Huh. All that work, just for little ol’ me? Gosh, I’m humbled. I didn’t even know that was going on.

I do try to limit thorn to my piefed account. Sometimes habit tricks me to using it on Midwest.Social, but that’s entirely accidental.

I use a convenience package on top of stow (yas-bdsm), but yeah: stow is foundational.

Yeah. SimpleX has a similar problem, because it’s basically creating a bunch of 1:1 connections between everyone to preserve anonymity - IIRC (I freely admit I could be misremembering this). As I understood, it’s a decent limit, though - more than the 7-12 friend/family group you’d reasonably trust in a chat group.

I did not consider this a blocker - who’s using encrypted chat for large groups? Large group chats are fundamentally insecure; is the use case about anonymity, not encryption?

IME, beyond the install, it’s all distro- and desktop-specific.

• How to find and install apps varies from distro to distro. IIRC, the Mint menu item is something obvious, like “Install software”, but on Arch (you’d have to hate your newbie to throw them into Arch), it requires a chicken/egg finding and installing a graphical installer. If you know the distro, this would be good information - or if you’re helping with the install, create a desktop launcher.
• Showing them where settings are. Surprising to me, this has been super-not-obvious to my newbs. Even though the KDE Settings app is called “settings”, I think Windows and Mac folks are used to looking for settings in a specific place, rather than an app name - and in Windows, there’s can be several ways to get up different settings, like changing display stuff is always in a weird place. Again, maybe a desktop or panel shortcut would help.
• One of my newbs used Mint for two years without opening a shell, so I don’t think that’s an issue. He even found and installed a piece of software he wanted, but I can’t remember if I originally showed him how to the first time. But that’s Mint. He did, however, need help setting up a printer, but that’s because he couldn’t find the settings program; he came from Windows originally.
• Edge cases, like printers and other peripherals, can be hard, and I don’t think any amount of extra documentation is going to help, because almost every difficulty is practically unique. There’s a ton of online help for stuff like that already. And then, if they want to, eg, attach a game controller… well, that’s very specific and again varies by controller. I don’t think you can cover all of these edge cases.
• Games can be hard only because of the indirection of having to install some other software, like Proton or Steam, creating an account, knowing how to check for compatability - there’s a lot of moving parts. It’s not just: go to the game’s web site, buy, download, and install something and run it, like I imagine it is on Windows. So maybe that would be useful - or - again - pre-installing one of the game stores and (surprise) making a shortcut would eliminate that.
• Network connections. Again, I always find figuring out how to get to network configuration in Windows to be hard, and bizarrely having multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, so I’d guess going the other direction would be confusing. Having a note about how to get to the configuration would be handy.

As I think about it, I realize that configuration under KDE of way more encapsulated and clear than on Windows, and people having learned the byzantine and myriad ways of Windows, KDE’s relative simplicity is confusing. Windows people look for configurations in places they’ve learned to look, which aren’t always where they are under KDE (I can’t speak much about Gnome - I don’t use it or set people up with it). MacOS isn’t as bad, having a similar configure-everything-through-a-single-settings-program approach.

Anyway, that’s my experience.

This was many years ago, but since I was learning on the fly and asking Germans for translations of English words and was trying to learn words, I’d gotten in the habit of simplifying my requests. So instead of asking how to say “all of” I asked for “whole”. I also may have phrased it differently where “whole” made more sense - this was 20+ years ago, and I don’t remember exactly what was said.

I would still like to understand why Jami is never mentioned in these posts. I’m not aware of any technical or security objections, and the less I hear about Jami, the more concerned I become about using it.

I was living in Germany and was learning Germman on the fly and was with my sister and her girl friends at Octoberfest, and I wanted to ask one what she did with her whole time, so I asked what the word for “whole” was. I ended up asking her what she “did with her hole time.”

I was living in Germany and was learning Germman on the fly and was with my sister and her girl friends at Octoberfest, and I wanted to ask one what she did with her whole time, so I asked what the word for “whole” was. I ended up asking her what she “did with her hole time.”

Not that kind of “use!”

That’s… a big gap. I think I’d just be confused all the time if I had to switch between them.

