Being real, Linux without terminal is kinda impossible. That being said, assuming you test compatibility via a live disc/drive before installing, you shouldn’t need to use CLI often at all, and may never need to if you don’t want.

However, when trouble does happen, you need that kind of access. You do on Windows as well, so it isn’t like you’re escaping it if you jump ship.

Not having a terminal program would be mind-numbingly bad. Any situation that you would need to use it, installing it would be harder, and maybe impossible. So, just don’t open the damn thing if you don’t want to use it regularly. There’s a ton of gui options for almost everything these days. But you can’t escape command line entirely on any os.

Repos are essentially what makes the various distros what they are, to an extent. They’re curated software, and the address for whatever is maintained by the distro is already in there, and that’s how it knows. Someone put it in.

If you’re not comfy with CLI, you probably shouldn’t fuck around adding repos tbh. Again, that being said, you’d find where to do so under the software/updates menu in mint. You find the box, type the info in, give your password, and Bob’s your uncle. Thing is, that’s not a decrease in steps compared to using command line, it’s just different steps. The exact label to get there via gui may vary between distros, but it’s in the “start” menu somewhere.

Updates are just a matter of the software connecting to the repo, checking to see what’s new, then giving you the option to use them.

Legit, I totally understand the issue with using command line interfaces. My dyslexic ass hates trying to sort through the text. But it is a great tool. If anything every goes really wrong, you’ll be glad it’s sitting there ready.

One problem

Batteries.

I’ve used old devices as many things: security cameras, a form of intercom, digital picture frames, etc. The real problem is that the batteries eventually go bad, and become dangerous.

For the few devices that have realistically replaceable batteries, that’s no big deal, but how many of those are left now?

No thanks to the potential fire, I’ll pass. The few devices I have left that I can swap batteries out are becoming harder to find new batteries for as well, so that’s an issue beyond their anemic hardware (I’m talking really old tablets at this point)

I can’t wait to develop my natural immunity to polio! Or smallpox!

The flu, why, without the vaccine you can develop a natural immunity every year, twice a year if you really want to!

Legit dude, what the fuck do you think “natural” immunity is? It’s catching whatever it is, being sick, and surviving it. You specifically chose colds and the flu as examples, and they’re the worst possible examples because they mutate so fast you never actually achieve immunity to anything; the version you have resistance to might come around again, or it might not, but you damn sure will eventually run across a strain that your body isn’t equipped for.

Like, I get that vaccines are confusing to someone with little education, but this is the internet age, you can look up the terms you’re using and make sure you aren’t fucking up your entire point. Like, the time it took you to type the post up, you could have looked up what vaccines actually do, and why they are/were the single greatest achievement of the human species.

You can go and get a shot of something stable enough and never get sick from it, ever in some cases. In others, you might get sick but it’ll be a few bad days instead of a week or more of misery (as is sometimes how the flu vaccines end up because of the aforementioned mutations, but other viruses are just a bit harder to stop entirely).

So, nah, fuck your natural “immunity”, that’s just a recipe for lost health and time better spent on something like reading up on why vaccines are fucking awesome, even in the rare cases of allergies or bad reactions.

My own lol.

Any of them

Well, of course there’s a benefit.

To anyone selling the ivermectin or whatever to people that don’t need it.

Seriously. That’s it. There’s zero benefit to taking medications like that if you don’t have symptoms.

Shit, I’m hostile now.

Legit, I’m usually nice to people, even though I hate people at large. But I don’t trust any motherfucker at my back until they’ve proven they can be trusted.

That’s how I would handle things in a crisis like that. Short term, low trust, mutually understood cooperation, but with safety valves.

No more or less flawless than windows, Android, or the iOS stuff.

It’s different flaws.

Heck yeah!

A very good friend gifted me one when he upgraded to the oled model, and it totally brought back my love of gaming. I hadn’t really been able to because of health issues, what with not being able to stay at my desk very long.

