“Many that live deserve death and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the wise cannot see all ends.” Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring
For some reason, this quote (and the entirety of Gollum’s story) has stuck itself in my head. I guess I interpret this as a message to not be so quick to judge death upon another person, no matter what they had done. You never know what their future will be like, and cutting their lives off would mean losing out on the potential benefits that their future might bring. Even bad people can contribute good things. I know that this is just my personal opinion, and a lot of people probably won’t agree with this, but this is the lesson that I got from Gollum’s story.
“You’re not here to make a choice, you’ve already made it. You’re here to try and understand why you made it.”
-The Oracle.
To this day it’s the way I don’t worry about determinism and free will. It doesn’t matter if I truly was the one who made a choice or not—if it was predestined—I’m supposed to learn about why I made that choice.
The way I think about this is somewhat novel I think.
Suppose we have two universes, everything the same, except one has free will and one doesn’t. Would an observer be able to tell them apart? I don’t think so. Maybe I just lack imagination, but I don’t see how free will would actually make a difference.
Your decisions determine what kind of person you are and what kind of person you are determines what decisions you make. They are self reinforcing and tied up together in a big path dependant knot.
Wanting to be a better person also only works if you let it change your decisions, bringing you one step closer to being a better person.
I think that only holds true if we stop making choices.
As far as free will is concerned, the multiverse theory has some great implications for that. Still no answers, but rationales that there are other “yous” out there living ever single possibility.
You want the job that is offered to you, pays good, and won’t feel like hell every day. This job may or may not be related to your field of study, but you better study something useful if you want to be taken seriously.
Stop thinking that you can pick and choose, sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. Some people can, most people can’t.
This this. I’m in my 30s and have hopped around jobs for a decade, and now I’m considering going back to school for accounting. My first degree choice was biology, which I still love but it wasn’t at all practical.
I used Linux desktop as my work rig for a year and a half. I absolutely hated it, had constant problems and lost time almost every day to stupid workarounds. When I tried to search or ask for help the answer I was usually met with was “your hardware is wrong” or “why do you want to do that” or more often than no “you’re using the wrong distro, you should use [different one every time]”. I also found the UI to be quite ugly and often obtuse, you can tell that there’s very few open source UI/UX designers. I switched back to windows and I’ve had better performance and less bugs.
Do you feel like you ever got over the initial setup period? A lot of what you are describing is what I encounter after a fresh install but I don’t typically have any issues after a little bit of tweaking.
Maybe because it was a work laptop I didn’t spend as much time on setup as I would for a personal computer. There’s were a lot of issues that I solved with tweaking at the start, but many of the lingering issues either had no solution or were so intermittent or complex that I couldn’t figure out how to word it in a way that would lead me to the solution.
Screens, scaling, nvidia drivers, games… Even spent an hour on gnome trying to get my desktop background image to fill the whole screen instead of repeating to fill the space. Solution ended up being download an image editor and resize the image to be the exact same size as my screen resolution. Tried KDE and kept hitting 100% CPU bug
In the end I just wanted a pc that worked, so went back to Windows with WSL.
Seems a perfect combo. Do my dev in WSL, and the desktop just works.
However I’m getting increasingly frustrated at every UI change Microsoft make… Which is what made me try Linux in the first place. If Microsoft Win7 and early 10 was great, I wish they’d stop touching UI and just improve under the hood
No, already burnt out from reinstalling different distros. I try Linux desktop every couple of years and it’s always the same frustrations. I’ll give it another go next year
ReactOS is fascinating, when I was younger and dumber I was optimistic about the project…but at it’s current rate it’ll never be an actual usable daily driver, and with Proton, the need for it is lessening, not growing.
I honestly get where you’re coming from as I went through a similar process of hating Windows, trying to make Linux work for me and just ending up back on Windows. I finally settled on Nobara Linux, but in my personal opinion it might be worth looking into Linux Mint for you if you want a rock solid distro. I installed Mint for my girlfriend not too long ago and everything magically worked with Nvidia drivers, wallpapers, Discord screen sharing, etc. I was so impressed that I considered distro hopping one last time.
I now constantly test myself to see if I’m overlooking the truth. Refusal to admit reality or refusal to acknowledge an unpleasant truth can ultimately hold you back.
Often times, for me, it’s not even a refusal. Certain situations or emotions I sort of just “I’ll deal with that later” and then never do. I mean to, eventually, but just procrastinate it until it’s a legitimate delusion
Say fucking what? When was the last time you tried KDE or Gnome? Gnome is a beautiful masterpiece that blows Windows and Mac OS desktops out of the water.
It’s my opinion. Part of the problem is ‘which desktop’. As long as I can ssh into a Linux system I’m happy. The guis are clunky, but I’ll admit to not having tried all of them or the absolute latest versions. Also, and I likely ought to have mentioned this, in my homelab almost all ‘systems’ are vms, so the desktop gui has to function well in a virtual environment and has to at least try to have a decent rdp implementation.
It’s really not a problem anymore. Look at a distro like Mint, compare the lightweight xfce version versus the full fat Gnome cinnamon. They both look the same on the surface using the same theme, all apps work, look and behave fine over all versions, yet you’ve got the option between “small and snappy” or “pretty and high end” which works much better than turning off the animations in Windows.
I’ve been an on/off Linux desktop user for years and now is just a comfy time to be a Linux user. All websites work, most of my Steam/Epic and GOG library just works with no messing, the various software stacks we use day to day are there, mature and “just work”.
Many DE have received substantial improvements over the last couple of years. It sounds like you’re really looking for something lightweight, more than you are something that is fully featured. I don’t have much experience with the lightweight Linux DE, because when I need performance I just use command line like you do. I’m sure if you did some searching, you could find a really snappy DE, but it doesn’t sound very important for your use case. Definitely do check out some of the full-featured desktops though if you ever decide to use Linux as a primary PC. Several of them are really slick now.
This line from Schindler’s List always stuck with me:
“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”
The context is that at the end of the movie Schindler is distraught thinking of how many more he could have saved if he just did certain things differently, like selling a ring and using that money to hire another Jewish worker. One of the people he saved tells him the above line.
It’s stuck with me for two reasons, I think.
First, it’s an interesting perspective on individuality. Each person has their own unique perspective of the world. When that person dies, that perspective is gone forever. An entire universe dies with them, never to be seen again. I think that’s a powerful way to view the individual.
Second, it’s a reminder that we do what we can, and while it may be imperfect, it’s enough. You can’t save everyone, just live well and help those you can in the capacity that you can. If you save one of those people, you’ve saved the world.
"Live on, survive, for the Earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention."
Salman Rushdie, from The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
A more recent one, meditation-related, short and simple and I have no idea who said it, I just happened to catch it a couple of years ago on a website-that-shall-not-be-named:
Great quote for me from the OP. Thank you.
This prompts me to adjust it to fit my needs: "I am my thoughts, so I better craft my thoughts in a better way."
As someone who has never thought about YouTube video IDs: is that a thing? Is there a small but tightly knit community of youtube video ID connoisseurs?
or if you choose to install Windows, only reinstall with official media and uninstall the stuff you don’t need. Then go into privacy and disable telemetry.
don’t install these random debloater programs suggested in this thread, and most of what they do will get undone in a regular windows update anyways
asklemmy
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.