Do I need to have elevated network permissions to do that? I don’t have admin access on my WiFi network and it is shared with a lot of people.

The hardware switch looks promising. Are there any decent ones for under $50 out there or are they usually a big investment?

I’m thinking use it to host a Minecraft or matrix server. I’m not expierenced with networking so nothing super advanced.

I’m not a programmer or coder and I’ve been using Linux for about a year. It’s been really user friendly after I figured out what distros are and which one to choose. I highly recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s worked quite well for me and was not a huge jump from windows because the user interface is similar. All you need to install it is a thumb drive.

I like playing games on steam and haven’t had any issues. There’s this really cool website called protondb where you can search steam game compatibility with Linux. For the few that aren’t compatible, oftentimes people share fixes which usually consists of copy pasting stuff on there.

LMDE is rock solid. I’ve been using it for a while and It Just Works.

You can get a used thinkpad T480 off eBay for ~$150. I’ve dropped it multiple times and spilled orange juice on it and it works perfectly fine. No issues running Linux mint Debian edition. Main drawback is the fan which isn’t the most efficient at cooling, but it is upgradeable.

I’ve noticed at least among my peers that the Meta policy change relating to Queer people and Immigrants was the final nail in the coffin.

Unfortunately they will most likely migrate to Instagram as a result, which isn’t good at all especially considering their recently hate speech policy changes targeted towards LGBTQ people and immigrants.

One makes them money and the other doesn’t, unfortunately.

I’ll take a look, thanks.

I’ll check it out. Thank you

You bet I would…except when I have to pay for it.

I’m curious, what’s the use case for FreeBSD? Seems obscure.

This is such a good approach. I suspect that countries like the US and Aus don’t want their citizens to be media literate so that they can be easily manipulated.

I had unlimited internet access and a smartphone from a very young age and had no idea about cyber security and why free apps are free because of their selling of data. I fell for a fair amount of scams and got some viruses. I’m sure that there’s embarrassing stuff online about me that I posted as a kid out there somewhere. I spent most of my teen years on YouTube and Instagram (around 12-15 hours a day of screentime, sometimes more).

It wasn’t all bad. The internet helped educate me on puberty and identity when I had little to no sex education. I was exposed to many different types of people and perspectives. I am much more tech savvy than almost all of my peers and am skilled at troubleshooting and fixing things for people. I somehow broke my social media addiction this year and am able to help my friends learn better internet hygiene too. I think that by having that extremely unhealthy relationship with technology it helped me realize that I need to live in the present moment and how much better I feel without social media in my life (still use Lemmy tho).

One thing that’s horrifying to see is that a very large portion of my peers at college are completely addicted to TikTok and Instagram reels. Sometimes I’ll walk into a room and there’s a large group of people and everyone’s sitting in a circle and scrolling on their phones. Sometimes in the middle of conversation people will start scrolling and shove something they found on Instagram on their phone into the middle of conversation that has nothing to do with it. It’s like people can’t sit with themselves and be bored for a second without that massive dopamine hit that short form content gives them.

I don’t think that it’s entirely a personal issue/failure, although at the end of the day you’re the only one who can truly control your actions. Instead this is a common pattern that I’ve observed and these apps are intentionally designed to be as addictive and distracting as possible even at the cost of expierencing life. It definitely resembles drug addiction. Not to mention that they prey on people with mental illness and who are in bad life situations.

The point is, young peoples’ relationship with tech and specifically social media is a huge issue and I get the need to do something about it. There has absolutely got to be hard regulation about the way these apps are designed to prevent the level of addiction seen today for all ages. I wholeheartedly agree with the Finnish education model and think that my life would have been a lot better if I’d had that, but holding social media corporations accountable is of equal importance.

The journalctl command returns [UFW BLOCK] IN=wlp3s0 OUT=(long string of numbers)

The GUI display settings for mint Debian edition don’t have an enable/disable button on my machine. It shows that the TV is connected as monitor 2.

So the xrandr auto command didn’t do anything. I downloaded pavucontrol and selected the HDMI configuration. It says that it’s plugged in and that audio is playing, but no actual audio plays. Very strange.

I mentioned in my post that I use LMDE. There aren’t any recent software updates that I recall specifically that did it. The TV does work with other people’s laptops in the same port. There’s two HDMI ports on the TV and they give the same results. The TV is a dumb TV.

It’s interesting because it’s essentially the opposite of the idea behind Linux. Using Linux specifically to censor and spy on people is diabolical, but it makes sense why they chose it.

Woah woah woah, there’s a North Korean Linux distribution?