We meet again! I'm Honduran. The Zelaya family is knee-deep in shit due to the ex-president's brother being outed as having made deals with drug Lords, heavily implying the Zelaya family is in the drug business, which surprises absolutely nobody because that's been their history for decades, and because we've been a "narco estado" for far too long. There's no right wing or left wing bullshit here, it's all a fight for control of a drug state. If anything, this has actually hurt the left's appearance to the people after over a decade of not having them in the spotlight. Castro has done more to damage the left wing movement than she has done to advance it.

We voted the right wing drug lord out of the country and into extradition, you bet your ass we'll do our best to try and do the same to the left wing drug lord.

The real problem liberals have with Trump isn't with his lies

No, it really is. He lies and lies and makes almost everything up, and all every normal person sees is the trump cult eating it all up. Trump says he won, and people go fight for him thinking he did win. Then turns out he admits he lost, and NOW those same trump supporters are angry that he lied to them.....when it's been so obvious to everyone else.

He lies about his intentions, since he clearly likes the power and has profited himself off it, but his supporters think he's being honest? Maybe he's being blunt where others would be more formal and evasive, but he's not being honest, almost ever. If he stands to gain nothing personally, he puts 0 effort into it, and his supporters confuse it as him being honest. It's so bizarre that they miss it, I genuinely don't understand it. They just attribute so much purpose to his actions where there is none beyond the need to satisfy his ego and fill his pockets. He couldn't care less about "exposing the fascist state", hell, he's clearly trying to create one under his rule and for his benefit.

It pains me to think that the far left could argue in bad faith, but strawmanning "the libruls" and then making them out to be the radicalized left's enemy, when they're the source of most radicalized lefties.....it just makes no sense to me.

Wooooosh

What relevance does Linux have in this specific context? Does Linux have a marketing team? Does Linux compete on a hardware level with Apple? Is there a Linux corp we haven't heard about that's working with some chip manufacturer we also haven't heard about in order to create ARM processors that can compete with Apple silicon? No? Maybe don't shoehorn Linux into everything regardless of relevance, especially not in such a lane way.

Speaking as someone who's still transitioning from windows to Linux on his machines...

1. My main concern is that the software I use should feel like it's there for ME, not for the company it's from. Windows does not feel like it's putting me first. Many have covered all the reasons in detail, but I don't like having to fight my OS to get things the way I want them.... Which is funny because

2. Yeah, its fun to tinker with Linux, but there is some fighting to get it to do what you want, especially when you're new to it. For instance, I'm on KDE, I set up a very aesthetic top bar with a calendar & time widget in the middle. It took me MONTHS and countless small sessions of reading to get my email's events and special dates to show up on the calendar. I was missing KOrganizer, as well as some extra settings that only show up on the calendar widget if you have KOrganizer installed. I've yet to figure out how to refresh the data to get up to date info, because so far it seems like the data just stays stale. I'll eventually get to it.

I also randomly corrupted my partition during an update and spent a good 5 hours getting it back. I'm experienced enough that I wasn't worried at all, and I was even enjoying the process at the beginning....but by the end of it, I was just annoyed. The solution? Yeah my distro's documentation mentions a specific command, "rebuild-kernels" which instantly fixed my partition. It was like the second sentence in an article about my bootloader. I felt stupid for how simple that was, compared to how much I was doing with other suggestions I found online....

So yeah, point is, it's tough, and I personally am not fond of it, since I just want my PC to let me do my thing while I let it do its thing. Even then, I would still rather deal with that kind of thing than deal with Microsoft's or Apple's shenanigans (also, kinda hoping that immutable distro's aren't as tedious, even though I know they will be, cause I think that would be an even more ideal system, one that's very tough to corrupt).

3. I totally get the sentiment on overpowered hardware. The nice thing about this era of Computing is that you can do a lot of things that you currently pay for as a service online. You just need some of that overpowered hardware you might already have lying around. Want to stop paying for a cloud photo backup? You can spin up an immich server. Too many streaming services with too little content? Fuck em, spin up a Jellyfin or Plex instance, automate content downloads with Arr services, hell, create your own subtitles with a speech to text language model running on your own equipment. Philips suddenly wants you to have an account to turn on your lightbulbs? Throw in home assistant to the stage, tell your lightbulbs to know their place. LastPass leaked your passwords? Throw them into Vaultwarden, throw your second factor in there as well (or don't, convenience vs security, and I'm too fucking lazy to care).

