Nice! Thanks for sharing this analysis.

I thought our primary way of producing new Linux users was sexual reproduction and then indoctrination from birth…

Interesting. I would have guessed that Mint gave ChromeOS a run for it’s money, by now.

Yes. By the porn stats, Linux already crushes ChromeOs. Let’s not take any advice from it.

I’m not sure Grandma and Grandpa would want a steam machine as a replacement for their aging Windows 7 home computer.

Fair. But for my gram, it would have been a slam dunk day one buy. She loved her playstation and only tolerated her PC. She would have called a Steam Machine “my game console that can check email” and would have adored it.

There’s a delightful DC Comics Elseworlds story that amounts to this. It was fun.

Good points. I feel like Fate does a better job staying in the interesting in-between for longer, and also supports “epic” stories a bit better (than other systems I have played).

But I haven’t tried to force Fate to support the newbie to epic growth, because the rulebook calls out that the Fate rules intentionally ignore supporting the ability to play as a helpless nobody.

Hence the number one rule: cool stuff should be done in the game, not your backstory.

I prefer Fate, where the rules practically require having cool stuff in each character’s back story.

Yes. That’s one reason that the Fate system basically disallows characters ever being low level. Low level starts aren’t actually particularly fun, and they can prevent characters from having diverse epic shared backstory.

“A wizards staff has a knob at the end.”

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett

Do you happen to also use Arch?

No. If I did, I would say so!

Haha.

(Apologies to my arch-user peers.)

That could get old. But…

I play Pathfinder, by the way.

Hmm. That matches my recent napkin math guessing where they would land.

It’s a little short of what they probably need, but they can always raise prices in a few months.

Where do you get once every 2 years? Do you never reboot your machine?

I’m hearing you like to reboot your machine unusually often.

The reason I can think of where clicking would be a huge pain in the ass is an automatic task. I have some of those, but I put them on machines that I treat as servers, and the time between reboots is genuinely counted in years, for those machines.

At this point you must be missing the point on purpose.

I wasn’t before, but now I am.

I find your argument distasteful. If you want a server, use a server. But there’s no need to shout to the world that servers require command line use. That’s normal in 2025.

If you treat your laptop like a server, that’s okay. No one is judging. But my grandma isn’t doing that, and it rings hollow to complain so loudly about it in a thread about average users enjoying Linux Mint.

An average user will never even notice the issue you have been complaining about, while enjoying the product for free.

I don’t normally tell people to go open a pull request, but you should do so, if only to get a better understanding of what the community has already given you for free.

Yes. I guess that’s fair though. Most people don’t like change.

So you’re complaining that you have to click on it - once every two years - when you reboot…

That’s rough, buddy.

I joke. But also, I guess if you feel that strongly about wasting my a click, Linux is definitely the OS for you.

In contrast, I set my nephew up with Linux Mint, and he is now slowly converting the rest of his family to open source solutions.

My understanding is that they keep having conversations about privacy news, and he keeps knowing a solution, which sometimes is Android or Linux based. So now his parents will ask me “Is it true the XY protects against YZ and is free?”

It’s been a pretty cool thing to watch.

I find Garyjay helps with this, by mingling videos from other services.

Sometimes by the time I’ve tried one of the first videos to load from other services, the PeerTube results have loaded for me.

Yes.

At this rate, we will be having a “local files are hard for the average user” debate, here, in another decade.

Which, maybe it will be, at that point.

It’s often the ones we most suspected.