An interesting real time experiment to see how long it takes for stratification caused echo chambers and/or extremists zealots from both ends of the political spectrum to seize control of the platform. Turning the platform into a hellscape of zealots fighting each other for dominance and the eradication of all the others.

Sadly, humans as a rule need adult guidance for polite interactions to prevent violence. The sad part is it has become impossible to pick said adult capable of doing the job. And anyone in their right mind should run from such a job anyway.

That’s nice. But those are not the parts that generally die. Now get the control board that runs the whole show-- that’s the main failure point. See what that would cost to replace. I just searched for the control board for my 12 year old Maytag front loader. One source only: $367 dollars, (they know what they got). Is a 12 year old washer with limited parts availability really worth that much money to fix to scrape a couple of more years out of it if the motor goes tits up in 2 more years? I can drive to town and buy a basic top loader and haul it home and have it installed by this afternoon for just $200 more. And it will probably be fine for the next 10 to 12 years. (I’ll probably be dead by then away).

I just replaced a 10 year old dishwasher this last summer because the pump was dying. No replacement to be had on the whole planet. I need to replace an 8 year old microwave now because the handle is broken and the door cant be be disassembled to replace it without destroying the door. If I could get it apart, I’d be 3D printing a new handle as I type. And I’m not even going to bother searching for a whole new door.

Cheap easy repairs on washing machines are long a thing of the past. Between proprietary digital potted control boards to 3 phase motors, the parts ain’t cheap. (I’ve bought a few to repair them before I learned better) To the sheer unavailability of the repair parts. Make fixing you washer and dryer a time consuming, expensive, and often impossible task.

By the time you figure out the time spent searching for the part you need, the availability of said part, the cost of the part, the expected life of the rest of the machine, cost of all the time spent, you can pretty much be sure it’s cheaper and faster to just buy a new one. I can’t think of one major appliance I owned in the last 30 years that was worth the time and effort to repair. And I’ve tried repairing washers, dryers, dishwashers, microwaves, and refrigerators.

The only washers I’ve ever owned and were worth fixing was those old wringer/washers your Great Grandmother had when she was young. Straight up mechanical machines run by one simple switch, a vee belt, shafts and gears. That’s the reason those machines could keep going for 30 or 40 years.

And resulting health data sold for mere pennies. So health targeted ads can be flooded to your personal device.

I am a veteran of that war. I shitposted for Vim. The scars that war left will never heal. The nice doctor here is trying to get me to use nano. Baby steps she says. But she say says soon I will be using Kwrite.

:q No wait! I think I meant :q! Crap, I wanted to save that. :wq

It’s been the Year of the Linux Desktop for for 30+ years now. So any decade now right?

And I say this as a Linux user since Red Hat 5 and Mandrake 6. And I’m typing this from Fedora 40 KDE Plasma…

RTFM Noob!

Those are the lazy people. Lazy people refuse to learn new things. You don’t sound lazy.

Don’t be like them. Hang out with those people that piss excellence.

I suspect it might be easier to teach high school students. You get them younger and they don’t know no better. Fewer things to unlearn. But the skill gaps can be eye opening for sure. I’m old as dirt. I got my feeble tech start in front of a printer terminal-- we didn’t have such things as monitors. I don’t think I saw my first DOS prompt until I was maybe 19 or 20. But we stilled played Oregon Trail and some Space Invader game. And we loved it!

And the first rule of KDE is “There is ALWAYS a widget!”

As a “boomer” myself, I do know the secret of the ‘right click: Save as’. Who do you think thought up the idea-- that’s right, a Boomer. And we taught Gen X about it. Not my fault they didn’t pass on the ancient and now arcane knowledge to future generations. But I suppose you need to know how to use a mouse before you can right click anything. Having attempted to teach 3D CAD to high school students, my first job was to show them how to use a mouse and why fingers and CAD don’t mix. And do it before we could actually move on to the subject matter they were supposed to be learning.

Still I do use an app for rotate my backgrounds and quotes. The app Variety works well with KDE Plasma with a large selection of repositories to choose from with beautiful backgrounds without taking up extra space on my drives. But what do I know, I’m just a boomer.

I do enjoy all the NASA photos and National Geographic backgrounds served up to me on a rotating basis without needing to take up local storage space to do so. But I ain’t running Windows either.

It’s actually not. Tesla just won’t care until the feds sue them in court for it.

The data on that is all there. Records like car fatalities are collected mainly through law enforcement reports and states have registration numbers. But the question is, how centralized is the data? City, county, state, or federal? There is a lot of data that simply isn’t required to be collected to a central agency to keep track of.

Tesla’s do cost more to insure than ‘average’ cars. But, that extra cost reflects more the cost to repair minor/moderate damage than cost of fatalities. Since fatalities are just a smaller subset accidents. Tesla’s are extremely costly to repair and often get totaled vs repaired. Premiums reflect that cost of loss.

3% of 250 million could very well be the approximate number of cars on the roads that are involved in a fatal collision. And that is the only consideration of the article in this study.

So it’s a matter of personal choices rather than one of necessity. To be honest I do the same with some of the software that Fedora installs, (I don’t need a suite like OpenOffice-- Abbiword and gnumeric are all I really need anymore), and some very specialized programs I use that most people have no need of. But none that has little to do with not having productive and usable software populating your first time boot.

So nothing to really make Windows actually useful on reboot. In nearly the same amount of time with a Linux distro, you get a system that may well not need anything extra to be productive with on 1rst reboot.

(And yes, I have installed both OS systems from scratch dating back to dos).

Did you also get most of the extra software installed at the same time or did you need to spend extra time getting all your non-OS software installed to make your computer actually useful?

Been there done that. Got the tee shirt.

While good support to customers is very valuable, trying to support a product that is decades old and shares nothing in common with current products is a plain waste of time energy and money.

It would require someone to search out all the documentation needed to make that one part, then you need to figure out the correct process to make said part, determine if you have material on hand or need to special order something, then try to find that one old jig/fixture needed amongst a building full of 100’s of such items for the right one. Then you need to be sure that the the complete fixture is there and nothing is worn out beyond use. Then you need to make time to insert this one-off semi-custom part into the manufacturing process.

By the time you do all this, that one 20 year old obsolete part will have perhaps cost you thousands of dollars and you still haven’t made the first piece of swarf. Imagine the shock and surprise that customer would have when they get the bill that accurately reflects the true cost.

Then it’s a habit not a fear. I also am comfortable with the cli since I started with Linux back at RedHat 5 and Mandrake 6. It was learn it or die in those days. But as time has passed, I find myself using it less and less because I don’t really need it everyday. But while I might need to google a specific command because I forgot it, I still remember it’s possible and handy.

For daily use, you don’t need the command line. Only in fairly rare instances do you need to resort to it when things go wrong. And those commands are a mere google away. So don’t let the that big bad scary terminal stand in your way. It’s not the stumbling block you think it is.

And there is little to nothing to fear. The big bad terminal and command line isn’t needed for day to day use anymore. It’s been years since the last time I needed to compile anything. And if I ever do need to do that again, something is definitely wrong.