But this sucker? It’s running everything I’ve thrown at it so far. Baldur’s gate 3, and 2. Genshin. Stuff like stardew valley.

The worst one to get set up was genshin because they insist on having their own launcher. Makes updates a pain in the ass. Luckily, I don’t play it often, so I don’t care much lol.

I can be in bed, on the couch, even in the john if I want to, and enjoy the hell out of the experience. Worst case, I might have to fiddle with settings if the game doesn’t have native controller support, or piddle with stuff like heroic or lutris if a game is pissy installing.

In a pinch, some superglue liberally applied can either block reception or muffle it so much that anything it could send would be largely useless. Or you can open it up and remove it and hope nothing else breaks in the process.

Sync on my main tablet, because it has the best 2 column layout for my needs.

Connect on my phone where 2 column isn’t really a big factor, with summit as an alternative on there because I never have decided which of the two I prefer.

I don’t use lemmy on laptop/desktop because I dislike the experience via browser. It would be fine for passive scrolling I guess, but even with the various front end options, I run into more hassles than it’s worth when even the meh apps handle lemmy better and I just don’t need anything that could be gained via browser.

Kinda. Twice, depending on how you look at it. I did one of those “you can’t fire me, I already quit” things. The boss was just clueless and didn’t comprehend that when someone walks out at end of shift and says they’re not coming back, that’s quitting.

The other time was due to a switch in managers at a fast food joint when I was a kid.

One manager took a vacation, the fill in didn’t like long haired guys and looked for any excuse. He kinda got one, when I was late for a shift. Took the opportunity to say i was fired. Didn’t actually have the authority to do it, so it wouldn’t have counted even if the actual manager hadn’t come back and reversed it, though I didn’t know that at the time.

Our old pong console. I don’t know if it still works because it’s been boxed up for over a decade at this point.

Oldest in use? Probably my old texas instruments graphing calculator, but it’s dying. I got it back in the early nineties for college, and my kid was using it last year with homework, but the screen is failing and it sometimes just freezes until you pull and replace the batteries. So only kinds in use, and barely hanging on.

My VCR is newer and still sees use rarely, but was used daily for a few years in the early naughties.

Wait! The phonograph! It’s still functional and my dad got it in the early eighties, so it’s older than the pong console, but I think calling it electronics is dubious, so I dunno if it counts. But it’s the oldest functional electric powered thing we have that I know of.

Brobdingnagian

It’s a reference to the giants of Brobdingnag from Gulliver’s travels. It means that something is absurdly large. It is also a large word making it delightful in that way. It also rolls off the tongue musically.

Coming in a close second is petrichor or petrichorian.

Petrichor is the word for the smell of the earth right after a rain. Petrichorian obviously means that something smells similar, or can be used to reference petrichor. I love the word for multiple reasons. First that it just sounds wonderful. Second that there’s a word for describing this one specific smell that is a universal human experience to anyone not anosmic out of all other smells that are similarly universal.

Third that it approaches onomatopoeia on that it sounds like the way the smell smells. The earthy petri combined with the grounded ring of chor (pronounced like core, and references that the smell is a core thing of rain and earth) is the verbal sound of the way the smell tickles the nose and makes many people walk around sniffing like hounds on a walk through the woods after weeks in the city.

Petri chor. It’s like the tinging of raindrops off of a piece of granite or marble in the mountains while you shelter under a tree and revel in the scents of it all.

I mean, it’s no Brobdingnagian, but as words go petrichor is a bit magical. It invokes and evokes almost as much as tintinnabulation, but does so for a smell, which is so much harder to do. That, btw, is an excellent word: tintinnabulation. Of the bells, bells, bells, which may be the most enjoyable poem to read aloud, ever.

There’s some other words that have the ability to invoke phantoms of their related senses. Cadaverine and putrescine come to mind; both names of chemicals involved in the putrescent smells of decomposition of flesh. Knowing their meaning brings forth memories of their smells. Not quite as effective in that, because you do have to know what they mean for the incantation to work, but still quite wonderful words. Sulfurous is similarly scent summoning. Flinty works as well, but is less musical as it resonates in the oral cavity and echoes off the teeth.

