Gaming PC - Nobara (Fedora base with lots of gaming-specifc kernel optimizations baked in.)

Personal laptop - Linux Mint

Business laptop - Linux Mint Debian Edition

Junk/Test laptops - Void

Home lab main hypervisor - XCP-ng (Highly customized Fedora under the hood.)

NAS - TrueNAS (Debian under the hood.)

Virtual servers - Mostly Debian, but a few Alma Linux VMs to get that RHEL experience. Ubuntu Server for my self-hosted gaming servers.

Steam Deck - SteamOS (Valve’s immutable spin of Arch.)

1. Typically, but not always. Some trans women are biologically intersex. (This also depends on how you define “biologically male” which is not totally straightforward.)
2. It matters in some contexts, not in others. Their physician should know, because various hormone treatments cause different effects in people’s bodies, and certain health conditions effect biologically male or female people differently too. That’s nobody else’s business but the patient and their trusted medical providers. As far as their dignity, opportunities, and general acceptance, it doesn’t matter. Trans folks deserve the exact same rights, opportunities, and acceptance as anybody else.
3. Usually people who bring this up aren’t acting in good faith, so I don’t engage with them. On the rare occasion where somebody is genuinely curious and wants to learn, I answer them in the same way as I am doing right now.
4. Because the word “woman” denotes multiple concepts, like the word “parent”. If a child is adopted at birth and is raised by a couple, the child and their community will refer to those people as the child’s parents. This is not a false statement, because the word “parent” doesn’t only mean the direct biological progenitors of a person. Parent also is a social role, hence the verb form “to parent somebody.” This is also why we have the terms, “biological parent” and “adoptive parent” to add additional information when it’s necessary.

Trans women are women in the sense that they are filling their society’s sociological role that surrounds the expected concept of a woman. That will be different depending on many factors, and will have many different aspects including their pronouns, fashion and clothing, voice, makeup, hair, activities, and so forth.

Just like any other woman, they will chose which social roles they desire to fit into, and which ones they don’t, and all of that is completely acceptable.

Wish they handled it better, but I knew about this a while ago, and the price is more than reasonable.

A decade without a price hike is extremely generous, especially at how cheap their plan was.

They are a FOSS company that makes a fantastic product I’ve been happy with for years, I’ll gladly pay less than $2 a month to support them. Their server code is licensed with the AGPL, the strongest copyleft license there is, which gives me a lot of confidence.

Worse case scenario, they enshitify down the road, we are protected via the open source implementations. We’ve seen this many times in the past, Red Hat > Alma & Rocky Linux, Citrix Xen Server > XCP-ng, Terraform > Open Tofu.

Pay for your open source software, folks 💖

Yeah, those two look like they should be studying for their civics midterms, not cosplaying jackboot goons.

“My friend says the story is stupid and no one would want to read it.”

That’s not real constructive feedback. If your friend has actual critiques of your concept, that’s one thing, but just saying something seems stupid is meaningless and carries zero weight.

Don’t let people live their life and your life too. If you’re passionate about an idea, try it and see if it works. Worse case scenario, it fails, and you learn from it and get lots of practice for your next idea. Which still might be bad, but it will almost certainly be less bad, and same with the next, and the next, and before you know it, you have hundreds of hours of practice and experience and you’re creating real cool stuff.

Also, sometimes ideas are good, but you currently lack the skill to execute them well. That just means you need to increase your skill level. An idea that fails badly when you first start out, might turn out fantastic 5 - 10 years down the road.

Film directors/writers sometimes talk about this, where they had an idea or a script for a movie that they wanted to make, but they didn’t have the budget and necessary experience to do it justice early in their career.

TL;DR Your friend’s “feedback” is worthless, if you’re really passionate about this idea, go for it. Worst case scenario, you gain a bunch of experience trying to make it.

GrapheneOS, love it.

Waterfox on Mobile has been working well for me so far.

I’ve been using Graphene for several years and I love it. I could never go back now, Google android feels so incredibly bloated and invasive by comparison.

