Libb

I am not a US-citizen nor am I a woman (if I was, I would probably be a little too old to need that kind of help) but, very naively I'll admit it, this is really not the kind of guide I would have imagined would become so urgently needed.

It seems a very well made guide, with a lot of very useful suggestions.

Which makes me feel even more sad to realize this is indeed useful and very much needed.

like for example, one time i was browsing through some neofetch screenshots and i found out that a lot of them have anime or furry stuff as their wallpaper or profile picture, but they use linux.

younger me would’ve freaked out by the idea of having proprietary files, but i still enjoy linux. what do you think?? please

What should they use in order to not freak younger you? A screenshot of some lines from the kernel source code? A picture of Stallman and Torvalds tenderly embracing (quite unlikely)?

On my Debian and Mint computers, I have countryside pictures (I live in Paris, I miss seeing some real country landscape, mind you) and paintings (oil and watercolors, all works I admire) and some illustrations (comics, manga, whatever I appreciate enough to be wanting to look at it from time to time).

Sorry for younger you but I don't have a single image related to Linux nor to GNU philosophy, no matter how much I appreciate them.

freaked out by the idea of having proprietary files

I would suggest you read a little more about what the four essential freedoms are and how they relate to code and the user rights, not so much to do with art and wallpaper choice.

I understand. Maybe two things to consider:

• It will depends how you installed your apps, but I have file containing a fe useful instruction in case I need to reinstall my system, one of them is just a 'sudo apt install followed by the name of every single app I want to use'. I only need to copy and paste in a next terminal window to gat all my apps installed. All except the few that I don't install using apt, say the few appimages I also use. For me it means three more apps, so it's no big deal to download them by hand ;)
• Most user settings and configuration should be stored somewhere in you home folder (for example, I know there many settings stored in the .config folders, others (related to the system and the DE you're using maybe stored somewhere in .local, all my custom fonts are stored in ./fonts, and so on. I'm sorry, I'm no expert so I'm not very precise). All of that to say: by baking up your home, you probably also are backing up a lot of your configuration and tweaks.

I have no idea how those settings are portable between two completely different distros, but I have once reinstalled my system and got most of my settings instantly back just by copying my home folder over to that fresh install. That plus the single line 'sudo apt list-of-all-my-apps' I was almost completely operational in mere minutes, including all my customer menus, panels, text size, themes,... The one thing I remember not working from that backup was my SSH keys. No idea why.

I wonder whether all species or even just one actually have a (shared) purpose? As humans couldn’t we all just try to find our own?

Not sure to understand what you mean here? Would you care to develop?

In a way we are just a very complex system

We are.

Life is very good at persevering but does that make it our purpose?

If I were to define them, I would separate life (as the yet-to-be-understood 'force' that make some things being alive), species (all the various kind of living things, arbitrary grouped and separated in categories by science), and the individuals (be it that plant on my desk, you, or I). I don’t think they all need to have a purpose, nor that this purpose is the same.

To me, life has no purpose beside maybe being what it is. Like fire has no purpose, it simply burns and converts some types of maters into light and energy (heat). At the very least, I cannot imagine life as a 'conscious' being wanting something. It just is a state of thing/fact (being alive) that science still can’t explain or reproduce.

Species on the other hand they all share a same purpose, which is to thrive as a whole (grow in numbers, but not too much in order not to endanger the very space they need to live in). At least that's how I see it.

And then there are individuals. They may or may not have whatever purpose they fancy within a somewhat restrictive 'species limitation’.

I mean, as a butterfly I would not be able to live more than a few days no would I be able to mate with a whale, no matter how badly I would want it. And we, as humans, we may have managed to push our species limits way beyond what they were (we can fly, dive underwater, even go into space, we can also live much longer and if we still can't mate with any other non-human species we do have learned to manipulate their genome, who knows where that could lead us?) but all of that is still very fragile and very limited (flying is a thing as long as we have access to enough energy and knowledge, we live longer but we all still have to die no matter what we try). So, within those boundaries set by what our species is, I would say we're more or less free as individuals to be what we want to be. We’re less so in certain countries than others, and in certain times.

On the other hand, I have no idea what the idea of the individual could evoke in a bee's mind? Or 'personal desire'?

For me it would be to be a net positive to society in certain ways (that I’m not sure how to put into words and the bits I know how to could get long) before departing.

Imho, that is a very nice objective to pursue. No matter how you would manage to achieve that goal.

What else?

My only advice would be these two:

1. Don't be afraid or ashamed to start and to not finish a book. It's fine and it's legit. There is no moral obligation on your part as a reader to finish a book you don't enjoy. Just close it and try another one.
2. Don't be afraid to reopen a book you did not like before. We all change. So do our preferences. It's not guaranteed (decades later, and after many repeated attempts, I still do not enjoy reading Marcel Proust) but some of your taste will indeed change with time. A few of the books I cherish today (in my 50s) were among the 'wtf is that thing?' the first time I tried to read them decades ago. Like, really.

