And the worst part is that us outside of California still see that crap.

Well, you have to dogfood it sometime…

Well, my laser printer jammed once in >10 years of ownership, and it’s because the paper was loaded weird. My parents’ inkjet jammed all the time as a kid, so much so that we ended up replacing it with another when my mom started working from home, and it still sometimes jammed.

Maybe things got way better since I was a kid, but inkjets always kinda sucked.

If you’re into photography, you’ll want professional prints. Send them off to a professional printer, and you can get pretty much any size you want.

Yup. If I need color, I print at tree library for <$0.10/sheet. If I need pictures, I order them.

But 99% of my printing is black and white. I’ve printed thousands of sheets, and I only recently replaced the starter toner, and I’ll probably throw out the printer to save space before I run out of toner again.

Oh, and I spent practically nothing on it. I think I paid $150 or so for the printer, another $50 or so on toner (maybe a little more), and maybe $50 on paper? I think I printed 3k pages (too lazy to check), and I should get 5000+ more without doing anything (maybe I’ll buy another case of paper?). As it stands, I’m already under the library print costs… Oh, and my printer scans and copies too, which was totally essential during COVID for my kids’ school.

Why are inkjets so popular? If you’re going to print with and frequency, get a laser printer.

So who is it for? This is everywhere. It’s in YT shorts, Instagram posts, etc. As a style, it’s getting pretty ubiquitous, and I don’t understand the reason for it. At best it’s annoying because if I look away for a split second, I’ll miss a couple words and it won’t make sense anymore.

Ok, but how is it helpful for the general population?

It’s really not.

Something something triage.

It also needs to be easy to pay for content. If you have to make an account and create a subscription, that’s a non-starter for many people. If you can just click a button in your browser, you’ll get a lot more engagement. If I pay, get rid of the ads and show me the article.

Yeah, people here can certainly be judgy. But I’m guessing that was quite a while ago, things have improved a lot since then.

And Bryce Canyon is gorgeous. We went there on our honeymoon because we only had a few days, and I’m excited to take my kids there in the near future. It’s pretty far away from the highway, so I’m glad you were able to visit. Most visitors tend to stick to Zion or Arches, but there are so many other pretty parks here, and they’re gorgeous year round (I think Bryce is extra pretty in the winter).

plus there’s drivers to consider

Is there an issue w/ drivers on unlicensed Windows? And yeah, you can reuse the key your computer has, this is assuming you can’t for whatever reason (i.e. laptop shipped w/o it).

I’ve never found the place to do it easily in the GUI in Mint

That would depend on which flavor of Mint you’re using. Keybindings are almost always in the GUI, though you can also do it through the CLI in many cases (e.g. GNOME-based DEs use gconf/dconf IIRC).

I haven’t used any of the Mint flavors, so I won’t be of much help. But surely someone in one of the Linux communities could help (or just search for “change keybindings Linux Mint” or something).

OpenTTD

Oh yeah, OpenTTD rocks. I haven’t played any of the others (other than messing w/ Minetest when it first launched), so I’ll have to check them out. :)

Most of my gaming is on Steam, and many (most? haven’t checked) of those don’t have DRM, since I mostly play indies and older games because I think newer games tend to suck.

We need to pay for the more expensive software because of our tax situation

That’s too bad. It’s still worth a look IMO, online tax software has come a long way. Unless, however, you’re doing something fancy with businesses and whatnot, but at that point I’d just hire an accountant. Anyway, at 80, it’s probably not worth making huge changes, though I’d strongly recommend putting some checks in place so granny doesn’t easily get scammed (and I’m guessing you already do).

Anyway, I’m always happy to see someone trying out and enjoying Linux. I’ve been here for >15 years, so I’ve kind of lost touch with what people on Windows use these days. I do remember the transition being a little rocky, but after a year or so, I ditched all of the Windows crap and found solution to everything I need.

Lol, I’m leaving it. I guess it makes sense for me to be their property, it definitely feels that way most days.

Yup. Still have a BAC limit of 0.05, but hey, we’re at least out of the stone age.

I don’t drink, so it doesn’t bother me, but I have plenty of coworkers who were happy for the change. Next step, allow wine to be sold in grocery stores so you can buy holiday drinks on holidays…

I installed GrapheneOS the moment I got my phone, which should give me a few protections over standard Android.

