.
• Promote education. Only stupid people can be influenced by the far right propaganda. Unfortunately there are way too many stupid people.
• Just do what you’re good at. If your profession is irrelevant, that’s fine. But if you happen to be a hacker, or want to become one, go ahead, and fight online scammers and trolls. Are you a software developer? Wanna be a web developer? Create something that has an impact if you have the free time and interest. Make it open source. Encourage others to join. Again, if you have no affinity for this kind of stuff, it’s totally fine.
• Do your research and vote on elections.

In my opinion, this kind of mindset of “you cannot do anything, get used to it” is a very demotivating and harmful piece of advice. Because that’s what’s been going on all this time; everyone being ignorant, while evil people never stop doing what they’re doing.

“Carry a laser” - Mr. Mister

When it comes to Facebook, Instagram, and other mainstream social media, just stay away, it’s not worth it. I had Facebook, and it was just full of trash. I haven’t had Instagram, but it’s not very appealing either.

A LinkedIn account, however, for professional reasons is very much advised. Or Glassdoor.

Although over the recent years I saw some decline in quality on LinkedIn, as it’s getting full of shit posts, but you can completely disregard what’s on the feed. What you need LinkedIn for, is to build a professional profile, have your former and current coworkers in your network, and find and apply for jobs. Or even just let opportunities come to your inbox once you have an impressive profile.

The most amazing workplace I’ve ever had was possible thanks to LinkedIn, with almost no effort on my part. I have to say, this isn’t typical though. It’s only likely happening in countries where there’s a labour shortage. But a recruiter (among tons of others) found me from a well known company, their opening looked good to me, so I gave it a try. After just one interview I was hired, and I didn’t even have to apply for the job.

My most recent job was with a relocation to a different country. I can’t even imagine how this would’ve been possible without LinkedIn or Glassdoor. But I achieved one of my big life goals.

A career advice I got about ten years ago: create a LinkedIn profile and always keep updating it. If you do so, you’ll see it’s kinda awkward to go back in time and retrospectively edit things and connect with former coworkers. But since you haven’t had an account yet, I don’t see any other choice for you.

As for Glassdoor, it’s maybe a bit less popular than LinkedIn, but nowadays you can find opportunities there too. The best strength of Glassdoor is that you can find reviews of companies, sometimes they’re also reporting their salaries so you know what to expect. In some cases, individual reviews may be misleading as they’re forced by the company (which is btw against the terms of use), it can be a good indicator if you find thousands of good reviews or thousands of bad reviews.

Regarding the fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc.), they’re much better than their corporate equivalents in terms of quality, but they’re not immune to misinformation either. And also not immune to the user’s own stupidity. Obviously, don’t share what doesn’t belong there.

Edit: added notes for Glassdoor

• When traveling to/from eastern Europe, always have your checked-in luggage wrapped. In those countries, especially in Hungary, there are many thieves among luggage handlers and there are many horror stories regarding in what conditions the passengers received their belongings at the end (if at all). While you cannot 100% eliminate risks, wrapped luggages are much less likely to be tampered with. It’s also worth wrapping it when you care about the outer texture of your luggage (sometimes the cargo area of the aircraft is really dirty).
• In the terminal building, find your gate first, so that you know exactly where to go when the time comes. Until then, go, find a comfortable seat somewhere else, far from the gates. At DXB I know a couple of cool locations where there aren’t many people waiting, so there are plenty of free space plus much cleaner toilets nearby due to less frequent usage. However, I’ll keep that information to myself, because I still wanna be able to enjoy those less crowded areas when I’m traveling.
• Pay attention to the safety briefing and really think it through. You have to remember it in panic situations. Pay attention to every single little detail, because everything is said for a very good reason. (Just as an example: when they say “pull the oxygen mask towards you when it appears in front of you”, you really have to yank on it (okay, maybe don’t rip it off; I have no idea how strong to pull it), because the oxygen flow starts only when a safety “pin” is released, which can be done by pulling on the oxygen line.)
• If your clothes are in your checked-in luggage, always have at least one set of extra clothes in your hand-carry.
• Pay attention to the airline’s guidelines when packing your luggage.
• During an emergency evacuation do not reach for your belongings. Just do as instructed and leave the aircraft as you’re told, ASAP. For this reason, keep your passport in your pocket and try to wear clothing that will be suitable outside as well to some extent. For example, wear your shoes and wear a sweater at least. (And pants as well, but I guess it doesn’t need to be mentioned.) You will get your belongings back at the end (if they’re salvageable, I guess).
• Others already mentioned it, but it’s so important, I need to reiterate: don’t be an asshole. It is common sense, yet there are so many people not following this rule.