The amount of stuff that can be self hosted is insane, and it can absolutely replace a lot of the things you're currently using, and it can all happen in a specialized Linux-based OS for running a bunch of services, such as Proxmox, TrueNAS Scale, unRAID, etc.

In the end, though, there's a lot of "having to learn new things" and "loving to tinker" needed for a lot of it. It's fine that your average user isn't interested. It's sad for those of us who care, who truly believe we need to regain most of our freedom from this tech, but it's totally not the end of the world either. Maybe there's no appeal to the average user....yet.

My advice would always be to try, say, Linux mint on a spare laptop, and force yourself to use it for casual stuff. Give it a try, and if it geeks out on you too much for your liking, you go back to your platform of choice. No biggie, it just doesn't hurt to see what's on the other side. Who knows, maybe you don't mind the casual tinkering that you may encounter, maybe you don't even feel a difference in day to day use compared to your platform of choice, or hopefully you like it even more because it might do things in an easier manner than you're used to. If that's the case, then think about whether you're ok with Apple's walled garden, or Microsoft's occasional antitrust infringements, or if you might simply want something to work your way and not the creating company's way.

Yeah, as someone else mentioned, this step is just for creating a folder. You probably need to get more intimate with the commands you're running to understand the process better, but I would honestly take a step back and use something more streamlined for these things.

Someone mentioned Proxmox for these things. I would also mention TrueNAS Scale. Both of those make it so that the process of spinning up containers and VMs becomes a lot more streamlined and easy to follow. They also forego a UI on the equipment you're using, opting for a web UI you'd access from another device instead. Make no mistake, this is a good thing. 99% of things you'll be wanting to do anywhere will be through web UIs, so that's where you'll want to be. The 1% of the time where you'll be seeing your laptop server's screen (or an SSH terminal) will be the most painful 1% of your life, and it will be when you misconfigured something and the web UI becomes inaccessible (on that note, also make sure to at least configure SSH access on something so you understand how that works). I've had to do this plenty of times with my pfsense box, and as a relative noob to these things as well, having to use nano and vim for editing pfsense configs to revive my server.....it's fucking horrible (sorry vim enjoyers). The good news is, you learn the hard way, but you learn. Try not to have this happen to you, or you'll be back here soon. Once you've had a lot more experience with your tinkering, this will seem less daunting and you'll be more comfortable debugging directly on your laptop server screen.

TrueNAS Scale, as the name implies, is better suited for when you want to include NAS Capatbilities on your setup. Since you mention things meant for Plex/Jellyfin setups, I'd say you could start there.

However you do mention a laptop, so I'm imagining a very basic setup where you probably have limited space or a couple of USB drives or something. You could, instead, opt for Proxmox. You lose the specific capabilities of creating complex RAID setups that TrueNAS would give you, but it sounds like you wouldn't be needing those anyways, as they better fit a setup where you have a bunch of disks connected through SATA or PCIe interfaces. Proxmox is a lot more specialized for containers and VMs so it's probably a good tool to get acquainted with, and might be better suited for a setup where you have just the laptop and maybe a couple of drives to toy around with.

Whichever you choose, make sure to watch YouTube videos about it, read the docs, truly understand what's going on with that tool first, as well as how to set it up correctly. This will introduce networking concepts to you in the process, as you'll need to understand how to access the computer through the network with a browser, as well as with SSH. Make sure you don't ignore networking knowledge. It might seem daunting, or skippable (why bother with local domain names when you can just use the IP and port number?), but a lot of networking concepts are actually rather simple to follow, take a moment on the first few tries but become very easy to reproduce afterwards, and it will make your life easier (yeah turns out, now there's 20 services and you forgot what ports are for what service...if only you had dedicated time to telling the network that port 69420 was for radarr.localdomain and port 42069 was for sonarr.localdomain).

