I thought that was a good question so I looked it up, not least because one of the right’s oft-repeated accusations has been that “the libruls want to take our guns!” which to me means that the right has been thinking about taking them all along.

Historically, authoritarian regimes are NOT big on letting citizens defend themselves against government, which is how the US got the Second Amendment to start with, so I’m still low-key convinced that the long-term strategy here is to create an environment of regular stochastic terrorism until the military is fully on board, and then to react to that public carnage by declaring all privately-held firearms illegal as part of the move to full martial law.

But in the meantime, as the Brady Campaign, a long-established gun control group, says, for Project 2025 the plan is “Guns everywhere.”

Project 2025 also seems to have a particular aversion to state-level concealed carry laws, and wants to overturn those as well.

There is a good amount of information out there if you’re interested in looking further but that’s the gist of it. Project 2025 = guns are good, and lots of 'em . . . at least for now.

This kind of anti-gay apologia was legitimately discredited decades ago by all accepted standards, and your research is shit.

Anita Bryant, shut up.

I’m sick and tired about hearing about Zorinn when there’s a dozen excellent Linux distros that aren’t derivative trash that astroturf social media and pass off other Foss projects as their own.

Your quote, but when asked to name a better “easiest distro for Windows users” Fedora KDE was the best you could do.

Somebody asked you a genuine question, looking for real information, and out of this “dozen excellent Linux distros” you came at her with, you lazily just shat out the name of a single one, and that being one of the more advanced distros out there.

Hell yeah, try harder. People who ask genuine questions deserve genuine answers. Unless that’s just your best and you need pity.

Nothing against Fedora KDE, it’s the best of the best, but it is hardly the easiest for a noob to Linux: just the install process alone requires a working understanding of the Linux filesystem and partitioning if you’re not using the entire disk space, you have to understand root vs sudo, god help you if you want to encrypt a disk, and there’s a lot more CLI at every step than other distros. Try harder.

I’d be surprised if he does. If he’s “sick and tired” of hearing about Zorin, it’s because Zorin is getting a lot of deservedly good reviews from the Windows crowd right now. If it really were ass he’d have nothing to say about it. The only social media I’m on is Lemmy, and I tried Zorin because it was highly ranked on Distrowatch, so if people are getting “astroturfed” elsewhere it’s news to me.

But you should know I tried over twenty (conservative estimate) distros before I settled on Zorin. USB drives are cheap, and you can try as many distros as you like without ever having to install one. Don’t take my word for it, nor his: buy a handful of USB drives, create some LiveUSBs and start trying out whatever distros catch your attention. I found distrowatch.com to be a good front page to the distro world, with rankings and extremely detailed reviews: start there if you’re looking for a fairly exhaustive list of what’s out there.

Oh, they’re customer focused, alright: focused on scraping customer data via the installed OS to feed to their AI and then aggregate for sale to other data brokers and/or interested governments.

The Dell logo is the BIOS loading, the black screen is your bootloader and the beginning of your OS loading, and of course the Z is Zorin loading. While it could be hardware, to be honest where it’s hanging for you makes me wonder about how well your Zorin video driver suits your actual hardware, based on some similar issues I had with Fedora doing the exact same thing that you describe.

I am still learning Linux myself so I am not the best person to tell you what to do, but I know where I’d start if I were in your shoes: use the lshw command (see below) to get the details on your actual hardware, specifically the graphics chip; see if anyone else is having similar problems with the same graphics hardware; and in the meantime put Mint on a LiveUSB and run Mint for a while to see if it performs better or ends up doing the same thing.

That’s just beginner tips off the top of my head; I know you will get better advice if you run your problem by the Linux communities, esp because they can tell you how to capture the load process to see exactly what’s causing it to hang, and I’m just guessing. But at least you now have some hints of where to start.

Quick primer on lshw: To use lshw to see your hardware specs, type at a command prompt:

sudo lshw -short

If it says it’s not installed, to install it type

sudo apt-get install lshw

That will get you started, I hope. Either way, whatever you do will get you further toward a solution, whether that solution is a different distro or tweakling this one. I hope this helps.

Love it. Just wrote a separate comment about it. I ran the free versions for over a year, then decided to go to paid just to support the project. Paid gives you GUI for appearance adjustments and desktop “personalization” but not a whole lot else; other than superficials like that, under the hood the free version is exactly the same. I can’t remember what the Zorin folks say about it, get the details directly from them of course, but IMO don’t feel like you have to buy the paid version to get a true taste of how it will work for you.

