Nothing like shrews and coffee to get your mind off things 😉👍

I see that you've posted a few new things in the last hour or so; hope this means you're feeling a little better about things.

If I may, Arts & Letters Daily has a lot of interesting links that generally aren't too overly tied to current events, and can provide a nice break from the world as usual. Aeon is also good.

Even a broken clock...

👍I envy you and applaud you at the same time (being serious here, not snarking).

🙏Please don't say that.

Yeah, maybe time to go on a news diet. Just read my local paper online (one that's reputable IMO) and then found something else to do. Not putting my head in the sand, just read the bad news once, processed it (or tried to), and then moved on to something else.

Post-Snowden and post-Windows, I also started with Fedora, and, well, it honestly didn't go all that well (this of course was my experience! If you like Fedora and it works for you, then 👍! Not here to dis the distro!). Actually, I think it had more to do with GNOME than with Fedora, so it depends on which desktop environment you're using; when I switched DE to Cinnamon all my problems seemed to vanish into thin air. And from there, I just went straight to Mint and have been happy as a clam ever since and never looked back.

In my experience, running Windows as a VM inside Mint was overall much better than dual booting, which can really get to be a pain after a while (and also I think that the Windows partition will sometimes overwrite the Linux part so be careful!); it sounds hard, but it isn't—if old and senile Erinaceus can do it, you can too! Always happy to provide recommendations.

EDIT: Also (and again not to step on anyone's toes), I never had good luck using Wine; this is perhaps because I was trying to run Photoshop and other heavy, Adobe-type things in it (this was before Creative Cloud). Other programs might work differently with it, but in every case for me, a VM has worked better. I don't play games (I know, boring), but I sometimes wonder if it wasn't for people's dependence on Adobe products that Windows might finally start losing a lot of market share and eventually end up on the rubbish heap where it belongs.

Ok, nobody told me not to, so here it is!

???

RHVoice worked for me.

🙂👍