Bonus points, once you feel comfortable with the software manager learn how to update Mint with the “apt” commands in the terminal. This will make you feel like an elite hacker while simultaneously teaching you a fast way to do a routine task, updating all your software. Make sure to reflect on how long this would have taken on Windows. :D

There were apps out there to help with this when I switched from Spotify to Tidal. I can’t remember the name anymore though. It just sucks up all your saved songs and playlists, matches them in the other service then adds them. Almost everything I had moved over without a problem. I do miss the social aspect of Spotify, being able to share links with friends. No one I know has tidal except the people on my family plan. There are services that will turn your song link into a linktree like page with links for Spotify, tidal, YouTube music, deezer, etc., but that’s clunky.

Also, the worst hemmeroids ever and a special CEO diet consisting of nothing but exlax and habanero peppers.

Nextcloud was somewhat difficult for me the first time I installed it, though I did have a usable system in the end. Then I discovered Nextcloud AIO and haven’t had an issue since.

I’m no expert. I want to include that disclaimer up front.

Nextcloud with block storage on btrfs with snapshots seems like it could work for you. No idea about VFS though. I’ll leave that question for someone more knowledgeable. The “drive” portion of Nextcloud is quite decent. I regularly use it to pass large files between my phone (Android), laptop (Linux) and gaming desktop (Windows).

Interestingly, a similar problem as with bike infrastructure. The infrastructure isn’t useful until a lot of it is built and it connects everywhere (and timetables get shorter for trains). The infrastructure won’t pass public opinion until it’s proven to be useful to people. I will always vote yes on funding these projects even if I think they will bomb because it puts us a little closer to the peak of that hill. Its still frustrating though. We could easily do like we did with the freeways if we just decided it was worth building.

Agreed. I love trains and it frustrates me to see them bungling the implementation. When they try, they always seem to make the same mistakes trying to bring it to my area.

To see meaningful ridership out here, the train needs to go fast enough to negate the penalty you get at the other end when you have to go from the station to your destination. They wanted to run them at ~55-70mph here, with a few stops between major cities, to parallel a freeway that is 65-75mph. Drive 1 hour (1:10 with parking) or spend 2 hours going to the station, riding a slow train, then going from the station to where you are going? I hate cars, but as someone who only gets a handful of hours to myself after sleep, work, and chores, I’m going to save my time and pick the car. If they ever build the train, as it is planned right now, it’ll just be another commuter train that’s only really used at rush hour when the roads are jammed rather than an all day all week car replacement solution that I can ride to Sunday night dinner at a friends house as easily as a 6am meeting.

/un-requested rant

Yes, I’m several years into my de-googling process and a solid email client is not something I’m worried about. K9 is great and, as Thunderbird, we can only hope that it gets better.

I bought my first handheld anything, the Palm Zire 31 in high school. Everyone thought I was weird, but I was also organized. :P

And the Tidal app has an amoled dark mode, which I don’t think Spotify has. Sometimes the little quality of life things make a big difference.

I’d be active in there. So many companies hide their pricing and gimmicks so you don’t know until you start using it. There’s few advertisements for useful unshittifying tools like RES or the one that fixes Facebook, tools that let you download Instagram photos, etc. Free alternatives like grrrrmin which can generate strava-likeheatmaps from your Garmin data can also be hard to find. Lemmy has been good for this, as Reddit once was. There are a lot if things that are only usable to me after extensive unshittifying.

I switched from Spotify when they cut my family off of my plan because some of them don’t always live with me. I like Tidal a lot, but wish it was easier for me to share a song with friends who don’t use it. Ironically, I don’t think any family members but my dad actually use my Tidal plan, so basically I just switched out of spite.

Those last 2 lines really sum it up don’t they. If Windows was a family member you would disown them.

I had to do all the same things on my work computer. If MS could stop shitting all over my taskbar that would be an amazing expression of basic decency. I’m about to go to IT and ask for a Linux computer that I can test with my day to day tools to make sure everything works. Typically only a few devs have them and those of us in support roles are on Windows. Microsoft is literally sapping away the time and effort my employer has paid me to put towards their customers. I use Linux at home and it has none of these problems. Actually, the worst problem I’ve had in years was a broken package that I simply uninstalled and re-added from a different source.

I think this is mostly because people who know about it have a mental block that it’s only for nerds. Millions have been using Android on their phones for years, though we’ll limit ourselves to desktop GNU/Linux type distributions for this discussion.

Actual usage of Linux has gotten much easier since 2006ish when I first tried it out. With all the popups and ads in Windows nowadays, its rapidly becoming harder to use than Linux, something I did not expect. I don’t see a combined Linux User Group/ Bingo Club/ Bridge Group forming anytime soon, but Linux Mint isn’t any harder to use than Windows, even for normies with an average level of tech skills.

I think when you press the button to cross a spike strip should automatically deploy directly on the stop line. Inching into the ped area with just the front tires will cost you two tires, running the light costs 4 and probably some scratches in the paint.

This appears to be what I’ve been looking for. I can’t wait to try it. Thanks for sharing.

You mean after the price hike they also hiked the number of ads? I canceled when they hiked the price and managed to get it down to the old price a few months later, so I renewed for the personal heatmap. Looks like I’m definitely canceling again. I doubt they’ll give me the price break twice anyway.

Baking ads into a timeline like Strava and some other apps do has to be the worst app trend ever.

I live in suburbia and the grocery store on the edge of my neighborhood is accessible via a dirt desire path. This beats so many of my friends neighborhoods, but these numbskulls couldn’t pour the 20 feet of sidewalk to connect the commercial to the residential, even though the sidewalk has a 2 foot long spur where it should be. 100% car brained.

Still, running to the store on my bike is just as fast as driving, if not a few mins faster.

You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It’s the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most “reputable” tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.