silkroadtraveler

For 99% of Windows or MacOS users who work in their browser and within simple applications, day-to-day Linux usage is as easy or easier than Windows. Microsoft’s monopolistic practices and lack of government intervention/regulation led us to this point plain and simple.

Three favorites based on region:

• East Asia: Taiwan. Food, geographical diversity, and their unique melding of indigenous and Han, Hakka, and Hokkien cultures that is experiencing a tiny bit of a renaissance
• MENA: Oman. Mesmerizing terrain, complex food traditions, fascinating history and overlapping of cultures and religious practices, a place that truly feels secure in itself. Go watch Parts Unknown Oman episode - it does a decent job sharing the vibe of the place.
• Europe: +1 to France. Never been somewhere that has such a distinct identity and atmosphere as Paris. The universal accessibility of national treasures is a monument to mankind’s potential. Where else can you visit a centuries old castle off of a subway stop and have the place all to yourself? (Chateau de Vincennes)

If it weren’t for the decades of conflict, Afghanistan would’ve been on the list.

Edit: added France

Yet

Yes! Linux Mint is such a great project - it made me excited to get on my desktop again.

If it’s any comfort, it took me a few tries to get it to work. It was over a year ago so the details are a bit rusty. I started out trying to install Debian, and it also crashed during installation, so I went back and tried some of the bug fixes. (One was something to do with the MOK). Debian didn’t work after that but Ubuntu did. It was a strange experience, and there’s nothing that would motivate me to switch after I finally got it to work.

Perhaps you can give it another shot sometime and it’ll work. If you hate the custom arch that’s on it, and you don’t use it, you might as well try.

Mint 21.3 as my main Desktop OS - almost zero complaints after over a year. Everything just works.

Ubuntu using Linux-Surface on my old Surface Pro. Breathed new life into a device I had abandoned (after all 8gb of ram isn’t enough for Windows malware these days). Gnome works really nice on a touchscreen two-in-one. Kudos to the Linux-Surface folks. They took one of the few positive developments from Microsoft (Surface hardware) and made it possible to remove the worst part (windows). Not that I’ll ever buy a Surface again. It also allowed me to retire my iPad.

Fedora Linux on a cheap Dell laptop as my media client. Fedora is nice and runs well, haven’t done too much with it other than Firefox and Calibre. Nice to see a different ‘branch’ in action.

I’m pretty basic and generally lazy so I don’t delve into some of the smaller distros or distro hop. Maybe later I’ll do it with VMs, but eh not sure it’s my kind of hobby. Too many other things to do.

Best of luck and let us know how it goes.

They also buy lots of guns from the US. This is one of the real reasons. Lockheed Martin’s profit margins would decrease by a significant amount if our relationship with SA changed at all.

Even if the Saudis and other major countries in the reason were able to decrease tensions with Iran, Lockheed Martin and its associated propagandists and lobbyists would start beating the war drums to increase tensions and thus sales.

Edit: *one of the real reasons. Added para. on LM ensuring tensions in the region always remain high even when the people that live there and their government’s reduce tensions.

I appreciate this, you totally get it. I hope you can hold onto that remote job. Makes it so much easier to tune out the hate and nonsense. I remain quiet and comfort myself by knowing that if the chance ever arises, I will do everything I can to undermine them. Which won’t be hard considering most of them have the intellectual capacity of a troglodyte.

Wow the more I talk about this the more I want to leave the US forever. There’s so little left here that matches my values.

I’m 100% with you. The deprogramming took years. It feels like I wasted so much of my life, and I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in. What’s almost worse than knowing so many vets are still so brainwashed is watching people who didn’t go through the same programming shill even harder for regressive destruction. I work on a construction site and have to listen to these overconfident fascist blowhards rant all day.

They should put an asterisk below the reminders **does not apply if your net worth is in excess of $3M or whatever point at which your lawyers outsmart the IRS annually

That’s exactly what I was alluding to but was too lazy to type in full haha

Yeah and he has a top secret clearance…different set of rules for our special brand of corrupt oligarchs.