YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!

Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out “uh…emails and productivity and things.”

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.

This is awesome!

It’s not just convenient for them to do it; it’s how they are able to evade anti-trust action (not that the U.S. is great at it anyway but still). I also run my own mail server. It’s not impossible, and I wouldn’t even say it’s even hard. It’s just time consuming to set up (if it’s the first time), and there are a lot of hurdles to make it so impractical that it’s virtually impossible to the average person. Only the most patient or those who have a real desire to run their own mail server will even attempt it. Anyone can set up their own mail server, but most won’t because it’s not worth it compared to using something that just works from Google.

I agree with this in general, but you still may want to consider using Windows or Mac if there’s university only software that is Windows/Mac-based and doesn’t play nicely with VMs, which is really common in test-taking software (since it’s essentially spyware). An alternative would be dual-booting if you want to deal with that.

The reason I say this is that when I went back to school and started course work, there was an online class that mandated the use of certain test-taking software. I tried to get it to work in a VM (by masking the clues of being in a VM), and it kept shutting me down. I ultimately had to borrow a friend’s laptop to take all of my quizzes and tests, which was a real pain. Thankfully, I only had that one class like that, but any others would have driven me to get a cheap throw-away Windows-only box.

In the end, I’d stay away from bleeding-edge for school work, so Fedora is probably your better bet, but there may come a time that you will need to use Windows (much to your chagrin).

I’m all about this. When I made my personal webpage, this is how I do it. I’m surprised it’s not more popular (at least for certain things) because it looks nice and clean, is fast, and crucially, is easy to put together. Most webpages don’t need a ton of JS to “accomplish the mission.” I get that not everything can do this, but there are soooooo many sites that can strip down to a more minimal site and have better functionality and a better experience. This is a case of less-is-more.

Congratulations on making the switch! I remember when I switched full time almost 10 years ago. It always feels like there’s something new to explore or to try with your computer. One of the most freeing things I learned was that most things are within my grasp if I put in the effort to learn about it. There’s nothing quite as fun as whittling the day away going down a configuration rabbit-hole to make something just right.

This is so true. Although not popular with people in my field (Computer Science), I highly value my liberal arts and humanities education. Far from being “worthless mandatory classes” (like many in my major believed), I found thee classes to be the most enlightening. I learned to wield algorithms and build software in my major, but I learned why I should and how to think critically about how to do it to best serve people (not to mention just simple communication). If anything, there should be more liberal arts in the curriculum, not less.

Which is really sad. What “conservatives” are representing isn’t even conservative at all; it’s just regressive, authoritarian non-sense. Conservatives (real ones) have an important part to play in a properly working political system (which we don’t have in the United States). Ideally, we’d have a a progressive party and a conservative party; the former looking for reforms anywhere they can, even to the point of burning down the system, and the latter urging caution and ensuring the stability and safety of the system. Instead, the U.S. has a conservative party (Democrats) and a fascist/regressive party (Republicans). So, instead of moving forward with caution, we’re moving backward.

Yeah, I didn’t even get to say that I could change it (though I don’t recommend it) before she wanted to throw the whole thing out for not being “user friendly” enough.

Oh for sure! Sometimes it’s not even when something breaks but just a normal thing that’s different. I used to be a Linux evangelist, and when I convinced my to mom to simply try Linux, she was upset when she had to enter her password to do something (I think it was an update or something) rather than it just doing it. She was mad that it prompted for a password rather than “just updating.”

Explaining that giving permission is much safer than just running everything as Admin did nothing. She hasn’t used Linux since.

It’s funny you say that. I find the Linux way of getting software way more intuitive. Just hop in the terminal and use the package manager. When I used Windows, I always felt like I was doing something shady when I was getting a .exe. With drivers, I’ve only had an issue once; everything else was pre-compiled into the kernel. On Windows, I had driver issues a lot. For those reasons (and others), I switched full time to Linux almost a decade ago.

Totally anecdotal, of course, but I just thought it was funny how our experiences were complete opposites and sent us in complete opposite directions for the same reason.