EDITED to add: This incessant, eternal negging shit from the Linux crowd kept me away from Linux for a long time. I found OPs question legitimate, which is why I answered it, but whether you like Zorin or not noobs should not be downvoted for simply soliciting opinions on a distro. I’m very fortunate that some people were generous enough with their time and answering questions to make me give it another go, but there were over thirty years between the first time I tried Red Hat that came on a dozen 3.25" floppies in the early 90s, and last year when I tried Linux again: that absence had EVERYTHING to do with the core haters that apply purity tests to any mention of any Linux distro that they personally find some fault in. Seriously, for the sake of Linux, shut the fuck up and piss off, unless you’re just concern trolling for Microsoft or some shit, in which case you’re doing a fine job, never stop.

Just for clarity, when you say it won’t boot, where in the boot process does it fail? Do you get as far as loading the BIOS, do you get a little way into the OS and then it crashes, or does it just not start at all?

I ask because depending on how far it gets into the boot process, you may not be looking at a software problem at all. Generally speaking, you have to get past the BIOS and into the bootloader before assuming the problem has to do with your choice of OS.

Further comments may have been disabled, but a number of them are still up and are highly entertaining:

https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336

Zorin is working out really well for me, esp on my older machines with slower processors and less RAM that choke a little on fuller distros. I enjoy the KDE Plasma distros, for example, but they’re a little too heavy for my older boxes and I was getting a lot of video stutter and unexplained shutdows, etc. I don’t get that with Zorin or Mint. For me Mint works just as well as Zorin and picks up all my hardware just as handily, it just feels a little basic for what I’m used to. But Zorin hits just right in every direction for my needs. It’s a good distro for Windows noobs, that’s for sure.

It’s from an Arthur Conan Doyle story; Sherlock solved the case of the horse stolen at night by noting that the dog didn’t bark, ergo, the dog was a direct familiar of the person who stole the horse, because it would have barked at a stranger. It’s a statement about guilt, and how silence is itself a powerful accusation in the right context, like when you’d expect a dog to bark (or a noise to be made in a way it usually is) but strangely nothing happens, all remains silent.

The way the phrase is used in the email is a bit off because the guilty party is neither a barking or non-barking dog, but look at the date of the email: April, 2011, after Epstein’s first conviction and around the time that victims started filing serious lawsuits, especially Virginia Giuffre, and going after the powerful men who not only abused them but then defamed them.

At the time this was written, the previously reliable walls of wealth, connection, and privilege were already unraveling, Epstein was getting sued, the media kept poking around, his own moneyed friends were already starting to distance themselves . . . so in this email Epstein is essentially pointing to the unspoken guilt surrounding the ONE person in the middle of all his troubles for whom the dog hasn’t barked.

I think the one that was blocked was https://www.youtube.com/@Endermanch (but they’re both up now).

deleted by creator

If you’re not actively curating your own choice of reading material and are relying on unknown others to make those choices for you, then you absolutely deserve everything you are “forced” to read.

But even that is far too generous: nobody held a gun to your head loaded with the article you clearly did not read, lol.

Akshara Ashok @happyfluffcomics

I’m old enough to remember when Serpico posters were ubiquitous. They were the height of cool for a hot half minute. Then they became what latecomers thought were an indication of coolness. (You can even see them occasionally in other movies of the same period, as a background prop set designers used to make a statement about the personality of a character.)

Then they were largely replaced with Farrah posters, lol. Priorities.

I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)

Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.

Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.

I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.

I can’t judge you for that, I feel like you probably got the very best Copilot has to offer, lol

With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. [1]

Does anybody actually believe that 68% of consumers use or even want Copilot? But they included a source for this very generous assertion at the bottom of the page:

[1] Based on Microsoft-commissioned online study of U.S. consumers ages 13 years of age or older conducted by Edelman DXI and Assembly, 1,000 participants, July 2025.

Oh yeah, that’s compelling: US consumers, 13 years old and older. An entire thousand of them!

So the only question I have left is which junior high principal Microsoft “compensated” for this survey, and what happened to the 320 summer school attendees who said fuck you, no anyway.