Mindset / traits

-Experimental mindset - why not try it out. (Doesn’t look for reasons not to try it out).

-Likes computers/ maths intrinsically (a bit), rather than just uses them.

-Ruined some toys / electronics / appliances in their house because “If it ain’t broke, fix it until it is”. or just, " Well it has screws, so it’s obviously supposed to come apart".

-Prepared to accept that free or cheaper stuff might be adequate. (price is not necessarily a signal of quality)

-Less afflicted by sunk cost - “I already kow how to use windows, or at leady i would if they didnt keep changing stuff”.

-They think Excel is shit for anything but a few basic small tables and know they should be using a proper database and/or code rather than insane fornulae and the odd bit or garbled vba vs the "I am a master of excel, and i love it because , look, i can coerce it to do all this cool stuff , excel can do EVERYTHING if you’re as good at it as me. Nobody needs anything else to do anything. "

-Seen enough BSOD that they’ve got nothing left to lose.

As for change: Number 1 is India by miles, so keep India growing I guess. So outwith India . . .

I don’t know how many of these are intrinsic vs malleable. I don’t think linux desktop (as per current mainstream linux distros) will ever be very widespread. Unless it is packaged into something very sanitised like chrome os, android, steam deck os. or like macos did with BSD.

Create a few enthusiasts maybe by give kids more toys like cheap knock-off lego, and real tools, less pokemon apps. Raspberry pi might be a gateway drug - shame its moved up the price scale. piZeroW2 is still pretty cheap and runs a more or less usable debian/LXDE - for basic stuff. Better to be using GPIO to do fun stuff with motors, gears, pulleys, sensors, solenoids even just blinkys.

Per the last two, that’s mostly up to MS to help. You can get some milage taking someones excel that theyre proud of, cut the calculation time in half within excel (to prove you know what you’re talking about), then tell them excel is shit, this still too slow/inefficient/unmaintainable/unscaleable , there are better ways. PSA - A lot of people will react badly to that method, so learn a few basic self defense blocks first or do that stuff over videoconference. I think this needs to be developed into a more sensitive implementation of the D.E.N.N.I.S system. Maybe that is what bill gates already did to 1 million corporate procurement teams?

Scarred by abuse, but resolved to escape instead of developing Stockholm syndrome.

Makes me wonder how ‘real’ roman gladiators were.

Valium Valeum Vallium Valyum … aha , Diazepam! Only the generics are available here.

Yes. For sorcerors lair, Xbox360 and PS4 were similar, whereas Steam has slight but important differences. I can’t remeber whether they were releeased as “zen” or “fx3”, it’s a while since I’ve played the console ones. I guess maybe they’ve updated the console versions and it’s just a change that’s happened over time.

On steam I’m pretty sure i’m playing this: https://store.steampowered.com/app/442120/Pinball_FX3/

On the consoles the gargoyle ball lock gives 15 seconds ball save , this gives great option to prolong a ball - and forces you into multiballs that you don’t really want, but adds variety. You need ball save because you have to be a lot more precise to hit each of the three discs to activate the sub-games, which are needed before you can reach midnight madness and actually score meaningful points.

The strategy in Steam version seems to be is much simpler, hit 3 discs (far less precision needed), get subgames, get midnight madness. Making the whole game a bit less engaging, I’ve not found any real benefit in going for most of the rest of the table. Maybe multiramp combo for extraball occasionally…

It’s still pretty fun, I do still play it a bit, but on console I just found it a lot better; all for a few minor tweaks in a couple of mechanics.

Hah, and they’re using it to play sorcerors lair . . .

Unfortunately the steam version is lame compared to the console versions that had more diverse strategies and were more fun.

No bother.

Yes planing does take a bit of experience - not as much as you’d think though to start getting decent results. It mainly has to be sharpened regularly and set up right and you need to know how to adjust the cut depth.

There are lots of youtubes on sharpening and setup if you want to get into that. I watch Paul Sellers mostly, there’s plenty of others though.

