“suicide drones”

… Hey guys I think they just unlocked… “missiles”. 😬

To everyone down voting and assuming this is ragebait, I would ask we take a step back. I think this is a genuine question and I can’t help but feel a bit heard that someone is asking it.

In the midst of all this ridiculous culture-warring, creators have a ton of anxiety now. It’s one thing to be afraid your creation will get you laughed at for being cringey, (as if that’s not a huge barrier already).

But it’s another entirely when it feels like in this era of “all art is political”, writing anyone who has recognizable human qualities will forcibly put you, the creator, into some ideological category where you’ll be scrutinized and judged personally based on your work’s perceived “agenda.”

The right with their relentless “woke-hunting”, the left with their “purity tests” to blame you for not championing their particular social cause. Showing your art seems to inevitably involve chumming the waters to the terminally online. This can also produce anxieties of being doxxed or something if it’s high profile enough.

That being said: My heart is warmed by all the overwhelmingly level headed responses in this thread. Seriously. It gives me hope.

Please notice I said FEELS a lot up there…Our perception is definitely muddied by how social media tends to megaphone the worst of society, and it tends to discourage us from being seen or interacting with others.

I’m glad threads like this demonstrate how genuine people can be. It provides quite a contrast.

While we’re at it…

Don’t make life choices based on the opinion of white supremacists.

Now your great life advice is even more universally applicable! :D

Also OP, if you want pretty and Cinnamon can’t do it for ya, you can always install KDE (my fav!) or GNOME or what have you right on top of your existing system.

Research before doing so! But it’s possible. :)

I also love Tumbleweed and rock it as my daily driver!

To complement this point, OP, you can also get that sweet rollback functionality in any distro! Usually the easiest way is selecting BTRFS as your file system on install, and installing a software called “TimeShift” that will manage snapshots for you.

BTRFS can be complicated, but basically, it allows remembering the changes in files, without needing to copy the ENTIRE file. This saves a ton of space. (You don’t need to get into the weeds deep diving if you don’t want to. Snapshots are great, everything else is great, as long as you aren’t doing crazy specific RAID setups or something lol)

Otherwise, on EXT4 for insurance, your rollbacks would just literally be copied files, which can eat your storage fast. :)

Tumbleweed is known for rolling (heh!) this in quite smoothly by default, but this is just an example how any distro can be tweaked how you like! (Highly recommend setting up Timeshift on ANY install.)

I absolutely second the advice in this comment: Try some live USBs or virtual machines and just play around for what feels right. Distro hopping can be lots of fun, but you’ll find one that “feels like home.”

:)

I agree with most folks here that usability-wise, both are truly fine! Mainly I think philosophy is where Mint might have an edge here.

Ubuntu, run by a corpo named Canonical, has had some controversial decisions in the past, such as inserting amazon ads into the system’s search feature, or “opt out” analytics being default, and lately, a system called “snap.”

Snap is controversial because it has a closed source backend, but effectively works just like its open-source counterpart, the “flatpak.” It’s packaged so the software has everything it needs to run.

Some people say they work great, others hate them, but Ubuntu doesn’t make it very easy for you to have a choice in the matter.

If you don’t like the idea of snaps, it’s a bit of a pain to get rid of it. And otherwise, Ubuntu will sneakily use it as the default way to install most software. Philosophically, this can feel a lot like why people left Windows behind!

Long term, that’s why I favor and recommend Mint to most newcomers: It doesn’t play those games, sometimes the drivers work even better, the community is fantastic, and the vast knowledge that works on Ubuntu should work on Mint too.

So that’s mainly where the difference will lie.

Either way, I wouldn’t sweat it too much while you’re learning, as long as it does what you want! And purple-orange is pretty snazzy. ;)

Mint just feels a little “cleaner” in my humble opinion. Most software you’d want the latest of, like GIMP or Discord, will be found as a Flatpak in Mint’s app store.

Hope this helps you get a clearer view!