What almost impresses me most is the architecture of the Parthenon in Athens. Nothing in it is perpendicular. There’s a rise in the middle of the floor of about 6.5cm over a span of 30 meters that makes the floor bowed and prevents it from looking like it’s sagging in the middle. All of the columns are just slightly tilted inwards. They’re not straight-sided, either, they’re bowed. The whole danged thing is an optical illusion to make it appear perpendicular, because it’s so big that if they didn’t, it wouldn’t.

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/6e7osxbhye9libjdlmb8std5b77rs9

C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

Amazon has a non-existent customer support, so you may have limited options.

If they had customer support, I’d suggest contacting them and tell them to either refund, or else you’d give them the ID immediately followed by a GDPR request to purge your data. That might have gotten some movement, because those GDPR requests have the force of law, and are also a fair PITA for Amazon. However, there’s no way to give them a shot across the bow. I think your options are:

• process a charge-back, as someone else suggested, which might result in an Amazon ban
• take the loss (that’s entirely your call, regardless of anyone else’s opinion)
• give them the ID, get your refund
• you can still initiate a GDPR purge request. I’m going to guess it’s going to result in a block, but maybe not. You might be able to recreate your account

The happy news is that you are protected by GDPR. Many of us are not, and don’t even have the option to demand they purge the information.

This is really good to hear. As someone who hasn’t used Windows since 2004, it’s easy to lose perspective of how daunting a self-switch can feel.

I’m glad to hear your experience is going well. I know you’re experiencing many little annoyances and things which seem harder than they should be, but are not focusing on those. It’s always good to hear the perspective from a new user!

OnlyOffice is a Russian company. Some people might care about the latter part.

The connection between OnlyOffice and Russia has caused some controversy. The company has moved headquarters and attempted to hide its Russian ties through shell companies. The company develops its product in Russia and presents itself in the Russian market as a Russian company. For this reason some Ukrainian businesses have moved away from OnlyOffice.

Wikipedia has more info (with references) for the curious.

Second this.

• message delivery can be iffy
• VoIP works well
• you connect with people like a normal app that isn’t going to scare your family off, not trying to get them to put in GUIDS
• it has all the creature comforts, attached/embedded photos, markup, attached files, attach pictures, share your location for 10 minutes (I’m on my way), history editing, deleting
• it has concurrent multi device support, so you can get messages on your phone, tablet, and desktop at the same time
• There’s a full desktop client (Electron, i think 🤮 but it works)
• the dev team is small and they seem to like to work more on features than user issues. development is slow
• multi-person groups work fine

It’s still the best E2E messaging system I’ve found; the only one my mom, wife, and sisters-in-law reliably use.

I just want them to focus on fixing the sketchy DHT that seems to cause every problem.

That’s a lot of bloom for a little guy!

Penalty: the equivalent of $100, probably. And even that will be contested; the second judge will drop it to $50, and the third to $10, and then the Meta lawyer will pay that out of her pocket change.

My recommendation is to put all of the variables in an environment file, and use systemd’s EnvironmentFile (in [Service] to point to it.

One of my backup service files (I back up to disks and cloud) looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Backup to MyUsbDrive
Requires=media-MyUsbDrive.mount
After=media-MyUsbDrive.mount

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/backup/environment
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/restic backup --tag=prefailure-2 --files-from ${FILES} --exclude-file ${EXCLUDES} --one-file-system

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.timer

FILES is a file containing files and directories to be backed up, and is defined in the environment file; so is EXCLUDES, but you could simply point restic at the directory you want to back up instead.

My environment file looks essentially like

RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/MyUsbDrive/backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=blahblahblah
KEEP_DAILY=7
KEEP_MONTHLY=3
KEEP_YEARLY=2
EXCLUDES=/etc/backup/excludes
FILES=/etc/backup/files

If you’re having trouble, start by looking at how you’re passing in the password, and whether it’s quoted properly. It’s been a couple of years since I had this issue, but at one point I know I had spaces in a passphrase and had quoted the variable, and the quotes were getting passed in verbatim.

My VPS backups are more complex and get their passwords from a keystore, but for my desktop I keep it simple.

I hope this isn’t a step towards replacing the native app with an SPA.