And life has been transformed! Everything is wonderful now!

Anyone else get free Ubuntu CDs shipped to their house? I think I had 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) shipped to my house back in 2007.

Otherwise, Mandrake Linux was my first "good" distro. I first tried one called Lycoris which claimed to be an beginner's distro with it's own DE, and it was impressive how well it handled setting up a dual boot installation and at the time it was a revelation that I could use a computer without Windows. I didn't begin preferring linux until I tried Mandrake with KDE 3, though.

I think in threads where an obviously well-informed computer user asks a question about how to accomplish something or troubleshoot something in Windows, it's pretty much never helpful to recommend using Linux instead. They probably know about Linux. They either must, or want to use Windows. It's a pretty common occurrence, however.

Though these days, you might get to recommend Linux anyway by saying "you should use wsl2."

Elon Musk is a brilliant inventor nonpareil. He invented tunnels, rockets, electric cars, and now Twitter.

To protect her privacy, of course

The problem, as I'm sure you know, is that a home server is not fit for purpose for the vast majority of people. Managing that is a fun project for some, but a complete non starter for most.

I think it's an alright compromise. I rarely move my expansion cards around. I use four USB-C cards and sometimes swap one out for a storage card that has Windows installed on it.

I don't think so. Enforcing two-factor auth to be allowed to do certain things with an account just makes sense. It's definitely not an attempt to squeeze profit out of users per se, but rather an attempt to limit liability and the risk of costly support problems caused by passwords being compromised.

In my case, the major upside is that I make federation choices, not someone else. I prefer to be as openly federated as possible.

This is why I prefer using my own instance- I don't want these federation choices made for me by people like this.

My first question is "how long ago?" Because if I'm talking to a 30 year old who was a nazi at 20, then I'm not even suspicious. If it was much more recent, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt but I'll keep an eye on em. I don't want people whose sympathies are changing from far right to far left to think that they will always be unwelcome, but I have to be wary of bad faith actors.

https://lemmyverse.net/ has been invaluable to me as someone running a very low member-count (for now?) instance. This is a directory of communities on all known instances.