Always eat your greens!
Noob friendly? Linux Mint. It’s not the prettiest, but it looks nice enough, especially if you tweak the themes a little, which is super easy.
It’s a fantastic all-around distro, and if you use the default Cinnamon desktop environment, it’s rock stable and super easy to navigate.
It’s what I use on all my personal laptops and also what I set my parents up with when I switched them from Windows to Linux.
At a place I worked at previously, there was a guy who got fired because the company found out that he had been hiding cans of beer in the water tank part of the toilet.
Yes…you read that right, he would “take a bathroom break” so he could pound a beer a few times throughout the day lol.
I wouldn’t critique it that much honestly, except for the fact that he operated heavy equipment for his job, so yeah, not safe at all.
A health company where they have that poor of security practices? Get the hell out ASAP! When they get ransomware, (and they will,) you do NOT want to be on the hook for trying to recover their systems.
Trust me, I had to help recover from a ransomware attack at a small company a while back, it hit early in the morning, I got there a little before 8am once I got the call.
22 hours later, we had only just finished wiping and re-imaging every computer, let alone getting all the software reinstalled, configured, tested, backups re-synced, etc. It took weeks to get everything fully recovered, and that was with a team of half a dozen people.
In the meantime, CYA hardcore. Document all security issues you can find in email and make sure whoever is in charge is aware and is on the email chain. There literally could be legal charges brought up if it’s involving private health information.
NCIS, or its variants. I think where I lived, it came on at 9pm, and because my parents didn’t want me to watch it, (violence and all that) it was a convenient bedtime marker.
10 seconds? That’s generous.
Your fear is understandable and valid, this is a dark timeline and a really bad outcome.
But being afraid and panicking cannot possibly help anybody, least of all yourself.
Take a few days if you can to reset mentally as much as possible.
Then, get to work building resistance, it’s more critical now than ever. Find a leftist org near you and get involved. DSA, a local anarchist group, a worker co-op that needs volunteers, a democratic socialist org, anything leftist that is doing real work locally.
If you can’t donate your time, donate your money. If you can’t donate either of those, then help them spread the word on your social media. Post all their links and use your social media to advertise their events and meetups, help make people aware.
On the personal side, protect your health. The conservatives largely want to demolish healthcare, especially for underprivileged folks. Your health is so critical, especially now.
Quit your vices or at least, reduce them:
It will not only help protect you from an administration that wants you to have less coverage if you’re sick/injured, it will help your mental health and save you money, sometimes tons of money.
Final advice for money, save it as much as you can. Practice frugality, get together with friends to cook and share meals. Get involved socially with people, learn about your community, build solidarity.
We will get through this, I believe in you, and I believe in the human drive for true freedom, equality, and community. Don’t let that flame burn out, we’re in this together, and only together can we come out victorious. ✊
Was in a public restroom years ago, I was the only person in it at that moment, taking care of business.
About a minute after I had sat down in the stall, I hear the main door to the bathroom smash open and a male voice desperately saying, “Shit! oh fuck me! Ohmahgaw! Holyshitomagaw! Fuck me!!!”
He slams open the door a few stalls down from mine, all the while never stopping his stream of profanity. I hear his pants ripped off and his belt hitting the floor, and what follows is a massive explosion of farts, liquid-sounding poop, and the entire time, he never stops loudly blaspheming lol. “Ppfffftt!!!OhhhhfuckkkPPRRrrppSPLASH!!!Ohhhmahgaww!PPrrrppprrtttShiiittFuggggohhh!PrrrtprraaaPPSplashhhh!!!Awshhiii!!”
I had to hold in my laughter while trying to wipe, pull my pants up, flush, and haul ass out of there before screaming with laughter the moment I got out of the bathroom lol.
Poor guy, I don’t know what he ate, but it came back with a brutal vengeance.
My gaming rig has been running Nobara for years now, it’s built off of Fedora by the developer who does the glorious eggroll version of Proton.
It’s got multiple desktop environment versions and is optimized for Linux gaming. It has a bunch of gaming-specific kernel patches and optimizations. Extra drivers pre-installed for controllers and Nvidia GPUs, etc.
It has a very easy update wizard, I run it once every few weeks, works awesome.
Getting better all the time!
Friendly reminder to give your fair and honest Steam review of Apex Legends after EA’s most recent changes. 😈
My advice: Don’t wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you’re under pressure to figure it out all at once.
Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.
Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.
Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.
It’s really solid.
KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.
Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don’t need to look sexy.
My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.
Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.
Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I’ve tried to like it for years, but I just don’t care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.
I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I’ve watched.
My current company is being absorbed into a much larger company right now, got bought out earlier this year.
I was the only IT for the smaller company, and I was using 100% Linux (Debian with KDE Plasma) on my laptop to administrate everything in our environment, which is mostly Windows.
Now that we got bought out, I am being forced off my Linux laptop and onto the new company’s Windows laptop, which really sucks. I am planning on quitting soon, as I hate using Windows and I am very underpaid at my current job as it is. Only real perk was not having to report to any IT manager/CTO, and being able to use Linux.
I mean, if you have the money and inclination, sounds like a nerdy but pretty cool project!
Your hardware is nearly identical to mine. On my gaming PC, I use Nobara.
It’s a distro created and maintained by the developer who works on the Glorious Eggroll version of Proton, so very well known in the Linux gaming community.
It’s based on Fedora, but has a ton of Linux gaming tweaks for extra performance and compatibility patched into it and pre-installed.
It’s very easy to download the ISO and install, and requires basically zero configuration out of the box to start gaming and using the PC.
The only thing I would caution you about, is the only use the built-in Nobara updater app to update your system. Don’t use Fedora commands like DNF to update stuff, it will cause conflicts.
As long as you do that though, you should be fine. I’ve been using Nobara on my gaming PC for about 2 years now, and it’s been awesome.
Fair points, yeah.
Different distros for different uses: