Don’t fret it, happens to everyone. And the rapidly changing pace of the news here makes it all the more likely.

Yeah, the reporting I have seen says the ceasefire wasn’t fully followed at first, but has been holding since.

When they try to negotiate for food or economic assistance, it gets framed as extortion

When one threatens death and destruction in exchange for money and goods, one does frame that as extortion, yes.

Why the hell would you want Iran to have nukes? Just because Israel and/or US bad, doesn’t mean Iran is good. Far, far from it.

consistently want to be left alone to do their thing

They consistently want to extract economic and food assistance from other countries via threatening all kinds of shit. But otherwise, yes.

It was attempted many times by South Korea, by the US, and by others to get North Korea to trash their nuclear program. It didn’t work.

The world learned if a country isn’t giving up their nuclear program, even with large incentives to do so, one cannot just hope things change in the future. That baseless hope is how we got a nuclear armed North Korea. The world learned, and a different strategy is being taken with Iran.

Men had privileged position in the society for millennia.

Other people had this privileged position in society for millennia. The people turning away from progressive politics aren’t wearing top hats, their hands are oil-covered. When you tell them they are privileged, that everything is just handed to them by society, they look around and wonder what you are talking about.

If 98% of Lemmy wants to kill all men, that’s a pretty shit state of affairs.

“Reserve Cloud PCs” will be preloaded with Microsoft 365 apps and a user’s preferred security policies and other Windows customizations.

You need a working PC to access this ‘reserve’ PC. Why not just install Office on your own PC and ignore this extra cloud thing?

Drop policies that have been consistent long-term losers like expanded gun control.

Suppressors are a hearing safety device/noise pollution reducer and Democrat politicians describe them like they get all their information from a John Wick movie. It would be so easy for the party to drop the matter entirely and throw politically-homeless gun owners a bone by taking suppressors off the NFA.

Force through policies that improve their lives at the cost of others, for example, healthcare paid for by taxing billionaires

Yep! Follow that up with policies that improve people’s lives and we have a ticket that writes itself.

Start by no longer telling men who have done nothing wrong they are responsible for the misdeeds of others. It breeds resentment and closes people to anything else you have to say.

• Bring lots of audio entertainment pre-loaded on your phone or burnt to a CD (don’t rely on internet). Podcast, audiobook, w/e. Boredom is the mind killer.
• Bring snacks that don’t leave your hands dirty.
• Bring a sandwich, it’s much cheaper than buying one.
• Bring a refrigerated and a frozen water bottle. The latter will still be cold for the second half of the trip.
• When you stop to pee/get gas, make sure you walk around for a few minutes. Your legs get tired just sitting.
• Both Google and Apple maps supports pre-downloading maps. This is very helpful if you need to set a route and you don’t have service where you happen to be.

I wouldn’t worry about it too hard, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with Ubuntu. Both it and mint are in the same family after all.

Sounds like you should just keep Ubuntu and get the non-snap versions of the apps that need codecs.

O, yeah. Snaps basically live in their own little system. Anything you do to your wider system, like installing codecs, will not affect a snap. Easiest solution is to remove the snap VLC and install normal VLC. Same for Firefox and MPC.

I have heard nothing good about snaps and Canonical pushing them is a big reason you don’t see people recommending Ubuntu, and instead recommending things like Mint (me included).

Yeah, I’m not sure why anybody is mentioning Windows IoT. When you lookup where to buy this, Microsoft themselves tell you to call or email a salesman; it’s an enterprise-only thing. Recommending this for individuals is misguided.

I know when you install Mint there is a ‘install codecs’ checkbox during the installer, not sure if the same exists for Ubuntu.

For Ubuntu, you could try this and see if it solves your problem.

Most people are willing to buy new hardware, and nobody pays for a Windows key tbh.

Many people are also not willing to buy new hardware. I have several friends where each PC purchase is a massive hit on their budget that requires other things to be sacrificed. And one does pay for a Windows key every time they buy a Windows PC. SIs who sell PCs with Windows as optional offer the Linux PCs for cheaper since you don’t have to pay the Windows license fee.

Even if they did it would be a free upgrade from 10 to 11.

Depends on the PC, some of them just will not go to 11, in which case you are talking about spending hundreds of dollars to go from Win 10 to Win 11, but $0 to go from Win 10 to Linux.

Enhanced Privacy

Once again not something people strictly care about.

Privacy is exactly what got me and one of my other friends to switch. Many, many people don’t like being spied on. And taking reasonable steps to reduce it is very much so within our control.

The implication that carbon emissions is something an individual can do something about has been objectively disproven.

Not buying something new and using what you have demonstrably helps. There is no world in which throwing away a perfectly good PC just to manufacture and transport another is somehow better for carbon emissions. Microsoft should not be rewarded for creating so much unnecessary ewaste by encouraging people to go out and buy another Windows PC.

Two of my friends switched recently precisely because Win 10 was going end of life. ‘I have to change the OS anyway’ was the final motivator.

intimidating complexity of installing Wine

I would give that a shot. The full guide is install ‘wine’ and ‘winetricks’ the same way you install any other software you use. Then in winetricks, select ‘default prefix’, then ‘run arbitrary executable’, and point it to your .exe installer. After that, you just open the program like any other program on your system.

You generally don’t need to do more than that and might let you forgo ever dual booting again.

Microsoft already lost enterprise servers to Linux, and has lost significant ground over the years in consumer PCs to ChromeOS, MacOS, and Linux. Hell, the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering. That was an unheard of idea just five years ago.

While I agree that business laptops will continue to be dominated by Windows for awhile, the market shifts we see everywhere have downstream effects on business laptops too. When you find yourself having to train more and more people on how to use Windows than you did in the past, the value argument for Windows on your employee’s laptops quickly comes into question.