Longer term, I intend to get a Linux phone, I’m just waiting for the hardware and software to improve. I already almost entirely avoid the Play store, so making the final switch shouldn’t be that big of a jump.

If you’ve been around tech circles for any length of time, sure, but your average person probably hasn’t heard of it.

I bought a computer and wanted to install a clean OS on it (it came with Ubuntu, which I loathe visually and general UX-wise…). I had a choice: go through the effort on my other machine of pirating Win10, or just install Linux

Yeah, I dislike Ubuntu as well, which is why I recommend Mint. Most of the community support for Ubuntu is directly relevant, but you don’t have to deal with any of the nonsense that comes by default (UI/UX, snaps, etc).

That said, you can also just install Windows, no need to pirate it. Yeah, you’ll get the watermark and can’t switch the desktop background as easily, but other than that, it’s perfectly functional. That’s what I use for my dual-boot because I use Windows maybe once/year, if that.

My point here is that Linux and Windows are fundamentally different. If you want Windows, but want to avoid something specific about it (cost, ads, etc), Linux isn’t going to be a great transition an comes with a bunch of caveats, and no amount of lipstick is going to hide that. If you’re switching away from Windows, surely you’re also okay with it looking a bit different too, no?

Alt+F2 rather than Win+R

Key bindings can be changed.

Notepad++

Recommendations:

• Visual Studio Code - closer to an IDE than a simple text editor, but it’s pretty good in general
• Kate - esp if you’re using KDE (Alt+F2 is the key combo there, but maybe it’s the same on Cinnamon and other default Mint DEs)

Some things don’t have a direct replacement, but generally speaking, there’s usually a few analogues for anything you’d use on Windows. For example, for games, you have:

• Steam - most games w/o anti-cheat work, and some with anti-cheat work, if the devs enable it
• Heroic - for GOG, EGS, and Prime games
• a bunch of FOSS games - 0 AD and Battle for Wesnoth are my favorites

her tax software is Windows-only and does not work correctly in Wine

Consider teaching her to use one of the online tax software solutions (e.g. in the US, FreeTaxUSA is free and easy). Yes, it’s different, but it’s also pretty easy, even for someone who is older. I use FreeTaxUSA (assuming you’re in the US; if not, look for an alternative), and it feels just like TurboTax, but without all of the upcharge nonsense. If that’s truly the only roadblock and she ends up liking the online version, then you’re golden (I recommend helping her create an account, but let her do everything else)!

Best case scenario, she saves a few bucks and is that much closer to switching to Linux. Worst case scenario, she goes back to what she’s used to, no harm done.

You can have familiarity without direct replication. KDE Plasma uses a lot of the same design metaphors as Windows, yet it’s distinct, both visually and functionally.

Linux will never work exactly like Windows, and I think it’s important to highlight that with the design. For example, instead of replicating the Microsoft Store and Windows Update split, it combines them in the Discover app, because system and user software is combined in Linux. It’s pretty intuitive, but different.

Familiarity is fine, but the more you try to make one thing look like another, the more jarring the differences become.

Yup. Fortunately, I’ve been away from HN long enough that I didn’t immediately avoid the article, and I’m glad I didn’t.

And that’s one thing I like about the projects I work on. Nothing I’ve built has been directly responsible for profit, it has just supported other profit centers.

My current project helps us sell our main physical product by making the supporting software easier to use vs competitors. Yeah, the features highlight the benefits of our product vs competition, but the user is free to use any competitor they want, and we even have an open-ish API so they can make their own interface. We charge for it, but it’s far from turning a profit since the main point is to be something our sales team can bundle with the main product.

We build software for reports, simulation, design, etc, and the entire goal is to be useful, not extract profit. We charge for computationally heavy features, but that’s more to prevent abuse (i.e. keep costs reasonable) than anything.

My company also has direct competition and who has decided to go with the lockin approach, and customers seem to appreciate us as an alternative. The business itself isn’t particularly ethical, but it’s necessary, so it helps me sleep at night.

That said, our end goal is to replace good (but dangerous) jobs with automation. and that will be complete once we plug the leaks in our abstractions, and that’s a little sad. So it goes I guess.