There was no more viable candidate out there in the wings. Dems lost this race before it even started, we just didn’t know it yet, because the vote is decided by how folks in swing states feel about the sitting President’s economic performance—a performance, by the way, which was stellar when compared to other countries. Everything besides the economy is theater.

I wholeheartedly agree with you about one thing, though. Vote for change in local elections. Not necessarily other parties, but the most progressive candidates within the Democratic Party. Change the organization from the bottom up. Reshape it into a more progressive institution.

I did that for years with nothing to show for it. No one ever (metaphorically) came knocking on my door asking how they could win my vote away from a third party. None of the candidates I voted for even came close, except Ross Perot and if he couldn’t do it, I guarantee no one else can. That dude’s whiteboard presentations were watched by 16.5 million people in an age where there were three channels and everyone watched TV. You can’t replicate his success today and he only got 20%

You want to change things, you have to change a major party from within, and that’s the effort of a lifetime, not an election cycle.

AOC loses key vote in House Oversight race to Gerry Connolly

Well anyway, I hope you enjoy Mint despite the rough start. The second partition has proven useful when I tried a different distribution a couple of times. I didn’t lose my local notebooks or ssh keys that I use for development. I’ve repaired my system a couple of times after a hard lock, but if I couldn’t I like knowing I could reinstall to repair it and not lose anything that’s a pain in the butt to deal with.

Hopefully the reinstall worked out better. When I said everything gets installed to home I didn’t mean literally everything. System level stuff gets installed at root. Personal stuff gets installed on home. Like Steam gets installed on root, Steam games get installed on home.

So you do need enough storage on root for all the system level stuff you might want to do. But the vast majority of your space will be taken up by user-level stuff.

It’s worth noting that you can resize partitions without starting over. You can reduce one partition to move the space to unallocated, then assign the unallocated space to the other partition.

Wow… I spend exactly zero thought on Reddit. Someone is big mad, and I give no shits.

The Linux system and applications get installed to root. /home is for user applications, documents, etc. everything that would be account-based on windows.

Depending on the size of your drive I might allocate 50gb or more to root. I have 250gb allocated and 46.65 are used. Everything else can go to /home.

Mine looks like this.

During Mint setup, it was surprisingly easy. Spent more time researching file systems. One GUI tool. Configured a swap, EFI, /, and /home. Very easy. I don’t know about other distros.

People partition windows systems all the time. It’s not hard.

We 100% don’t agree on everything, and I don’t know how unified we can be given the number of diverse interests under the umbrella. Feminists don’t have any natural overlap with folks who want to eliminate cars or with atheists. The only unifying goal that makes proponents allies is opposing conservatives.

You’ve got black folks who are going to live their entire lives oppressed by systemic racism being told to just go along with getting rights excruciatingly slowly and trust their grandkids will have it great.

I’m afraid as much sense as your point makes, it isn’t realistic.

Lemmy is definitely not that. It’s an echo chamber like any other. Ideas that mollify or agree with the zeitgeist are promoted regardless of merit.

My understanding from following the issue is they are just going to be removed from app stores. Desktop use isn’t much and an ISP block would be thwarted by a VPN which are cheap and ubiquitous.

That said, take my words with a grain of salt. I’m not a primary source.

One bit of advice I will give you because I haven’t seen anyone else offer it: partition your drive and look up how to install your /home to a separate partition from root.

Give the /home partition most of the space because that’s where everything goes. By doing this, you can completely wipe your system drive and reinstall even a different distribution and’s basically lose nothing. Just in case everything really goes to hell and you can’t repair it without a reinstall.

This was quite easy to do with Mint, but I did need to follow directions as you have to deviate from just following defaults for everything.

Also, I know people love to hate on AI here, but ChatGPT has proven invaluable to me in troubleshooting any issues.

It’s not always right, but it’s far more responsive than forums and often does have good advice as long as it’s a simple problem (and as a newbie user, most of their problems will be simple).

Examples of things it has guided me to fix:

• boot drops me into a grub prompt instead of starting the OS
• I enter my password on the lock screen and it thinks for a moment and then drops me back at the password prompt.

Not sure how long it would’ve taken on forums and documentation, or how much worse I’d have screwed up my system, but I fixed both of those in about 30 minutes without a lot of pertinent technical knowledge.

Inability to reinstall when a phone is broken or replaced will send it on a slow death spiral if all they do is remove it from the stores. Or in Android’s case I guess this could drive users into adopting other app stores.

I think they will literally delete the app from our phones if they have that capability.

TikTok users aren’t going to Bluesky, they’ll go to IG. Perhaps Reels, but I doubt it

X is loosing users to Bluesky, but much more slowly than right after the election. Engagement is much higher per follower there and everyone I’ve seen has been happy to move but I also think it’s about a critical mass of big accounts moving over and bringing their followers. A lot of left wing journalists are there. A lot of news has broken there before X, but I actually learned about Mangione’s arrest here on Lemmy first.

I think Bluesky has potential, I joined after the election when it was gaining attention (deleted my Twitter account long ago) and it was around 18M users. It gained another 3 million rapid fire, but now I think it just hit 24 or 25M. So the X-odus could use another kick in the pants.

I don’t necessarily like huge social networks, but I’m voting for it to kill X.

I think there are a lot of progressives, but I think not enough of them live in swing states. I’m one, and I know there are some around in the college crowd. When Michigan went blue trifecta in 2022, I thought the pendulum was swinging, but now it looks like I was wrong.

This guy might be an asshole, but I’m not certain that he’s wrong.

Not that ever found. Ye Olde Power Button. And it does on rare occasion bork something.

I highly recommend keeping /home on a separate partition from / so that if worse comes to worst, you can reinstall the system and lose pretty much nothing. Most of the time it’s no problem. But sometimes it is.

He’s a techno libertarian, but doesn’t easily fit on the left-right axis. I suspect this will be what happens as leopards eat faces.

This is our interns last week as a dev intern for a big car maker. Bright kid. Had good ideas and in a private candid conversations he had identified many of the same problems with our team (I’m new, too).

I didn’t ask salary, but I’m sure he is getting paid, and I’m sure he has a bright future once he speaks up a bit more and takes more initiative (as an intern, it’s no surprise he was there to listen and learn, not act like the expert).

That’s just my long way of saying lots of big companies have IT interns, not just IT companies.