You’re right on all points, except that Space Babies is hilarious perfection.

C: Cheddar?

O: No. We don’t get much call for it.

C: But it’s the single most popular cheese in the world!

O: Not around here, sir.

Where do you get once every 2 years? Do you never reboot your machine?

I’m hearing you like to reboot your machine unusually often.

The reason I can think of where clicking would be a huge pain in the ass is an automatic task. I have some of those, but I put them on machines that I treat as servers, and the time between reboots is genuinely counted in years, for those machines.

At this point you must be missing the point on purpose.

I wasn’t before, but now I am.

I find your argument distasteful. If you want a server, use a server. But there’s no need to shout to the world that servers require command line use. That’s normal in 2025.

If you treat your laptop like a server, that’s okay. No one is judging. But my grandma isn’t doing that, and it rings hollow to complain so loudly about it in a thread about average users enjoying Linux Mint.

An average user will never even notice the issue you have been complaining about, while enjoying the product for free.

I don’t normally tell people to go open a pull request, but you should do so, if only to get a better understanding of what the community has already given you for free.

Yes. I guess that’s fair though. Most people don’t like change.

So you’re complaining that you have to click on it - once every two years - when you reboot…

That’s rough, buddy.

I joke. But also, I guess if you feel that strongly about wasting my a click, Linux is definitely the OS for you.

In contrast, I set my nephew up with Linux Mint, and he is now slowly converting the rest of his family to open source solutions.

My understanding is that they keep having conversations about privacy news, and he keeps knowing a solution, which sometimes is Android or Linux based. So now his parents will ask me “Is it true the XY protects against YZ and is free?”

It’s been a pretty cool thing to watch.

I find Garyjay helps with this, by mingling videos from other services.

Sometimes by the time I’ve tried one of the first videos to load from other services, the PeerTube results have loaded for me.

Yes.

At this rate, we will be having a “local files are hard for the average user” debate, here, in another decade.

Which, maybe it will be, at that point.

It’s for people who aren’t tech literate.

My experience installing Linux for tech illiterate parents and grandparents was lovely.

They never noticed they’re not on Windows. They just wanted their two desktop icons - web and email.

Edit: Funny related story - they (grandparents) always rebooted with the power button after Linux told them it had updated - which was almost never necessary. I always just told them “good job”, when they mentioned it, though.

when they run into HW issues they post on fourms and reddit like its personal tech support

For folks reading along, we absolutely are your personal tech support. Most of us owe way more than that to our mentors, and can never pay our mentors back, we can only pay it forward to folks like you.

Ask away!

It’s often the ones we most suspected.

a picture of Reagan with quotes of how Russia is the enemy, and tariffs are bad for everybody.

That’s particularly good.

and to my surprise everything seems good! (knock on wood)

After a few aborted attempts to switch to Linux, over the years, that has been exactly the vibe of my latest journey.

“So this all just works now?” has been my repeated surprised thought.

Standard disclaimer: I don’t have any hardware by Nvidia. Not by choice, I was just feeling broke when Nvidia got hot.

Couldn’t you also make a throwaway ms account?

I could, but them I’m up a creek later if I need to use any recovery functionality, as it all ties back to that MS cloud account.

It’s certainly possible to get working, disable all of the cloud saves and telemetry, and then just save the MS account in a password vault for later.

But all of that is much more work than clicking “next” a few times in the Linux Mint installer. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1993 called and wants the inferior FOSS software you last tried back. Haha.

I find that Linux apps for basic stuff are now well ahead of their Windows counterparts.

It’s getting hard to find quality free software that is Windows native, and not just a recompile of a Mac or Linux tool.

I’m happy to pay for software too, but the paid stuff has all been shit, for awhile, in my weird experiences. (Weird, in that I’m not doing music or video editing or non-developer power user stuff. I’ve heard mileage may vary with those.)

Haha!

But…yeah. This is how I make friends in real life, though.

Edit: Now I am checking timestamps to see if my needlessly using the word “cromulent” in another thread comment might have helped inspire this delight…

Edit 2: Just a coincidence. And evidence that I live this meme, too.

It feels like everything is vibe coded, now.

I need to start a vintage software hobby.

Ensign is a perfectly cromulent rank to achieve during a Starfleet career.

I find that con artists don’t like to communicate slowly. It makes them uncomfortable.

Asking the real critical question.

Pre-beard, I only give them one episode.