Women often have to trade career progression for motherhood. That’s a big ask considering the decades we’ve spent letting neoliberals devalue motherhood and labour in and out of the home.

~20 years ago my wife was mocked at university for wanting to have children. It hasn’t improved much since.

I just moved my main PC to CachyOS like two weeks ago. It’s been quite nice so far actually. Minor hiccup when trying to play The Guild 2 (had to use Protontricks to download DirectPlay)

just the thought of having to configure it all again makes my skin crawl

It took me ages to get the nerve to redo my media server. Then some of my hardware failed and I had to redo it again… By the third time redoing it I had become a lot more confident.

Also you learn to take notes on everything you touch and make backups lol

I just feel like bringing these pain points up in the hope that someone might have an answer for me or others, I guess?

Completely valid and I encourage you to keep doing so. Denying there are usability problems does not fix them.

This kind of thing is why backups / snapshots are so important to do. On Linux we actually get that option so much more easily than on Windows, so it’s worth doing. On Windows, updates are painful enough that out of habit I just reinstall Windows every year to head this problem off.

Not trying to minimize your pain, it’s something I had to learn to deal with too and it does take time and energy to properly resolve, which isn’t free. The experience will also vary dramatically between distros and hardware.

Lastly if you’re a long time Windows user try to remember what it was like when you were new, when you had no idea how the pieces connect to each other; it takes time to get into the groove.

You might prefer a more curated experience like Bazzite.

Moved to CachyOS. Most things just worked. “update” is literally an alias that updates your OS. Once had a bad update, snapshot rolled me back into action within 3 minutes.

With Windows that could warrant a reinstall/reimage if it’s bad enough. Fucking wild.

Microsoft is a machine fueled by monkey paw wishes.

You want to force users off a garbage algorithm? Your wish is granted, now you have to use this new proprietary algorithm that has a major flaw that will be discovered just after you get comfortable with it.

You want to be able to change audio devices with just two clicks? Wish granted, but the apps just use whatever device they wanted anyway and now the sound control panel (the only guaranteed way to change devices) is buried even further in the UI.

You want more control over your updates? Wish granted, but now your OS is an agentic OS

Ah I see you’ve run into the hexbear people. Theyre like the mentally ill homeless guy who just jerks in the middle of the street; better to leave them be, it’s just about never worth getting involved.

• doesn’t go outside
• spends all day doing it for free
• obsessed with “antisemitism” and pedo apologism
• no longer allowed near playgrounds

100% she is a Reddit mod

This is the material analysis we need to be doing. During COVID I saw farmers shredding crops instead of selling them because we lacked the transportation capacity to get food to market. “How the fuck is that even possible?” you ask? We rely too much on individual truckers when we should be using rail… And that’s kind of an analogy for the whole market.

No system in place to ensure there is enough energy, water, food, steel, concrete, lumber, etc. to go around, just this vague hope that “the market will respond to price information as it always does”.

Well now that price information is telling people to invest in space mirrors to send sunlight to their AI-powered saffron gardens, employing cheap foreign workers rather than local labour so that they can sell the spice to wealthy people. So yeah I think that mechanic is busted now and needs a rethink.

I wonder how? Plex is actually worse to navigate and filled with ads and shit.

The issue I had: Jellyfin experience is a better on Firestick and Chromecast than it is on Roku, but the difference has been shrinking fast due to contributions from someone named 1hitsong on GitHub. That person has absolutely hammered patches out over the past few months.

Microplastics are stored in the balls.

When my friends talk about what books they’re reading and it comes back to me I just joke and say “oh I largely read non-fiction”.

I read every manual, decision tree, process document, whatever lands in front of me.

RTFM is life

I just personally wish the COVID lifestyle was more accessible.

Same, it suited me quite well and I feel bad saying I missed it because so many others, including some of my own family and friends, suffered. Now that I’m back in the office 5 days a week, I lose >2 hours a day with my kids. I had my own parents say “i don’t get why you’re complaining, we got by before COVID” while refusing to acknowledge it’s different because one of them stayed home with us, while my wife and I must both work to survive.

I grew up in a religious conservative family. These and other experiences drove me to the left in a big way. I see now that thinking we can solve systemic issues with individualism is bullshit. I want a world where my wife or I could stay home (or some communal solution) to raise our family right rather than having a bunch of latchkey kids and being stuck doing chores from the moment we get home until the moment we lie down. Some people say “well that’s how I was raised” but it isn’t right.

Now that would be a funny headline.

No sadly COVID lockdown isolation did them in. I’ve never seen minds and bodies decay so fast. I have another friend who developed full-blown psychosis from it too, and at this point it looks like he’s never coming back. The lockdowns were harder on some people than we were/are ready to talk about I think.

When my wife’s grandparents had to get a new computer they got upset about the new windows interface and the fact their old games didn’t work, so I set them up with Linux and a DE that resembled XP (it’s what they were familiar with), and I was able to get most of their games going.

They used it without issue until they died.

Your OS isn’t getting regular updates!!!

This is a feature imo.

It aligns with Democratic Socialists well enough, but not the seize-the-means socialists.

That’s a fair observation I think: UBI doesn’t put the same pressure on financialization that worker- owned industry does. Ultimately I think eliminating work is a terrible idea, but reducing work, focusing on actually productive work, and ensuring we all collectively benefit from it is ideal.

A system is what it does. If it costs us jobs, enriches the wealthy at our expense, destroys creativity and independent thought, and suppresses wrongthink? It’s a censorious authoritarian fascist pushing austerity.

Show me AI getting us UBI or creating worker-owned industry and I’ll change my tune.