Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I’d be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don’t really remember too many people using AIM.

Just Thunderbird is fine for me, has all the features I want and I already get my email there (but even if I didn’t I’d struggle to find an RSS reader with its features).

OpenSUSE, it’s what I’d be using if Fedora didn’t exist.

It was Red Hat Linux 8.0 (not to be confused with RHEL 8), I think, that I first dabbled in Linux, that was around early 2003, and then I moved on to Fedora Core 1. But I went exclusively-Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) in 2006.

I’ve moved around since then but for the last 5 years I’ve ended up back on Fedora, where I’ve been since version 28, now version 39.

4.20 still feels like yesterday

I’m surprised at that, from my experience I think it’s still more normal than not to have analogue clocks at home, and I would always prefer an analogue watch.

It just adds another layer of abstraction when my file manager works just fine. I think it started back in the iPod days, and now you have a generation of people who don’t know how to manage files.

VLC because it works with everything and it doesn’t try to organise my music collection for me.

I was mildly interested until I saw “designed for creators”. Seems like a meaningless marketing term that gets added to everything these days.

That didn’t exist when I tried TW, but that’s something I’ll at least try out on a second machine at some point.

One that might be controversial: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I still have a lot of respect for this distro and I really wanted to like it but it’s just not for me. It’s the fact that major updates could occur any day of the week, which could be time-consuming to install or they could change the features of the OS. It always presented a dilemma of whether to hold back updates which might include holding back critical updates.

So rolling distros aren’t for me, everyone expects to run in to some occasional issues with Arch, but TW puts a lot of emphasis on testing and reliability, so I thought it might be for me. But the reality is I much prefer the release cycle and philosophy of Fedora, I think that strikes the best balance.

I find they’re a pain to use and I only have one out of social pressure, and privacy or not I’m constantly confused on why they’re so popular.

I just use a throwaway account and have the rule of not putting in any data that I don’t want to be read - which is barely anything any way because I do all my computing on my Linux laptop. I figure if they’re collecting location data and recording me then they’re just associating it with “random guy x” because I’ve never given it anything else. I should look in to one of the de-Googled Android distributions but I have so little interest and energy in anything to do with it, if it could be made totally private I would still rarely use it.

Can’t even vote without a Google account.

I don’t think they would do it if they expected that would be the outcome, that’s my scepticism. I think the more likely outcome is that it will turn in to Fediverse by Meta™ in people’s minds.

Doesn’t seem to work? I’ve not been able to search for and find that thread from any Mastodon instance I’ve tried.

Logseq is great, a bit of a learning curve but worth it.

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It’s the best Chromium browser, but unfortunately still a Chromium browser. Pleased to see it in Flathub though.

Or could it be that it might bother them but they just keep quiet and put up with it, assume that it’s part of owning a computer and feel powerless to change anything?

Admittedly I do have the bias of experience which could blind me to the difficulties, when I phrased my first two sentences as questions they were genuine questions. Between work and personal life I must’ve installed Linux in some form at least 200 times over the last 20 years, so I’m not most users.

I’ve also not used Windows in many years, the last I think was when I had to use Windows 7 for work about 10 years ago and I found it extremely difficult to get it to do what I want. If it’s improved then it’s improved.

On the other hand a novice user can ask somebody to install Linux for them, what about that? That’s what my non-techy parents have done, and it’s easier for them to use Linux (they say so) and easier for me to provide technical support for them.

Also yes, avoid Nvidia.