I always assumed schools had at least one or two IT people who just are spread really thin or something. Never occurred to me that an organization would just have PCs with no admin, but it sounds plausible. I guess the instructors just have to fix things if they run into issues.

Are you now the IT support guy for these workstations, or is the school’s IT going to take over maintenance. I guess you have an internship or something if you are.

It’s software that’s made by people for people. I think it’s kind of wild that you can get a full-featured operating system with no strings attached. Normally, if something is free it means that you’re the product, but this is not (seemingly?) the case with FOSS stuff.

The nice thing about distro choice is that you don’t really need to commit to one with them (mostly) being totally free. As long as you back up your files, I’d recommend trying a few until you feel comfortable. If you go with Ubuntu or Linux Mint I think you’ll have the easiest time. I’d tentatively recommend dual-booting to give a new distro a try without fully committing, but that brings its own difficulties and troubleshooting with it. Having a second machine to test with is also great, but it’s not a good option for everyone.

It’s not that simple. In David Allen’s GTD book he talks about how many people we consider successful like people in upper management are hiring coaches to help them get organized because they’re losing control. Granted, it’s a bit self gratifying since he sells the GTD book, but there may be quite a bit of truth to it.

I remember hearing that you can’t solder batteries normally though and that a special technique is needed to heat them minimally. Is this true?

Do your issues appear on a fresh install? At my admittedly limited level of expertise, I’d probably start from there. If a clean install works properly, then something that’s happening later is messing it up. You’d have to keep track of changes you make to your system and check for issues as you go.

If a clean install is borked from the get-go, maybe try different distros. Since Framework supports Fedora, I’m surprised that anything would go wrong.

I don’t know if Framework offers any support or warranty, but you could check with them too.

Yeah on my Dell laptop that I have lying around, the machine I use to demo distros before giving them a real try, the wifi card is just not supported. I tried GhostBSD and openBSD.

As much as I’m against the takeover of minimalism in logo design, something a bit more subdued would make people more likely to use the free version. The anime girl vibe may not be the one for every website.

Maybe Xe has little interest in people using the free version, which is fine, but they still haven’t nailed down the pricing. You contact them and set up a meeting to discuss the price. That may change as soon as they gain some traction though, so we’ll see.

I may be missing some context here. How is it creepy to have a child as the mascot of your software? I just checked the Anubis website and didn’t see any sexualization.

My experience with products that lean so heavily into the sponsors is that they’re usually mediocre in terms of your overall choices. Basically, the ads kind of give me bad vibes. I admit, it’s not a rational judgment, but I won’t go out of my way to find out if NordVPN is actually good when there are alternatives.

If many people feel the same way, it may be evidence that sponsors are an outdated method of advertising.

Making a new OS isn’t easy as others have said, but it’s also helpful that Pebble OS has a bit of a following. There are still people who are very vocal about how much they love/loved their pebble watches. Making a new OS that’s inspired by PebbleOS would be met with more skepticism than just releasing a watch with an OS that people already know that they like.

Assuming that he made no major changes to the software, pebble fans almost already know what they’ll be getting out of this product. You couldn’t say the same for a watch with a new OS.

I remember downloading it a few years back to do some basic image editing and drawing. I think I wanted to make a simple diagram for a lab paper. I didn’t get very far though and ended up using an alternative program. It may not be objectively terrible. but the first time user experience leaves a lot to be desired.

If this happened, would Ubuntu based operating systems be impacted as well? I might start to learn Debian or LMDE if so.

It’s been a while since I used it, but Librewolf had a habit of showing the bitwarden extension’s window at the wrong size.

I was able to fix this by disabling a “resist fingerprinting” setting, but it’s annoying to have to do stuff like this in the first place. I really wanted to have an exceptions list that included certain websites for fingerprinting resistance, but I never found a clear way to do it.

There are a few other examples of settings that I had to tweak in order to make the experience as good as Firefox.

Those who are against it probably would just move away from Ubuntu. For those who aren’t, I don’t see why they shouldn’t register for Ubuntu Pro. It’s not in the spirit of the free software ecosystem, but not everyone needs to have the same level of commitment to free software.

IMO, hearing about Ubuntu Pro reinforces my decision to stick to Ubuntu derivatives like Mint, and it’s making me consider trying options like LMDE or straight up Debian.

This sounds like a problem with your organization. I use windows at the hospital where I work, and we don’t run into these kinds of issues. Yeah it is rife with other issues like goading you into using microsoft edge, one drive, and more, but updates are handled by IT.

They’ll never tell.

That’s cool. I may keep an eye out for old Kindles in thrift stores and whatnot. With the advent of android tablets that just have e paper displays, I probably will try those before buying another kindle.

I am curious if anyone with some legal knowledge can weigh in. My messy google search only pointed to one federal law, the FTC act, that would allow the FTC to intervene if a website breaks its own privacy policy. Otherwise US privacy laws are industry specific. (E.g. there is a set of laws for healthcare related data, HIPAA. There are other ones for some financial institutions.) So on a federal level they would have the FTC to worry about, maybe.

What complicates this is that multiple states have their own data privacy laws, and I don’t know what a company based in one state with data from users in other states has to do.