Double check your backups just to be safe, and then go for it. It’s not hard to revert if you hate it. There is a big of a learning curve, mainly just using the alternative app stores like Accresent, F-Droid, etc.

But once you spend a bit of time getting your apps installed and your system set up the way you like, you’ll love it.

Awesome to hear!

+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.

It’s my #1 “just works” distro

Why not both? 🤓

I am constantly impressed with the level of general idiocy of end users when it comes to stuff like this…

I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.

My current job has expensive enterprise class HP laptops, brand new, Nvme drives, the newest CPUs, 32GB RAM, blah blah.

Nearly every day, my corporate VPN app just shits the bed. The tray window that pops up to connect just goes black and never shows anything. I have to open task manager, end the process, wait 30 seconds for it to autostart to then authenticate.

My WSL instance constantly fails to start and I have to run a Powershell command to fix it. Programs won’t maximize won’t open when I try to switch to them until I do it 4-5 times.

Everything is slow and clunky even when I have almost nothing running.

Meanwhile my 8 year old low end Thinkpad with 8 GB of slow DDR4 RAM and a 2.5inch cheapo SSD runs fine with Linux Mint thrown on it and I frequently go 4-6 months between updates.

I mean, it’s intended to be an insult because the implication is that Reddit sucks.

I personally never understood the “Redditor” insults.

Reddit is just a forum directory with an infinite feed. You can find cringey weirdos but there’s also subreddits for potted plants, chess, home improvement, etc. which are pretty mundane and low drama.

I left Reddit for similar reasons, but I still use it sometimes for troubleshooting and advice in the IT/Programming space.

Haven’t had a Motorola in many years. Hopefully this works out well and we get a really nice piece of hardware that isn’t subject to the whims of Google.

Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.

Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.

Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.

How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?

The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.

This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.

All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.

Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).

But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.

And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.

It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.

Start with Linux Mint. It’s similar in vibe to older Windows, (think Windows 7/10)

You can use the GUI for everything, even major version upgrades, driver installations, and Kernel changes.

It comes with everything you need to get started, and their software portal is easy to use and get stuff from, including gaming staples like Steam, OBS Studio, etc.

Breaking News! Multiple forks discovered in kitchen, exclusive coverage tonight at 11:00!

Free Options:

• Go to your local library, borrow DVDs, Music CDs, and Audio books. Take them home a use one of the many free software options to rip the content onto your own computer.
• Stream recording. You can find all kinds of free streaming sites to watch movies and TV shows. You can use the ytdl command line tool to rip those movies and shows to your own computer, and I don’t think that will trigger your ISPs alarm bells, I might be wrong though. If that is too advanced or isn’t working, just go full goblin mode and start playing the media full screen, then use OBS or another free screen cap software to record your screen. Set it and forget it.
• Torrent raw and risk it from your own home. Depending on your country, this might not actually be a big deal.

Cheap Options:

• Mullvad is $6 per month. You can almost certainly afford that. But if you truly can’t, then if you’re in the US (idk about other countries) donating plasma can net you $30-$40 on the low end and $60-$80 on the high end. And assuming you’re reasonably healthy, you can donate once a week. Even just one session at the low end would net you 4-5 months of VPN access.
• Sell stuff on Ebay, Craigslist, etc. You probably have some old junk laying around. Old computer parts, clothes, random tools, etc. All you need to do is find something worth 6$ and bam, there’s a month of VPN.
• If you live in an area with multiple ISPs and you pay for your own internet, call the other ones and tell them what you’re currently paying for internet, ask them if they can beat it by at least $10 a month. They will almost always say yes, and they will often include free installation and equipment set up too. You’re now saving at least $10 a month on your internet and can afford a monthly VPN plan.

Thanks for the response. I’m doing great now. Got a new job as a sysadmin making about 35% more than my old job, and I get to work on Linux a bunch, and my team is really solid.

Still sucks that I lost all that work, but I was able to get some of the old hardware back for free, so my old servers can live again in my home lab.