The point you raise reminds me of when Signal dropped SMS support, after my efforts to convert all the non techie people in my life over to it. So sad when it happens…

I have a guideline I like to follow when putting together my pizzas, I like something spicy, something savory, and something sweet

Spice: banana peppers, jalepenos, or yes, hot sauce if that’s what I’ve got

Savory: bacon,chicken, pulled pork, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms,

Sweet: onions, picked red onions, roasted corn, pineapple

You can blend stuff (put tandoori chicken on the pizza) for even more interesting combos!

I feel like one of each gives a great result.

I’ll be slightly contrarian to others and give a different perspective: you may find yourself hitting some roadblocks, I’ll try to explain.

I set up Linux Mint for my elderly parents. The key thing is, I set it up for them, functioning as the administrator for that machine, making sure they had a non admin account and configured their desktop to only show the shortcuts they cared about (firefox).

It worked fine, and I only got calls once every few months. They got scared if some popup occured, or if they accidentally saved something to their desktop that they wanted to get rid of. I don’t know if that really meets the definition of seamless, and I don’t know if you’d even consider those problems.

The other thing that can happen, is hardware interfaces. I know that you’ve listed out your use case. I’m just saying that if your birthday rolls around and someone buys you a 3d printer where you “just plug it in”, you’re going to be in for a long troubleshooting day, if it isn’t natively supported.

With Steam games, you can often get away with enabling proton, but… Small issues like being able to select multiple drive folders have sent me down long troubleshooting avenues as well. And when I use the word troubleshoot, I’m inevitably referring to the command line.

Lots of people are encouraging you to try, and you can make that decision. I just want to toss out that it might not be seamless. But I don’t think Windows is seamless either. It’s just what most people are used to.

I do a mixture of ketchup, mayo, garlic powder, onion powder, and msg, and slap that on cold cut sandwiches!

I know I can’t actually help you, but I have to say, I’m excited for you. You sound like you have carefully thought through your ideas, and concluded “I don’t personally have a future in India”. You are in a tough spot financially, but I can tell you have the fire inside you. You’re going to find a better country to live in, and change your circumstances, like so many Indian ex-pats before you! You can do it.

I had many problems with installing grub in a dual boot configuration, so much so that I moved to systemd-boot and never had problems after. I don’t know why, but it’s config file approach felt more intuitive.

I’m actually not sure why GRUB is such a popular boot loader that comes packaged with so many distros. Maybe GRUB does something more complex than just bootloading, but I don’t know if most users would care…

Well, I guess spirit is technically the cheapest. So that might be worth it to people all on its own. But I find the seating to be very cramped, I don’t like the feeling of being “nickel and dimed” with their “charge for everything” scheme, and when I rode spirit they would have extremely generous take off and landing estimates so that even with many delays, they are still “on time”.

None of this is really malicious, I think they are clear about the fact that they offer cheap tickets for a cheap experience. But man, as a customer, it feels bad. I will just pay the extra money and go with something else.

Friggin’ Spirit Airlines!

That sounds exhausting. I hope you find peace, one day.

This may be a minor point, but I often think in discussions like these, people are talking about the entire OS rather than just the kernel. And while you can take a fully featured desktop system environment for a spin, and it’s pretty good, a lightweight window manager is lightning quick.

If you stick to minimalistic apps for things like photo viewing, you can open folders with 1000s of images in thumbnail mode at incredible speeds, or enormous PDFs. Those are the types of tasks that seemingly slow W10 to a crawl.

In general I also have pretty good luck with stability on my machine. I don’t find myself needing to kill apps that start misbehaving for unexplained reasons, except Firefox… But usually an update sorts it out.

This is a completely fair point. If I were given the proverbial golden keys to rewrite bidding practices, I imagine whatever I wrote would be subject to perverse incentives of some kind.

Do you think education is generally moving in the right direction? I have a few people in my circle that trained to be teachers and left the profession because of the lack of support from admin when dealing with troubled students (and troubled parents). They described a staff that was upside down, similar to a hospital (everyone is an admin, a very small part of the staff is actually teachers, and they never make the rules).

On the other hand it sounds like the mechanics of disseminating knowledge have increased tremendously due to research supported practices. I just wonder if the next generation is doomed, I guess.

Yes, another tragedy is when sales guy from company A talks to sales guy from company B.

You want a submarine to also fly into space? Oh yeah, we can do that! Our engineers are really smart, shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll have that design over to you in 2 weeks!

Later, when talking to the engineering team…

Well, I don’t see what’s so hard about it. We’ve had submarines and planes in WW2, you’re telling me we can’t innovative and combine those ideas? Well, this is an opportunity for you guys to really show off the engineering ability of the company… And I can’t move the promise date now, I already talked to him on the phone and I’m about to go on my cruise. Call me if you need anything!

Excellent point about government sponsored anti corruption measures, too. Here in the US our government contracts award “points” to businesses which are minority or woman- owned.

In practice, the same construction companies simply institute shell companies, and make their wives/daughters/sisters the owners of these shell companies, charge a premium, and have the “owner” subcontract the work back to the same old company, effectively making themselves an extra 20 percent…

Small businesses (which may be minority or woman owned, but they don’t play golf with the government buyers) are still totally forgotten.

I’m an engineer. When you see something really badly designed and think “wow, those engineers are so stupid! I could have done a better job myself!”

Please know that we did think about it. It’s just that some guy with an MBA decides the schedule, and another guy with an MBA decides the budget, and terrible designs get released no matter how much we protest. I’m sorry we couldn’t figure it out fast enough and cheap enough, though.

And yes, we do mistakes all the time too. It’s just that we usually know about the obvious ones.

I’m the same as you! I recommend “trash-cli”, then you can undo if you mess something up. You can even set an alias to echo “wrong command” if you use ‘RM’.

I saw this thread on stack Exchange

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/41210/redirect-terminal-output-to-image-file#41211

I think you’d write a script that turns standard output from something like khal to an image, then use a feh command to turn it into your background. But honestly it’s pretty fast to set up a keyboard shortcut to launch a terminal session and type khal.

I think PhotoPrism

I think you want to use hwdb and evdev to do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nypsi1/updated_guide_to_remapping_keys_on_linux_using/

If you check out the mailing list archives there is some active discussion about dbus-broker as well.