Look, I can do this all day. There’s a word for people like me: logophile. There’s a fancy word for people that are into words. How awesome is that?!

Oh, that ?! Even has a word! The interrobang! Ain’t English awesome?!

And yes, at this point, the entire comment is sigogglin’ (or sigoggly, or sigoggledy depending on where in the Appalachians you are), which is a twisty and crooked word for something that is twisty and crooked.

Loquacious, no?

Believe in it?

Nothing to believe in, it’s a word that describes an evaluation of events on a subjective level.

Person does bad thing, bad thing happens, other people decide that the bad thing was good because it happened to the bad person.

Secondary to that, they believe that the bad person’s actions led to the bad thing happening to them.

Comeuppance isn’t the same thing as fate, karma, or doom, all of which do require abelief in external forces. It just means that people think any bad things that happened are appropriate

Well, I’ve dealt with insomnia since I was a kid to some degree, and as a teenager to a significant degree. I’ve kinda got a list.

The first thing I try is meditation. It’s a solid way to shift brain waves to begin with, and often leads to improved rest even if I don’t get back to sleep at all. So I always recommend at least laying still and breathing controlled patterns. Doesn’t matter much what style of breathing you do, it’s the control and regularity of it that helps being better rested. Half an hour of that, and 4/10 times I’m back to sleep. The rest of those, I’m usually at least feeling like I had another hour or two, so I can either get up, or switch off to other things.

Reading has been a lifelong help since it doesn’t bother anyone else and for me it’s almost a form of meditation of its own. So that’s usually what I’ll try if I still want to try to sleep more. It works fairly well. Out of those remaining 6/10, it usually gets me back to sleep 3 or 4 more times.

The rest though, I’m usually going to give up. When I was single, that meant maybe getting up and just starting my day, or fucking around doing what I could do without waking housemates. That’s where devices like phones and tablets have been a huge help. I can play games, fuck around on lemmy or whatever and not disturb my wife at all, much less anyone else. Sometimes I’ll throw on some headphones while doing so and listen to music.

Just for the hell of it, I don’t know about OP, but I don’t even know how to.

I went to the relevant linked section and couldn’t find a way to raise an issue directly. I’m going to try again, and if I succeed I’ll return here and make a top level comment for anyone scrolling by and wondering. I’ve never tried to do this before, so I’ll see how it goes.

Edit: aha!

You have to go to the issues page and select the “new issue” button, where you’ll be directed to log in to github.

Which, for me, means I’m finished trying. No desire whatsoever to have another login for a one time thing. If I ever manage to learn enough code to do anything like this often enough, I’d do it, but it just isn’t worth it to satisfy my curiosity about the process.

This is all you fucking do. These shitty little comments that are supposed to look like irony, but are empty and mindless.

What’s the deal? Why have you put in that much time on lemmy making essentially the same comment over and over again? Like, often enough that I don’t even have to look at the user name when there’s a comment like this, it’s going to be you.

There has to be a reason behind it, some kind of thing in your head that makes you think it’s a beneficial hobby, so what is it? Help a motherfucker out, I don’t like blocking people unless there’s no other choice, so show me the human behind the blathering.

Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)

Not too bad.

But I was fucking around while trying to learn to ride a bike. Went too fast, hit a bump on a dirt road. Went over the handlebars, slid face first a few feet into a ditch.

Now, like I said, I wasn’t badly injured. It was all just scrapes and bruises. But they were deep scrapes from my forehead all the way down one side of my face, then my chest and belly, plus along the inner side of my right arm from trying to stop myself.

Every scrape was filled with dirt and gravel, which had to be picked out. Then it all needed flushing out. So by the time it was all done I was high from endorphins and crying and screaming, looked like a shredder had beaten the shit out of me, and was both throbbing and burning along the entire scraped section.

Then I had to go to school like that lol.

Gotta be possum. That shit is musky