I'd check out Lawrence Systems on YouTube. They make videos covering networking configs with pfsense and the like, as well as TrueNAS configs, and maybe they've delved on Proxmox? Craft Computing, another YouTube channel, for sure teaches about Proxmox. There's tons of video guides for *arr services, I haven't looked for platform-specific configs, but I'm sure you can find both videos for Proxmox and TrueNAS Scale configs. Once you get your first one, most other *arr services are very similarly configured (though not all are, some are very quirky).

Another thing you'll need to understand is how containers work, as well as how to map things from outside the containers into them. Containers are, well, contained, and mappings are how you expose parts of the container to the outside. You'll probably be guided to map things such as your data and the service's config files from outside the container to better organize and persist those things. Make sure you understand this concept, where things are on your setup, where they're getting mapped to in the container, and what this means when it comes to modifying the container (hint: it means you can delete or upgrade the container and things still work exactly as you configured them once your container is back up).

Maybe a controversial advice, but I'd steer clear of the console unless it can't be helped, since you honestly can do a lot from the UI for the vast majority of things you'll need to do. If you DO need to use the console, however, I'd bother ChatGPT and documentation for whatever youre doing, to make sure you understand what every command you try does. Things like "sudo mkdir xyz" should be crystal clear to you. In the case of this failed command, for instance, you should be aware that mkdir doesn't create entire paths, but rather only specific folders. If the preceding folder doesn't exist, the command fails, so if /home doesn't exist, nothing else will work. If /home/user doesn't exist, you're not going to be creating /jackett_config, and so on. Sudo is also a very powerful keyword, which means whatever follows it is an order from the big boss and must be obeyed. As such, absolutely make sure you understand any command that starts with "sudo", as those are the ones that can easily set fire to your entire config. If you don't understand what it's doing, don't run it.

While we are on the subject of folder structures, theres no shame in looking up videos and docs explaining the Unix file structure. If youre coming from windows, this is a veeeeery easily confusing bit, and understanding where you are is very helpful.

Hopefully some of my ramblings make sense to you. Hit me up, or hit the community up, if you need more specific guidance. Things can seem daunting at first, especially if you're new to Unix, but I promise you it becomes easier as you build good foundational knowledge.

Are you from the US? Aren't they phasing this out?

No the fuck it's not. It's used for everyone, it's been used for everyone for decades at this point. Throwing a tantrum over being called a dude is plain fucking stupid, no girl I know takes issue with being called a dude, and they call each other dude. Shit's genderless a f.

New to AC what do you mean by floaters? Are tetra legs not considered floaters?

The whole sticker implementation is absolute dog shit. How hard could it be to do a half decent implementation with customizable keywords for searching, custom sticker categorization, and backups? I have hundreds, if not over a thousand, stickers and it's impossible to access them quickly to find the one you want. You end up just adapting to whatever is on your most used list, and you're stuck scrolling for a while to find a different sticker, which In an active chat group it means you end up reacting super late to everything and the chat has moved on at that point.

MSN and the MSN+ plugin had this nailed down 20 years ago. Even telegram has a better implementation where you just add the entire sticker library for each new sticker; you end up with stickers you didn't ask for, which is a negative, but everything ends up categorized in SOME way at least.

Its also ridiculous that whatsapp can't be bothered to offer sticker creation in-app.

Dont get me started on chat participants count limitations and how utterly USELESS archiving a chat is. You can mute the chat and archive it, and a single message will just pop it back to the top of your list, as if you weren't trying to actively avoid that. And whatsapp has been pretty useless for big chat groups such as big neighborhoods and the like. My HOA hasn't added me or my friends to the neighborhood chat groups historically due to size limitations, which in itself perpetuated a toxic approach from the HOA where only sycophants are allowed into these groups. Most neighbors are left in the dark over decisions and meetings, which is utter stupidity and has 100% been aggravated by whatsapp's limitations. Doesn't matter that they've implemented alternatives to this, you try to get hundreds of boomers to understand how to use community chats.

And that's exactly the problem, it's by design to pull you into a proprietary ecosystem and squeeze you for your money. Since companies have more incentive to make things NOT work across platforms than they do to work together, we're not getting out of this mess without government regulations in the countries that matter (so, USA and Europe.... Mostly Europe...)

Case in point: Apple and USB C, or phones and removable batteries.