What are your reading habits like?

• I read at every single opportunity I have. I never waste my time scrolling on my phone or watching TV (we don't have a TV set). For me, doom scrolling is not even a temptation as I always have a (much more interesting) book with me. And when I don't read and still don't want to 'waste' my time looking at my phone, I will sketch in my pocket notebook instead. No matter where I am.
• I read at any time of the day/evening/night. I have no fix work-schedule (I'm my own boss).
• There are books waiting for me to grab them everywhere at our place. I mean not neatly stored in a bookshelf but lying in places where I will see them (my spouse is OK with that). I just checked, there are four books (one essay, one novel, a children book and a how-to guide) just here on my desk. Plus two dictionaries. And my personal diary which is another book I regularly re-read.
• I always have more than one book started at the same time. So I can change book if I don't feel like reading one in particular.
• When I don't want to read, I don't read. That's not a job. I very much like going out for long walks too and those will often take precedence over reading (but I will have a pocket book and a sketchbook with me, just in case).
• I recently quit reading ebooks almost completely to read printed books (want to know why? check the link to my blog in my profile, there are three posts talking about that choice).
• I always take notes while reading, no matter the type of book. I carry a bunch of A6 index cards within each book and a ballpoint pen. Cards on which i write the page number and a short note/comment/quote. I keep all those notes organized in a box which later helps me easily and quickly go through all what I read to find whatever I am looking for and also often find new ideas while doing so (wanna know more about that card thing? Search what is a Zettelkasten, aka a fancy German word to describe a box with a large stack of somewhat organized but not too organized index cards in it, it's like a second brain, just better).

What do you like to read?

Essays, poetry, novels, phylosophy, history, short stories, sociology,... Younger, I used to read a lot of plays (Racine, Shakespeare, Godot,...). I read in French and in English (starting to read in Spanish too, but I still have a lot to learn). I love all eras, from antiquity to very contemporary works. I like reading children books a lot too, even though I'm 50+ and my spouse and I have no children. Some of those books are pure masterpieces, text as well as illustrations.

The thing that may help you get into reading more (beside not forcing yourself to finish one in particular) is to try to widen your horizon by trying stuff you would not normally read.

Say you like fantasy, ok, try horror instead. Or scifi. Or historical romance. Or essays. And so on. Just keep in mind you're trying it, don't force it if you don't like it. To save money, use your public library: it's probably free ;)

What kind of stage of life are you in, and how does that affect it?

Not sure to understand the question.

50+ I now need glasses to read. Beside that... I still try to read widely and to never let anyone's expectations about what some dude like me (my age, my genre, race, social situation, whatever) is supposed to be reading and enjoying.

Have you made any changes, positive or negative, to your reading habits?

Positive: like I said, recently I quit reading ebooks and went back to good old paper. Zero regret, quite the contrary: I'm more tranquil. Once again, feel free to check my little (and seldom updated) blog if you're curious to know more about that ;)

Negative: I sometimes read less, out of sheer laziness. I always regret it.

I am going to disagree with one item. You say you don’t have a tv. The screen you use to display the image is effectively a tv. So in essence you still have one. You just don’t have cable tv or an aerial antenna. You even use the streaming services from time to time.

Well, technically it is not a tv since it has not the thingy (whatever the technical term is) that makes any TV able to receive a signal and transcode into a meaningful image all by itself. The thing that makes it so you just plug the TV to a cable or an antenna and get some content. Our screen needs to be plugged into a computer to do the work of creating the image the screen is displaying. Here in France, every household is required to pay a tax on the TV sets they own, for many decades, computer screens were not concerned by the tax because they could not do that stuff a TV does, so they were not considered TV.

But I understand what you mean. I was... misleading.

To make myself clearer maybe I should have said that we own screens (more than one, as we both work from home and own more than one computer each) but no TV set and have not owned one since the late 90s, and probably never will again. Edit: we watch stuff on screens, obviously, we just do not watch TV content.

re-edit: typos

Do you watch any streaming services or do you mean zero tv, no shows, nothing?

We do, from time to time. We will subscribe for a month to such or such streaming and watch the few content we're interested in. Most of the time, though, there isn't that many stuff we really want to watch. And if you're wondering, we watch content on simple computer screen (hooked to a Linux machine) that has nothing 'smart' in it — it just displays pixels.

Note that a few years ago, when they all started appearing, we were subscribed to quite a few services and that was fun, at the beginning. Alas, we quickly grew tired of always being fed the same kind of politically correct, highly sanitised, and very... formatted type of content. Like with books, my spouse and I both enjoy challenging content (which includes being confronted to things and thoughts we will deeply disagree with). Don't get me wrong, there are a few very high quality content that is streamed, just not enough to our taste for us to be willing to pay the always more expensive monthly fee they're asking for it.