Ah the old bad guy cliché. You know they feel threatened when they bust out the “We’re the same, you and I!” Lol

The way he wields that stupid flamethrower around employees and such is SO Zorg!

Let’s be honest, corporate was just mad they didn’t think of it sooner! :p

This gesture is meant to convey threat and to harass religious and racial minorities.

I’d even take it a step further and say it’s a gesture made by a very dangerous minority that threatens the vast majority.

Nothing says “I’m willing to forgo my humanity to wage pointless violence on literally the rest of the world.” like the cringiest dipshit salute ever devised.

Yeah, no.

Or as they’d say down there:

“Yeeh, nooar.”

(I make this joke with love, Australia 🫶 lol)

Yeah you make a really good point there! I was perhaps thinking too simplistically and scaling from my personal experience with playing around on my home machine.

Although realistically, it seems the situation is pretty bad because freaky-giant-mega-computers are both training models AND answering countless silly queries per second. So at scale it sucks all around.

Minus the terrible fad-device-cycle manufacturing aspect, if they’re really sticking to their guns on pushing this LLM madness, do you think this wave of onboard “Ai chips” will make any impact on lessening natural resource usage at scale?

(Also offtopic but I wonder how much a sweet juicy exploit target these “ai modules” will turn out to be.)

It seemed really obvious, like, I had this thought before the election was called that I should start grabbing some stonks because the uncertainty dipped everything for a minute.

But I don’t have money for stocks right now, I’m simply not in the position. (Okay I own like one, for my favorite (not starbucks) coffee chain lol)

And then everything jumps massively after his “win”, because all the corpos are probably anticipating massive deregulation.

I probably would’ve been gutted on short term gains fees anyway lol.

That’s how it works though isn’t it? The secret is to already have a bunch of money and stock and general capital…then when it dips, it’s not so bad, and when it surges, you win such a payout!

How ingeniously simple! /s

Maybe we ought to just step aside and let these voters suffer the full consequences of their actions.

If we could do this without also suffering the full consequences of their actions I’d be all for it.

But at this point, in a hypothetical dystopian future, those voters would be reduced to scavenging in the slums, every public station owned by the GOP, not a Democrat in sight… and they’d still be able to get away with “blaming the liberals” for everything they directly caused right before everyone’s eyes.

I’ve been aghast reading all these comments on like, Nextdoor, of people shaking their heads saying “The left is always the party of divisiveness and violence.”

They’ll believe anything at this point. They literally can’t seem to comprehend the consequences of their votes.

Maybe we ought to just step aside and let these voters suffer the full consequences of their actions.

If we could do this without also suffering the full consequences of their actions I’d be all for it.

But at this point, in a hypothetical dystopian future, those voters would be reduced to scavenging in the slums, every public station owned by the GOP, not a Democrat in sight… and they’d still be able to get away with “blaming the liberals” for everything they directly caused right before everyone’s eyes.

I’ve been aghast reading all these comments on like, Nextdoor, of people shaking their heads saying “The left is always the party of divisiveness and violence.”

They’ll believe anything at this point. They literally can’t seem to comprehend the consequences of their votes.

Surely, now everyone will be hiring for all kinds of jobs and competing fiercely for who pays the best and offers the sweetest benefits, across all industries… Right? :D

/s

:(

Bough it

Twish it!

Pull it!

(Yeah I know this joke is a stretch lmao)

massive recession. What smart thing do you think were going to do about it?

I remember 2008 like yesterday. “Nobody hiring. Mass layoffs. No jobs.”, and then it seems like that same cycle has just been on regular repeat the rest of our lives up to this point. (Meanwhile, record profits because of course!)

This is what I really worry about. I’m still trying but still on the same treadmill. I’m not a super genius or a heartless grifter, so I don’t really know if I can be clever enough for us to get through this… And that scares the crap out of me.

Had us in the first half, not gonna lie. LOL

Dammit, Manjaro. Why you gotta be WEIRD?! I used to love their branding, but they keep doing crazy things that would clearly alienate the userbase that’s left…