Uneducated.

That’s the word you’re looking for.

Stupid if you don’t want to be nice about it.

Ah, good to know!

Yup - I was thinking the fast train, which isn’t fast at all compared to the rest of the world. I think that one is only once or twice a day - could be wrong though. Price aside, it’s not a terrible experience.

I’d rather dig my eyes out with a dull spoon than take the others. Snail’s pace and stops every 5 min.

San Francisco has a pretty good bus/trolley system. There might be other cities with decent busses but I’m unaware of them.

Some major cities like New York, Boston, Philly, Chicago have acceptable subways, and commuter rails. You can probably get a daily train from one city to the next. Example: you can take a train from Boston to NY once a day - it’s fairly ok, and probably preferable than driving for most people.

Most cities have busses that suck, and literally zero trains and subways.

Most Europeans don’t realize how big the US is, and how much of it is quite rural. It doesn’t make sense to build a rail to service the few dozen families in east bumfuck nowhere.

Getting a license to drive is, generally speaking, pretty easy from most states. Usually just a written test and a road test where you just have to drive around the block without breaking any rules.

Some city dwellers survive without cars, but they are kind of stuck in the city. When they want to get out, they’ll rent a car for the day.

Same I run the flatpak app on fedora workstation 42 with zero issues.

Has that ever happened across drives? Without user error?

Every Linux distro I’ve ever used has been pretty damn specific about where it installs boot, and respectful of all other drives and boot loaders.

I’ll concede defeat, but I find your claim hard to believe.

Lots of good advice here. I’ll add a bit about dual booting.

1. the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesn’t play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you can’t f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)

2. dual booting is nice just in case something doesn’t work - you can easily switch back to windows.

3. dual booting sucks because there’s very few things that don’t work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.

My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. It’s YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your “main” OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand what’s YOUR computer vs what is Microsoft’s OS.

Same - I can reach all parts. If I couldn’t, I’d grab a something on a stick.

Third for fedora. IMO the new “it just works” distro in place of Ubuntu - but a little more current than Debian.

We used to be cool.

Seconded on Monty Python - he should feel terrible about that travesty.

Also a shower per day minimum for everyone is necessary and that’s the hill I’m dying on. Clean your stinky arse up.

I failed a class in college. It was impossible to make the credits up due to scheduling conflicts/the tight nature of my curriculum’s scheduling. I had to miss my graduation in the spring, and go back to school in the fall for one semester for one class.

I am now a C-suite executive at a mid sized engineering firm.

Don’t worry about it at all. Take the extra time to breathe, get other things in your life in order, and hell-maybe just have a little fun too. You’ll be fine.

Its main purpose is to prevent malware from booting. In my experience its main purpose seems to be preventing me from booting things I want like ventoy flash drives, nvidia drivers, and Linux distros that don’t support it. Same goes for tpm module. Its main purpose seemed to be the switch keeping win 10 from upgrading. I turned them both off and haven’t felt the strong need to turn them back on yet.

That said, and my bad computing habits aside, you probably should turn them ON. I’m not sure they will do all that much realistically speaking, but if it isn’t getting in your way (and it shouldn’t), then ON isn’t a bad default state to be in.

It used to be a pain. Multiple versions that didn’t all work. Today it’s pretty painless. A lot of installers will actually do it for you now.

In arch (at least the last time I did it), it was just a matter of picking the right package and installing it with pacman

EndeavorOS’s installer will do it for you

I use Fedora these days. It didn’t do it automatically the last time I loaded from scratch (not an upgrade), but the rpm fusion team/repository made it simple. I just followed the crystal clear instructions on their website.

I think mint does it automatically with the installer…

Honestly I really don’t even think about nvidia drivers anymore.

Hard

94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.

But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.

My appendix came damn close to killing me. I vote “not valuable”. :)

It was a good childhood from an independence building, learning to explore standpoint. People my age around me are 1) very independent 2) confident 3) clever. It was also a hell of a lot of fun.

But dangerous. Like some guardrails could have been in place without really affecting anything. I also didn’t feel this way - I had good parents. But a lot of kids were pretty much just straight up abandoned on a daily basis. Lots of resentment towards their parents, it’s tough having a parent that literally didn’t give a shit about you. I unfortunately think a lot of kids fell into that category.

RI in the states.

Funny how things so far away can be so similar.

Man, what was it with pipe bombs? It was totally a thing to do. Everybody has a story about them. For anyone younger reading - no parent thought that was safe. But so many kids tried to make them…

A kid on my street blew his hand off doing that. For real, I don’t know the details. Me and a couple of other kids strolled up to his crew (they were older and generally got into more trouble than I did). They were out in the woods and he was cutting a galvanized pipe with a hacksaw. When I figured out what he was doing, I took off. I literally got picked on for that - for about a week. I could not have been a bigger pussy. Then he was in the hospital with no hand. Then I was ok to hang out with again - someone with brains - nobody screwed around with pipe bombs any more after that.