That said, we own a large DVD collection, which we prefer to streaming because:

• We paid for them once, some 20+ years ago. No lifetime rent.
• In the same logic: nowadays used DVDs are dirt cheap and one could easily build their dream library for almost nothing.
• We're not tracked while watching them.
• We're free to watch whatever we want. It doesn't matter if it is trendy or not, if it's popular or not, if it's decades or a century old. We own it? We can watch it.
• Last but not least, there is no one that can come at our place to modify the DVDs we own. Be it to remove some content that would be considered unacceptable today (or tomorrow), to change or to add something in it, or even to delete the whole DVD. We paid for that plastic disc, we legally own it. Even if the almighty Sony, Warner, HBO, Universal or Whomever changed their mind and wanted to take it back, they can't. Unlike what we have already seen happening more than once with digital content being modified or deleted, or less dramatically but as efficiently as far as censoring goes 'not being available anymore'.

This is also why I quit reading ebooks almost completely, to read printed books again. I don't want anyone to be able to remotely edit or delete a book from my bookshelves (Hi Amazon, please go kindly sit your naked ass on some cactus), nor to feel entitled to look over my shoulder while I'm reading so they could 'data mine' my reading habits.

Wooops, sorry for this lengthy and 'ranty' reply. Hope you won't mind ;)

Wow. I hate that.

Well, it's not like Debian hides it in any way or form. Quite the contrary.

It’s positively terrible but it explains so much.

Depends what you're looking for in your distro. I love that stability and lack of updates outside of security issues.

And worst of all, I am in far too deep to switch distros at this point.

May I ask why you don't think you can change distro? It's just a matter of installing Linux (which takes a few minutes) and, if it's not done already, of backing up your personal files and settings (most of them probably in your home folder, already).

The rule is that apps are only updated for security reasons. Not because of new features.

So, new versions of apps may (or may not) be added to the next version of Debian.

Hi. I’ve been thinking about trying out Linux for a while now (haven’t used it before).

Welcome :)

I have 1 PC which I share with my son. I mainly use it to browse the web, listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, Office for work, etc.

Depending your 'MS Office ' expectations, you should have no issue using LibreOffice. 100% compatibility doesn't exist, though, but for most users it should work more than fine. For the most part, it is only a few advanced features and tools that are lacking, and some layout stuff. I write books under Linux as easily as I wrote them under, well, not a Windows PC in my case: it's a Mac.

I am not a gamer. So, for that I can't help much, but you have the ability to dual boot your PC and chose between Windows and Linux when it starts. Maybe that would let you use Linux while keeping a small Windows partition for your son games?

Here is one guide among many others (I have not used it myself, it's just an example there are plenty more): https://opensource.com/article/18/5/dual-boot-linux

FYI, you can try Linux directly from a live CD (or a USB stick) without even have to install it on the computer. It's really cool.

As for the distro I was considering Ubuntu.

You can use whatever distro you fancy, you can easily try a few different ones either by using the live CD/USB I mentioned, or by running them in a virtual machine — something I have never done myself as it's a bit too intimidating and techy to old-and-not-much-of-a-geek me :p

I use Debian (on my desktop) and Mint (on my laptop). Ubuntu is based on Debian, and Mint is based on... Ubuntu (from which it has removed stuff I'm not happy with in Ubuntu and added a few others I like). There is no good and bad distro, only those that you like and those that you... like less ;)

Edit: to a beginner, probably more than Ubuntu I would suggest Mint, at least if I can judge on my own personal experience: everything worked out of the box, including my stubborn Apple Airpods.

Even if parties have wildly different objectives or winning conditions, if they didn’t have to compete for the same resources then they could cooperate or at least ignore each other.

I think that ignoring each other is probably the most common thing happening. One can look at wild animals sharing the same living space without fighting (or not, depending if they're prey/predator to one another). Competition and fight happen when there is something disputed between them, bet it one serving as food to the other or some common resources. At least, as far as I understand it. It's not that different for us, human animals ;)

I didn’t downvote you,

I did not designated anyone in particular, I was just trying to encourage whoever downvoted to also express their motivation/reasoning. I'm more than willing to learn from my mistakes, but I can't learn shit without at the very least some form of an argument beside 'Nah, don't like u/what u said' (which is perfectly fine by me, just not very... interesting).

Maybe some folks thought it was a cop out answer,

Thx, I did not know that expression and had to check its meaning. I can confirm it wasn't a cop out, just the question that crossed my mind when I started reflecting on the OP question (a question I may have poorly understood, though, as English is not my first language).

No TV, no ads. Simple.

My spouse and I have not been forced to watch a TV-ad since the late 90S. Since the day we got rid of our TV once and for all, when we realized the were expecting us to pay good money to buy a TV set and then still have to watch their ads, and more and more of them? Not the best deal. So thx, but no. 25 years later, we still have to regret it once ;)