I'm gonna have to strongly disagree... I have all those health issues, and they keep getting worse, I can't remember the last time I had sex, I've got a massive shiny forehead where hair used to be, and so on. But actually, I am better off today than I was in my 30s and 40s and this is basically due to one reason: I've stopped putting pressure on myself on fulfilling the life that I thought I needed to have. I've spent so much time trying to do the "right thing“, especially as a father, but it turned out that all my worries and all the effort I've put into doing the right thing were unhealthy for me and life had its own plans anyway.

I realized that the world doesn't really care about what I do and that lead to the realization that I can do whatever the fuck I want. So now, the pressure is relieved and I'm trying to focus on things I enjoy doing instead of chasing some life plan. I still have depressive phases, but not caring so much about things that I deemed super important a few years ago has made things much easier. Also I found that people have no power over you if you let them know you don't care. You don't need to pretend to be happy to anyone. You can choose just not to play their game of toxic positivity and enjoy being your own grumpy old self. I definitely do.

I've recently seen some statistics about perceived happiness by age distribution. Turns out, it's sort of an inverted bell curve. People in your age group are feeling significantly worse off because the more positive youth experiences are still quite fresh while you're not ready yet to adequately deal with the downsides of adulthood. This is a kind of midlife crisis. The good news is: It will get better, statistically.

And a more personal note from someone suffering from intermediate depressed states: It might not really help you right now, but there is a soothing realization in that most of the burden you are feeling right now is only in your head. A different state of mind is possible, but you'll have to work on it. The big foggy cloud surrounding your head is not THE reality but your current perception of reality and that can be changed. Sometimes it helps to just get a different perspective, and you'll get to that if you try new things that look even mildly interesting. Get out of your so-called comfort zone (which isn't that comfortable anyway as you know by now) and do little things every day that you haven't done before. Even if the specific things you are trying out might turn out to be a failure, you'll discover other interesting things along the way. A word of warning... Don't let anyone guilt trip you, if you try new things. Your environment usually doesn't want you to change and that can be a problem, because if you change yourself your environment has to deal with that change too. So make sure you find people who support you as a human being, instead of just supporting your role as a good parent, employee or debtor. Also check for yourself if all the things you feel obligated to do have to be done in the exact way you are doing them right now. Maybe there are some adjustments to be made to gain more personal freedom, to get regular breaks from the chore in your daily life.

Good Luck!

Could be snapless in a minimal install, but if you need Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird or a bunch of other useful stuff they all come as a snap package

Can someone point me to technical/learning resources about NPUs? So far all I have seen is superficial marketing talk and ads. And on top of that, everything existing in the AI/ML sector still seems to require beefy server hardware. So is there any real point to NPUs at all?

I'm in a similar situation. I've used Kubuntu (Ubuntu + KDE) for more than a decade now, and it has mostly worked beautifully. Over the years, memorable problems were a few issues with GPU drivers, GRUB shenanigans and the occasional amateurish KDE UX fuckup. But in general I found the whole experience much better than what I saw on Windows during the time.

However, for a while now Ubuntu is breaking my #1 rule of software products: Do not annoy your users. Every update they are trying to push (and fix) their useless Snap architecture a bit more, and every updates makes things effectively worse. Examples: displaying annoying popups to tell you that Snap app x needs to be updated and that the app has to be closed for that, but not updating it when closing the app, trying to fix that in the latest version by auto installing the latest snap with a popup and progress bar when closing the app (making me wait to turn off my computer till it's finished - I just finished my work and want to go home please), numerous interoperability issues because snap apps run in some kind of sandbox and don't play nice with regular (Debian and Linux) mechanisms, and so on. It's an absolute shitshow, and I think they have now annoyed me, personally, long enough. I need to find something better.

Ah. I just needed that off my chest. Maybe I should give Mint a try

I think OP wants something that also minimizes the "set“ part. Arch is for enthusiasts who like to put a lot of effort into creating their own perfect Linux system. I've tried it once and to be perfectly honest I don‘t want to fiddle around with basic settings if there is no need to. I'm pretty busy with other things in my life and want stuff to work out of the box with sane defaults if possible. It's essential that stuff can easily be customized afterwards though.

Arch is very good for people who want to invest time into learning what goes on under the hood. Perfectly valid use case, but probably not for OP.

“legal at the time“ - I guess native indians who were displaced from their land would see things differently

Just call it Ecmascript and be done with it. The name JavaScript was misleading from the beginning. Well, Ecma sounds like a skin disease but who cares.

“Is a $100 Dunkin’ Donuts gift card for a trash collector wrongful?” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the court’s opinion. “What about a $200 Nike gift card for a county commissioner who voted to fund new school athletic facilities? Could students take their college professor out to Chipotle for an end-of-term celebration?”

In my country government employees (including teachers) can't legally accept gifts above €10 in value. All of these examples would be illegal here. Sounds petty, but anti-corruption laws are pretty strict for a reason.

Time to resurrect a classic

Yeah I think it's about time to get that feature. As a user I have preferences that don't necessarily match with the defederation policies of any instance and I would very much like to choose for myself which instances I want to see.

In my case: I'm not interested in polarising, divisive, toxic content and I really don't care if it's coming from the left or from the right. But it seems to me that I have to choose a side, because some instances are blocking the right wing extremism and some blocking the stuff to the left, but not both.

Reading subscribed communities only is not an option, because then I will miss out on new stuff. And blocking all these awful communities in "all" by hand is too much work.

tl;dr not being able to block instances as a user is giving me a bad Lemmy experience

I don't like this story. The outcome is only accidentally good and what the author seems to miss entirely is the elephant in the room: A crass failure to communicate with the developers. If you try to establish something like KPIs (not commenting on if that is good or bad here) you need to talk to the team and get them on board. If you treat them like lab rats and try to measure individual performance from the outside that is an obvious fail. In the end, where they state that they "quietly" dropped it, indicates that the real lesson was not learned.

Uh, and a dilbert comic.