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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • About a year ago I somehow fucked up installing a new window manager on my tablet so badly I had to start from scratch - to this day I have no idea what happened there, but it just wouldn’t boot properly or anything after that 🤷 I needed it for school pretty quickly though so my top priority was getting it working again, so I set up a fresh install instead of continuing to fuck around.

    Not the same level of destruction, but I fucked up my first ever install a couple months in trying to resolve dependencies related to python and wine, which is why I’m more interested in sandboxing whenever feasible these days. After only two months I guess I had been fucking around with linux long enough to have a little too much unearned confidence, lol




  • My vote is for mint. If you’ve been a long time windows user it should be the easiest one to get used to. PopOS is also newbie friendly if you’re not into the feel of Mint for whatever reason.

    My biggest recommendation though is to spend some time with a few different OS’s and try setting things up different ways. Like if you start with Mint, try something new a month or two later. It’s a good way to get used to the way linux OS’s work under the hood.

    I’m not a programmer at all, but if you have some background with computers and are willing to sink some time into learning and setting up a new system you’ll be fine.


  • I tested it out bc I thought I’d need it to get teams running for school, but it turns out we’re only using teams’ video calls so Vivaldi works too. Edge is fine I guess? I dislike that it’s chromium and I dislike microsoft but it’s good to know edge works fine, in case I need it for some reason at some point. I still uninstalled it when I realized I didn’t need it.

    Normally, I use firefox for normal personal browsing and vivaldi for school (since some sites we use work much better on chromum, and it’s nice to have that separation anyways).



  • Try a few distros before settling down - setting things up a few times is a good way to get to know the ins and outs better. Try something other than plain Ubuntu - I really enjoyed Mint and PopOS personally, both of which are forks of Ubuntu. In my first 6 months I tried around 4-5 different Ubuntu family distros, and that was such an important learning experience for me.

    If you want to use wine, get bottles instead of running plain wine. The dependencies are much easier to manage, and you can run separate configurations of wine. As I know from personal experience, the sandboxing also helps prevent you fucking your computer up.

    On that note, backup your stuff - set it to do it automatically daily.

    Look up some terminal games - there are a few that are designed to help you learn. I don’t remember the names (I’m down to track them down later if that would help), but in particular I remember an SSH-based file searching game and a folder exploration dungeon crawler themed game.

    Learning commands is less useful than understanding how Linux is setup, but it’ll all come together with time - just keep playing around with it and learning new things.


  • I’m in kind of the same boat as you op, I’ve been using Swiftkey for 5+ years but have been wanting an altnernative that isn’t associated with the big tech companies for a while. After seeing this post earlier today I decided to give AnySoftKeyboard a shot.

    I got it all configured the way I wanted but now I’m actually using it I don’t think it’s gonna work for me tbh. I’ll give it a few days before making a decision though. I wish there more options out there.

    On the plus side, I came across this and it made my day:


  • I switched to linux before the steam deck came out, and things were already pretty good then, but it’s even better now that more folks are invested in it. Since then, I haven’t come across any steam games I have major issues with - however, I still have issues getting my controller running (I don’t use it often though, so I haven’t really looked into that much) and on certain games I have issues if I switch windows while it’s running. Generally for me, if it runs, it runs well, aside from occasional issues from needing more ram. It looks like we have similar cpu’s, and you have a better graphics card and more ram than me. I can’t speak for everything on your list, but I did play some civ fairly recently without any problems. Check protondb for the games you play most before making the switch - and if you’re worried, check lower rated games on there for examples of issues and fixes. I suspect it would be fine for you to switch.


  • I also use VPN all the time for privacy - if I wasn’t pirating I’d still have it. I’ve also used it at times to access region locked content.

    I personally only pirate things I feel are more “moral” to pirate, or if I don’t have a choice - I never pirate any kind of indie content, for instance, but I do pirate movies and tv shows put out by large corporations. In undergrad I pirated almost all of my textbooks because the markups are unethical. I’m not against paying for things, I just want to boycott some specific companies, plus I’m often too broke to afford things or sometimes need a downloaded copy specifically for offline access. When I was working full time I did actually pirate fewer things - only things from the companies I boycott or things I can’t access legally where I live - and I will return to that once I finish grad school.




  • Something I liked about the official app, that no other seemed to have, was the ability to flip through posts, one to the next, without having to return to your feed. If anyone knows of a Lemmy app that can do this, let me know please!

    The official reddit app would frequently not load images/posts/comments etc or even sometimes fully stop loading anything at all. I have never had these kind of issues with the third party apps, or much of any other apps of any type for that matter.