Hm, I’d probably get a copy for the fantasy section as well. It really reads like a fantasy adventure.

If I saw that folder name while using a friend’s machine I would know not to click on it to respect their privacy.

Depotaufenthalte? Ich stehe auf dem Schlauch

No, that’s the joke. I have to roll a 12 or so to finish even a single chore

Ich dachte schon es geht um das MettBett

I didn’t read but the formatting is 🔥

Same for me. I distro-hopped for about 20 years with OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and Fedora being the most memorable desktop setups for me. While all that was a valuable experience, NixOS feels like graduation.

For the Nix-curious: I wish someone would have told me not to bother with the classic config and build a flake-based system immediately. They’re “experimental” in name only, very stable and super useful in practice.

It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s a challenging concept to have to explain to immigration officials at the airport.

This cat just moved to Berlin

I agree it’s very confusing. There’s this GitHub issue that goes a bit into the differences. If you don’t have any special requirements, I’d probably try the wine-wayland package first.

Stalin will take your lunch money

I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I’m pessimistic that any flavor of Linux will be an acceptable experience for the person you’re describing. Something like Silverblue may be least obstrusive, but compatibility will still be a prominent problem.

Alternatively, you could show them surface level cool stuff that’s easier to do with Linux. Like blocking all ads, running your own Minecraft server, downloading YouTube videos, building your own PC with cheap parts (and maybe even pirating movies and TV shows, depending on your own practices and relationship to that person). There’s a lot to love about Linux even if you don’t care about privacy and open software as abstract values.

When I was 10 years old my father told me the grain joke. Do you know it? This extra-terrestrial reports on her travels through space. She has studied the earth. ‘‘An interesting planet’’, she says, ‘‘it is inhabited by grasses of various sizes. Some live in shallow water and others on dry land. They all have two legged creatures working for them. These creatures eliminate other plants so that the grasses may grow without being disturbed too much. They also keep hungry beasts away. At the end of a season, the creatures carefully assemble the grains of the grasses, so as to sow them again on the next possible occasion and set a new cycle in motion. The creatures keep a few grains for themselves to feed on, but overall they expand the grasses’ living space a bit more every year. It is very impressive’’.

Mol, Annemarie. 2008. I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities. Subjectivity 22 (1): 28–37. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.2

The way I usually start teaching using the console to my (very much non-tech) students is set up a safe container and then let them type whatever, invariably generating a lot of error messages. Then I challenge them to generate different error messages, “gotta catch em all” style. Then we talk about the error messages and what they might mean. After this exercise they usually get the basic idea of command – response, what to look out for and how to compose valid commands.

This sounds like a good idea, but I think the problem here is that a lot of popular software runs great on Linux but is very clunky and ugly on other systems (looking at you, LibreOffice). So keep that in mind if you try out FOSS on Windows as a sneak peek.

Navigation on Android: Osmand lets you download and cache OSM data so you can use it offline. Cache is unlimited if you download Osmand via F-Droid.

You can put together a media server and build a catalogue so you can watch movies and series offline. Maybe not a huge priority in that situation but definitely nice to have.

Jellyfin is a good option for streaming from a media server to other devices. The *arr suite is an option for building the catalogue.

If I’m not mistaken, ffsend generates a link that you can share with non-tech people (which is a big difference in my book).

ffsend targets Send which is an actively maintained community fork of Firefox Send.

It’s not centralized, you can host your own or choose from the public send instances.

You can load bitmap images into Inkscape and manipulate them to a degree, but Gimp is much better at that. You can probably also load vector graphics (svg) into Gimp, but I’d assume they would be converted to bitmaps.

Vector vs bitmap is a good topic to be familiar with for anyone who works with computers, I keep running into professionals who really should know the difference but don’t.