I shifted from Neon to Kubuntu on my work machine. Figured that Neon was a good shout because it’s the official KDE distro, only to later discover that KDE now consider it to be end of life, and are working on a replacement.

Kubuntu is basically the same (from my perspective), but has continuing support.

Yeah, which is part of what’s stopping me. I can’t really be bothered to spend the time putting everything back as it should be if I bugger it up. Which I will.

So for now it works and it works very well. And I guess I’ll leave it that way.

I have Mint on the 2014 Mac mini I use as a media and Home Assistant server. It was my first dabble with Linux, and I now wish it used Plasma instead of Cinnamon. My other Linux machines are running Kubuntu with Plasma, and they’re great, so logging into Cinnamon always feels like a step backwards somehow.

I could try changing the DE on it, but I’m not massively proficient, and don’t want to have to set everything back up again if I fuck it up.

Yeah, I ended up dropping 4Gb in that one. For some reason it could only see 3Gb, but it made it immensely more useful. It got me through a radio production degree and only got replaced because I happened to find myself in a position to be able to afford a 13" Pro a few years later. In fact, it’s still in a box somewhere.

The 2011 MacBook I still have that still works a treat (with Linux) was also an incredibly lucky purchase too, I guess.

My 2011 13" Pro is still trucking along. Granted, it’s running Linux these days, but it’s still a damn useful machine.

Even though my PC use is now 75% Linux, I do still have an M2 MacBook Air. That thing is three years old and still as powerful as the day I bought it. Though to be fair, it’s not running macOS 26, because fuck that.

Their hardware is legitimately incredible. But as a company they’re dog shit. Hence my 75% Linux use. If Asahi was as useful on my MacBook as Kubuntu on my desktop, I wouldn’t be using my Air with macOS at all.

I’ll never forget buying my first MacBook in '07 and asking the guy how much it would cost to bump the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb. He told me in no uncertain terms that I’d be better off looking online for a cheaper price.

Well, in the intervening years they certainly have closed that loophole.

Free on the NHS in the UK. In fact, diabetes is one of the conditions that qualifies people for free prescriptions across the board.

I recently started another play through of RDR2, while figuring out the settings on my old Linux gaming PC. I’d forgotten how long it is between save points during that oh-so-long first segment up in the mountains. Christ. Having to play for half an hour just to get to a point where I could save up.

Do they really though?

The company I work for has 150 employees. Granted, most of those are across various departments in the worlshop, so don’t use computers as part of their core work, but we have around 50 PCs around the site.

We don’t have a dedicated IT person. We should, but we don’t (currently), because our boss is the kind of old skool employer who doesn’t really understand why we need that many computers when they didn’t have them back in the '70S. I would suggest that there are far more mid sized businesses like that where the boomer owner holds a similar view than you might think. Or I’m wrong and just looking at it through my particular lens. But having worked for a bunch of mid sized engineering firms over the years, little about my current employer strikes me as particularly different from the others.

I built a little Python app that’s just a big Download button on top of yt-dlp. Copy the link, hit the button, it downloads the video to my Jellyfin folder so I can watch YouTube videos on Apple TV without having to tolerate ads every three minutes.

I would suggest that the vast, vast majority of companies that use Windows do so for two reasons

1: Because the software is (mostly) interchangeable with what their customers use. Office docs can be opened in any Office application without any formatting errors. Generally speaking. Open an .odt in Word and it could (will probably) end up buggering up the formatting.

2: Because most business owners don’t want to go to the expense of hiring a dedicated IT guy to manage a bunch of computers that their staff don’t know how to operate.

AND YET, Pictures of Matchstick Men is a psych masterpiece.

Coldplay springs to mind. The Coldplay who released Moon Music last year is an entirely different band to the one who released Parachutes in 2000. I know of few other bands who’ve gone through such an enormous transformation. And while the newer stuff may not resonate with me the way the early stuff did, it’s fair to say that it’s worked for them.

As a teenage metalhead of the 90s, little has distressed me more than literally everything Metallica have released since St Anger.

I really, really dug Load and ReLoad. They were different to what had come before, but they still had a hard rock edge to them that I loved. Then Jason quit, and The Corporation Of James And Lars hired the formely mighty Rob Trujillo and set about their plan to record the same indistinguishable wall of noise over and over again until people stopped bothering to even pirate their music.

It was watching The Bear that made me finally appreciate that fine dining isn’t about filling yer belleh, and more about the art of food; how the senses meld together.

I’m too poor to eat at places that offer that kind of experience, but at least I now understand the point of it and appreciate why it can be so expensive.

I use Voyager to access Lemmy, which is heavily based on Apollo for Reddit. And one of the very best things they kept in Voyager is the “New Account Highlightenator”, which adds a baby emoji next to a username, with how many days the account has been active. This disappears after a month (I think it is), but it’s really, really handy for quickly highlighting whether it’s worth paying attention to the shitty opinions being spouted.

Chances are, if it’s a bot or a troll, they’ll be using a new account. If I see shitty opinion + baby emoji, I’ll block and move on.

Other than that, I personally don’t really give a shit how long someone’s been on here. This is my third account on a third server since I first discovered Lemmy a couple of years ago, and I’ve only had this one for a couple of months.

When cucumbers are so cheap, and re-usable.

ouch!