With a machine like that, you’re firmly in the mainstream of linux. Almost any distro will run well on it, so selection is a matter of taste.

Debian is a solid, conservative option, though they have a reputation of lagging behind other distros in terms of software versions. I do like arch, their wiki is first rate. It has the reputation of being finicky but I’ve always found it pretty straightforward. Great for the extensive docs and not trying to insulate you from the system.

I personally would avoid ubuntu these days, they seem to be leaning into the Ubuntu Way for things like installing software. A bit lock-in ish for me.

FWIW I’m running nixos on my thinkpads, works great. Nixos is not to be undertaken lightly, there’s a lot to learn and docs are meh. Stability is second to none, and the declarative configuration management makes it great for easing into devops.

I used to model in openSCAD and do tool paths in fusion. Good combo for the most part, but there were some issues like cutting slots that never worked well; the slot always had to be wider than the tool. Fusion works better on its own proprietary models than on STLs.

OpenSCAD is super fun and I have built things in it too. It is just for the modeling and doesn’t do tool path stuff like fusion360; but I think you could import models into freeCAD and do tool paths there.

some people really have an eye for sparkles

I like the firefox AI translation because it doesn’t send the text to fucking google. It translates it on my machine, and its shitty but good enough most of the time.

to me the main difference was having to use a different package manager. so no biggie really. and arch has an awesome wiki. the documentation made things too easy so now I use nixos BTW

Dad are you making memes again?

for xmonad commands. also windows-p is dmenu.

LF?

sounds like a better solution is don’t use docusign

Age 57 here. We kind of blobbed up a bit during the pandemic. About a 18 months ago we started walking every day at lunch, about 2.5 miles. Not huge distance but just being consistent with it I think has helped us a lot. We did a few hikes this year that I don’t think we could have done (or not without more injury risk) without the consistent walking.

For me tendonitis has been a thing. Got my first case of it in my late 20s and have had several bouts of it since - achilles, hip flexors, wrist, etc. Learning to recognize that as a problem and what to do to recover is important, as repetitive stress injuries can keep you from doing a lot of things.

maybe could filter the comments based on tag as well.

What I think would be interesting would be to have communities be tags rather than exclusive categories. So if you make a post, you can add more than one tag to it, provided you are a ‘member’ of those tags.

Tags would have moderators much like communities have moderators now, to preserve the meaning of the tag. So you could have a tag like ‘billionaire media’, and members could slap that tag on all nyt, wapo, etc articles. Moderators would boot members who misapplied the tag.

Then what would be interesting would be to use the tags for searches, like ‘news’ minus ‘billiionaire media’.

Pretty significant changes from what lemmy is today, so would be either a fork of lemmy or a from scratch new program.

services not protocols

I dunno about ‘friendly’, but my setup is minimal configuration and about as stable and unchanging as the terminal. Its xmonad with xfce in no-desktop mode. My xmonad configuration is extremely minimal because I mostly don’t care about customization. I set terminal=alacritty and the thickness and color of the outline around the focus window, and that’s it.

Because I have xfce backing me up, I get the benefit of monitor layout, mouse settings, the xfce session logout window, etc etc.

As for using xmonad itself. You’re just going to have to pull up the keyboard reference on your phone until you can get around ok, there’s no help and no explanation. When you boot into it you get a blank screen lol.

For launching programs, you windows-p and you get the dmenu program launcher at the top of the screen. Type the first few letters of whatever program and hit enter.

I got into programming on a TRS-80 clone. Everything you needed to know to program it was contained in a little 150 page book that came with it.

To program the Mac, you needed a whole bookshelf of books.

Check out the movie “Sicario”

To me the main thing is to relate to a computer as a programmable device, not just a shiny box with pictures and videos. To that end, it might be more effective to have the computer be in command line mode rather than it just being a conduit to youtube.

I started on an apple II at a friend’s house. BASIC was built right in to the command line. Our family ended up with a TRS-80 compatible which also had BASIC. Back then everything you needed to know was in the TRS-80 basic manual. I spent hours and hours making games on it.

Perhaps something like LOGO? Some simple command line environment where the knowledge required is small, and there are easily reachable payoffs for making loops and so forth.

Something like Clouseau vs the world’s assassins from the pink panther strikes again.

I think its interesting that multiple instances feel they need their own “music@my-instance” community. One might expect that the instance doesn’t really matter, and each instance is just a gateway to the larger federated collection of communities.

But that’s not really the case - individual instances do have their own flavor to some extent. Moderation policy can be different, instances can avow some kind of purpose, like hexbear.net for instance is explicitly “leftist”. Other servers have different priorities.

In that context, it makes more sense to have duplicate communities - for instance if you post a youtube link on on music@hexbear.net you get an annoying warning about youtube. That fits with their leftist perspective. And its likely you’d get a different response from posting leftist music there than posting it on some right wing instance.