We didn’t have a lot of water near us - just some ponds. We did stupid shit, but 1) not considered safe and 2) generally not that bad in the big scheme of things. Kids drowned a lot in pools and ponds. The items above around water were changing. My mom wasn’t a fan, but my dad was all “you’re just moming him to death”. So I suppose those are half truths - mom didn’t think they were safe - but I was still allowed.

51 Born in 74. Dead smack in the middle of GenX. Parents had me when they were real young. To be fair, they are good parents. We were pretty poor, they got divorced and should have never married in the first place, and they do all the boomer things that drives everyone crazy. But, they cared about me and my sister, gave us more than they could afford and we deserved, and I think I had more love from them than most kids got.

But boy-when it came to making decisions about safety. Man, what was considered normal and ok just blows my mind. ;)

Gen x with boomer parents who barely parented, so…. Everything?

How’s this for a list? I swear every one of these is honest to god true and I did them all.

• jarts
• Being kicked out of the house for the entire day with zero supervision
• ice fishing / pond hockey. We decided if the ice was safe or not. Like 10 year old kids…
• being allowed to ride our bikes on literally any road except for highways
• riding bikes on the roads with no helmets
• being allowed to go literally anywhere we could get to on our bikes
• being given firecrackers
• carrying and using real guns on the farm at about 10+ years old unsupervised (22s and 410s - the 12 gauge unsupervised wasn’t until I was older - like 16ish)
• riding with no seat belts
• riding in the back of a pickup truck
• riding in the way back of a station wagon
• riding on the edge of a tailgate with our legs dangling over (we used to drag our sneakers on the road and make white lines by burning off the rubber soles)
• riding on the side edges of the bed of a pickup
• holding ladders and whatnot onto the roof & tailgate of a pickup (like not tied down - the kids held it down)
• working / playing all day in the summer sun with no suntan lotion
• making jumps and going off them with bicycles
• jumping over our friends with said bicycles and jumps
• riding three wheelers (they stopped making them because they were so dangerous)
• mean green machines
• candy cigarettes
• buying real cigarettes for our fathers from a vending machine
• drinking from the hose
• we we had “real” ninja stars and we hucked those things at everything
• we had real knives at very young ages - like maybe 5?
• I had a real slingshot early. Like 5ish. That thing could kill. Dangerous af.
• I always had a bow and could use it as soon as I could draw it. My friend was lucky enough to have a compound bow. Totally cool to walk around with bows and shoot shit.
• I learned to use a chainsaw around 10yr old
• drove tractors unsupervised at about 8 yr old
• drove tractors on the road
• learned to drive a real car (Datsun pickup truck - stick shift) at about 10. Unsupervised on the farm. Not allowed on the road. We used to drive it fast and do donuts and shit. Parents and grandparents didn’t care - we were just having some fun. “Be careful and don’t crash into trees” was all I ever got warned about.
• siphoned gas with a hose
• sprayed herbicides pesticides and fungicides as a teenager with no mask
• being allowed to camp outside in the woods for the night with friends
• being allowed to make campfires at said campouts (we cooked hotdogs and ate them)
• going to concerts with older brothers (anyone’s older brother) at young ages (basically once you started getting into music - 10ish?)
• carrying a house key with you since day 1 of kindergarten
• being a latchkey kid - I came home alone and took care of myself and my younger sister by about 3rd grade. Before that we got dropped off at grandmas house after school. If we had a problem we just called grandma on the phone.
• allowed to cook anything anytime since about 5
• it was a responsibility to light the wood stove and keep the fire going in the winter.
• mowed lawns unsupervised since a young age. 8ish maybe?
• used weed whackers about the same time
• had a dirt bike at 13ish. Allowed to go anywhere unsupervised
• totally cool to swim unsupervised or even alone once I learned how to swim
• totally cool to eat things that had fallen on the ground - the 5 second rule definitely applied
• it was ok to drink at home a little bit with friends as a teenager. Like a sleepover or out in the woods. Better than drinking and driving. Getting shitfaced wasn’t cool, but drinking some of dad’s beer / liquor was - as long as we didn’t drive. Party at a friends house? Gonna be booze? Ok if parents are around and nobody drives.
• when tromping around the neighborhood-I didn’t have to tell my parents where I was. They didn’t care. There were no cell phones either. If our parents wanted us they’d yell. If that didn’t work, they’d call neighbors and once they found out where we were last seen - that neighbor would yell.
• people had chicken pox parties (I never went to one but they happened - I think I got it from my sister)
• monkey bars - big ass ones at least 15 feet high. Hard packed dirt underneath. Totally could bust your head open or break your back if you fell off one. Wicked dangerous. Was actually scary to climb to the top but you bet your ass we all did it, otherwise you were a pussy and got picked on forever.
• huge Fn seesaws - like would go up in the air maybe 6 or seven feet
• those spin-y things in the playground-dunno what they were called. You know all the kids piled on, others grabbed the bars and spun the shit out of it. We all got dizzy and tried not to whack our heads falling off.

I dunno, that’s all just off the top of my head.