And certainly practice on a few different wood types, before using a hand plane (or any new tool) on anything you’ve already put time into.

I can’t see any problem with sanding. I don’t see why you need to clamp though and risk introducing a bend while you sand. I’d glue or tape a sheet of sandpaper, larger than the workpiece to a hard flat surface and rub the piece on it.

Except thst I woudn’t because I’d use a hand plane, No real benefit, but I prefer a planed finish, I enjoy planing more , and, plane shavings are way cooler and harder to inhale than sanding dust.

Downvoted. For betrayal of dog commmunity.

My upstairs neighbour a few years ago had a similar thing going down into our back garden. She called it the catwalk.

Tariffs don’t “work” or “not work” it’s not a binary outcome. Just as measuring “the economy” is pretty much impossible, so is attributing economic outcomes to one single feature of the regulatory environment, They interact with the rest of the economic environment and some variety or work, production, trade, investment and distribution will occur. Over time all aspects of the system will change, adapt and react. Most changes have winners and losers and they can be counted or balanced off differently.

It it were paired with bank regulation and asset ownership regulation and a coherent industrial strategy, maybe also forex controls, maybe some counter cyclical macroeconomic policy (extremely unpopular these days) the outcomes would likely be quite different from a low regulation free for “all”. “All” is probably “a few with relatively unconstrained access to enough capital or credit to hoover up assets of the losers”.

But then a smaller subset of those things might also change the outcomes on their own. Either way it would be a matter of time and adaptation of a complex system.

It also depends what you think the objective is before you understand “success” or “failure”, the goals might well be social as much as economic. If the objective is trash the small scale asset ownig middle classes and enrich the elites economically then it might be working already.

One of the main level designers for original Doom “Sandy of Cthulu” was a pretty serious mormon christian.

“I have no problems with the demons in the game. They’re just cartoons. And, anyway, they’re the bad guys.”

I’d go basic debian . Install flatpak and flathub to get any packages that are too far out of date or might get so. Any derivative or ubuntu derivative just sees like unnecessary extra dependencies to me.

Debian gives i think a wider choice of desktop environment than any of the derivatives on install, but I think they’re all much of a muchness really. Most of the DEs have the “Click something, window opens” feature.

I always think of Kiwi / Ozzie slang when I type chroot.

Of course that’s after consulting the ArchKiwi to remember how to mount it

oh oh, I’m a below average arch user. I suspect i copied most of my hoome from debian or something.

I’ll rename it to Dickuments as a security feature.

Because one of them shot the sheriff one time?

I’d say the operational requirements.

A home PC mostly has max 1 simultaneous user (i.e. the “person”) - out of maybe a small pool of potential users - the availability requirement is ad-hoc. It offers many services, some available immediately on boot, but many are on call.

A server typically has capacity to provide services to many simutaneous users and probably has a defined availability requirement. Depending on the service, and the number of users and the availability and performance requirements it may need more communication bandwidth , more storage, faster storage, more cores, UPS, live backups and so on. But it doesn’t strictly need any of that hardware unless it helps meet the requirements.

In terms of software any modern PC runs an OS offering a tonne of services straight from boot / login. I don’t see any real differences there. Typically a server might have more always on serices and less on-call services, but these days there’s VMs and stuff on both servers and on PCs.

Most PC users would expect to have more rights such as to install and execute what they want. A server will typically have a stronger distinction between user and sys-admin. but again if a server offers a VMs it’s not so clear cut. That mostly comes out of the availability requirement - preventing users compromising the service.

They can’t if if they’re “difficult”.

That’s a problem and I remember talking about it in the 2000s when everything started to become user friendlieness. plug and play, just works and so-on, worst part is stuff being locked down and harder to jailbreak.

It’ll be fine though, I’m sure AI will install their OS for them, I won’t have a clue how it did it, but it’ll probably be better than I could do.

You’ll just add “without backdoors” to the prompt and it’ll be secure too.

I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.

If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.

I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.

I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.