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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • (Most) North Americans are the epitome of wasteful consumerism, even more than their economic kin in other global north countries (but sadly not by that much). They succumb like flies to company deals and propaganda that incentivizes throwing away functional stuff and replacing it with new shiny thing XYZ in ever decreasing intervals. Vance Packard’s 1960s book still being to the point. If environmental preservation is a concern to you or other reader, don’t incentivize an unnecessary tech and use your smartphone (that is a necessity) until it breaks beyond repair or usability (and buy an actually strong protection to increase the interval). I still use an iPhone 6S, and it works perfectly well for smartphone tasks (there is even functioning bank apps. security updates still appear once in a while, and bank apps are protected by the banks anyways. if you feel unsafe using banks in an old smartphone, create a 2nd bank as a ‘‘street bank’’ for daily tasks keeping only a low amount of money, and keep the money in a primary bank to be used via internet).

    Imagine if we could just flash a functional android ROM on it, that hardware still is great and could last decades (replacing pieces once in a while). Anyway, the mainstream tech industry is definitely an enemy of sustainability, don’t ‘buy’ the green-washing.



  • Console Gaming is a lot less worse than Nintendo, but if you (or someone else) wants to be ‘pure’, they are also not recommended. Consoles are locked-down PCs controlled by the companies, not you, and they abuse their captive consumers by charging multiplayer online, having less promotions (and getting worse with time at that, by eliminating the physical disks), demanding subscriptions with ever more grades and higher prices, tying games to a digital account they can revoke, and not letting the users use the hardware as they see fit in general. PC gaming avoids most or all these issues, with steam excelling in everything (sans the digital license tied to the account, but even that is mitigated because their DRM is weak, and games frequently are found on the high seas if needed), and GoG (and itch.io, etc) respecting completely its customers (offline instalers, completely at your control).


  • In case of zombie apocalypse, your best friends will probably be a bicycle (to get away from the zombies in almost any terrain and road condition, not be without industrial fuel the next day, and be able to do needed repairs with rough tools and scraps that can be found), a hunting knife, and maybe a crossbow if you can find one (weapons that can be sharpened and reused, and crossbow allowing random joes to just make piercing sticks (again with scraps that can be found anywhere) that work like an arrow, again weapons that do not depend on industrial infrastructure that will not be available anymore). Games that need electricity would be extremely hard to use, it’s better to buy card decks that have multiple rule sets for different games to play, like french decks and tarot, maybe a tabletop set that also has multiple games.



  • It’s mostly an aesthetic choice, a choice between desktop environments.

    Desktop environment (DE) is just the visual bells and whistles that you use to navigate the PC, like that quick animation when you minimize or maximize a program (Apple loves this), a start menu that has cute icons for each program and turns blue when you pass the mouse over it (or a start menu that is just a raw list of program names), etc.

    Mint Cinnamon uses a DE that looks like Windows 7 reborn, Mint XFCE uses a DE that looks like Windows XP reborn, and Mint MATE uses a DE that looks like Windows Vista reborn.

    People will tell you that these DEs will have a slight difference in consumption of RAM, where the most ‘shiny’ DEs will consume more RAM (XFCE<MATE<Cinnamon) by virtue of having more bells and whistles and some different programs that execute the same function, but the difference is irrelevant in practice (unless you are using a 2gb or less PC, where each 50mb of RAM counts). So it’s mostly what you fancy to look at. I just like the old-school visual of XFCE.


  • You are still a beginner, and in that case almost everyone rightfully says to go to regular Mint only, instead of LMDE or any other distro. A beginner will not know how to evaluate the situation in case of troubles or follow any complex instruction (like anything involving the terminal that is not completely copy-paste). Mint is fully click-click-install now, something that no other distro has equaled. Linux Mint, regular edition, is widely compatible with all sorts of hardware, that in other distros give black screens or esoteric deep s**t at install or later, which is a show stopper for beginners just making the transition.

    I myself am not a beginner anymore, and every other distro (save Mint) has failed me at some point. Debian, LMDE and Sparky Linux have not even booted in one notebook, Bazzite (Fedora) has after a few weeks given me a black screen in a desktop pc with Nvidia that i could not solve, and Arch - Endeavour OS - Manjaro have simply collapsed after a few months (probably by using AUR, which is supposed to be their main advantage, but i could not even discover the source of the problem, in each). Everything was restored in order after a blanck install of Linux Mint XFCE, which is the only distro i use now.