speaking of bein on the computer. found this channel a week or two ago & it made me feel pretty significantly less insane than usual.

I follow a lot of channels that do videos about hardware & programming & linuxes & obviously MOST TO ALL of them are hosted by men. lot of them are very cool! I learn a lot. but I also can't help but get tired of just. Constantly thinking "what are the women who DEFINITELY ARE INTERESTED IN THIS STUFF doing instead of wrangling youtube channels." as one does.

most of the videos on "veronica explains" are more scripted than this one (& those are good, too. I learn!!), but this is the kind of thing I'm Exactly interested in & try to research and play around with on my own time, so listening to a Real Live Adult Minnesotan Mom Type Individual talk through the setup process live was like. wow! she's literally me! & that's nice to have sometimes.

I don't think I'd like grapheneOS, but FIRST of all it's nice to know how low-fuss it seems to be, and SECONDLY this reminded me that I should really try to VM some smartphone OS-es in my free time so I can find one I do like!

just makes you feel a little more grounded in your own hobby, seeing Content (tm) from people who probably have life experiences that are a little more like your own. now I am starting a counter for "how long until a woman makes listenable videos about dwarf fortress." so far we have men from like half the countries on planet earth, and low-dialogue stream VODs from one vtuber with a robot voice. and mirakurutaimu but she stopped playing. so. my money's on "heat death of the universe," basically.

A boy can dream, can't he?

Telling young zoomers to "just switch to linux" is nuts some of these ipad kids have never even heard of a cmd.exe or BIOS you're throwing them to the wolves

Bought my uncle a burger and milkshake in exchange for letting me disrupt the holiest day of the week, NFL Sunday Football, so I could install a Pi-hole and free the household of ads...the thing abt the specific boomers I live with is they told me not to trust people on the Internet but they do not understand the algorithm or online advertising and think that Facebook has their best interests at heart. And every time I have tried to explain to them that no, blorbo from my dashboard is not selling my kidneys on the dark web but Google from your capitalism is definitely selling your web searches to every advertising company on the planet, they think I am paranoid. How could their personal friend Mark Zuckerberg want anything bad to happen to them etc. I am fighting battles I did not know existed!!!

So, my spouse has been exploring his gender lately; he also just built himself a new laptop. Today he told me that he in an attempt to process some genderfeels through metaphor, he made a post on a trans forum along the lines of: "I'm a lifelong Windows user and I think I'm pretty good at it. I want to find out what Linux has to offer but I'm afraid I wouldn't be any good at it. And how do you choose the right Linux distro, anyway? Do you have to try them all?"

The responses, he said, were a mix of useful advice about feeling out your gender and useful advice about choosing a Linux distro.

I love trans people so much

Edit 4/8, in case you don't see the reblogged additions -- my wife is now going by Eve!

real, rb if you're a d&d enthusiast or sex pervert (or both like a True Linux User)

from a classic:

In case you have little choice on having to use Windows 11.

Option 1: Guide to basic install de-bloated Windows 11 (by Chris Titus, with video and blog article)

Option 2a: Use a script to de-bloat Windows 11 (by simeonsecurity. more digital literacy. check "how to install" section)

Option 2b: Use a script to de-bloat and harden Windows 11 (by simeonsecurity. more digital literacy. check "how to install" section)

Note: If choose Option 2, choose either 2a or 2b. not both.

anytime I forget to update my system for more than like a week or whatever it gets the little system tray ⚠️help! watch out! help!🚨 icon & I go Yes okay hold on. I'm busy writing fanfiction or whatever can you give me another (checks the clock I slapped onto my desktop instead of putting it somewhere normal) 1 to 3 business weeks

& it says "ok." & sits quietly in its little system tray spot thereafter doing absolutely nothing. as god intended. and then when I finally tell it to go ahead it LEAPS into action slapping hundreds of upgrades in there rapid-fire like it's making a tall cartoon sandwich & when it's done 1 to 3 minutes later my user experience has changed literally 0%.

it's exactly what I always wanted. literally the Perfect antithesis to the EXACT shit I ditched windows to get away from. life can be dream and I proved it

Maximum Linux - October 1999 Penguin Computing

I don't think people realize how absolutely wild Linux is.

Here we have an Operating system that now has 100 different varieties, all of them with their own little features and markets that are also so customizable that you can literally choose what desktop environment you want. Alongside that it is the OS of choice for Supercomputers, most Web servers, and even tiny little toy computers that hackers and gadget makers use. It is the Operating System running on most of the world's smartphones. That's right. Android is a version of Linux.

It can run on literally anything up to and including a potato, and as of now desktop Linux Distros like Ubuntu and Mint are so easily to use and user friendly that technological novices can use them. This Operating system has had App stores since the 90s.

Oh, and what's more, this operating system was fuckin' built by volunteers and users alongside businesses and universities because they needed an all purpose operating system so they built one themselves and released it for free. If you know how to, you can add to this.

Oh, and it's founder wasn't some corporate hotshot. It's an introverted Swedish-speaking Finn who, while he was a student, started making his own Operating system after playing around with someone else's OS. He was going to call it Freax but the guy he got server space from named the folder of his project "Linux" (Linus Unix) and the name stuck. He operates this project from his Home office which is painted in a colour used in asylums. Man's so fucking introverted he developed the world's biggest code repo, Git, so he didn't have to deal with drama and email.

Steam adopted it meaning a LOT of games now natively run in Linux and what cannot be run natively can be adapted to run. It's now the OS used on their consoles (Steam Deck) and to this, a lot of people have found games run better on Linux than on Windows. More computers run Steam on Linux than MacOS.

On top of that the Arctic World Archive (basically the Svalbard Seed bank, but for Data) have this OS saved in their databanks so if the world ends the survivors are going to be using it.

On top of this? It's Free! No "Freemium" bullshit, no "pay to unlock" shit, no licenses, no tracking or data harvesting. If you have an old laptop that still works and a 16GB USB drive, you can go get it and install it and have a functioning computer because it uses less fucking resources than Windows. Got a shit PC? Linux Mint XFCE or Xubuntu is lightweight af. This shit is stopping eWaste.

What's more, it doesn't even scrimp on style. KDE, XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon, all look pretty and are functional and there's even a load of people who try make their installs look pretty AF as a hobby called "ricing" with a subreddit (/r/unixporn) dedicated to it.

Linux is fucking wild.