For what it’s worth, I am one of those letters and it is somewhat irrelevant to my identity. My identity is the following: human being.

I consider the identity obsession of Gen Z to be mostly narcissistic self-regard. It reflects our society’s rampant individualism, where kids have become a lifestyle choice and pampered like fragile consumer objects. I don’t have any answers about how to fix any of this. Indeed I’m something of an individualist myself.

Be nice to people, but don’t feel the need to indulge their whims if it feels unreasonable.

Sure, but the third hottest is June, not September, so if the seasons last (12/4=) 3 months then logically summer began 3 weeks ago.

Well okay but the name “Midsummer” does kind of make my point.

Sounds awful. Your situation is extreme (ah rural America!) but I won’t deny there’s something freeing about cars. These days I hate cars with a passion, and I’ve always lived in big European cities where they’re completely unnecessary, but even I had a car when I was 20, and I loved it. But then a couple of years later I got rid of it, and that also felt like freedom and I loved that too… Anyway, just an anecdote. As for your situation, good luck, you’ll find a way out of there.

PS off-topic: I’ve always found “good luck” to be a bit lacking for these contexts, in French there’s the much better “bon courage”, sadly untranslatable but much more appropriate in your case.

The only possible way to get to a shop is “a car”… Poor Americans!

This convention that summer “begins” at the solstice is so weird and disconnected from the commonly understood definition of summer. Flowers bloomed months ago, it’s baking hot, days are about to start getting shorter. It’s already summer.

For typical middle-class people (like the ones probably reading this), usually the single worst thing they do is flying. It’s the only way to blow your personal carbon budget for the whole year in just a few hours.

That’s at the individual level.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

I don’t see any reason to use ubuntu over debian

I do. The last time I tried it, Debian’s installer crashed and left me with a white screen. Imagine telling a newbie to wipe their disk before that happens. Linux has lost a user for life. Debian’s site is still completely archaic, so the pre-installation funnel is going to be a challenge in itself for most people. No way.

To be clear, I used Debian for years, I love their mission and I want it to be the reference FOSS distro. But beginners need hand-holding and Debian is not ready for that yet.

I’m gonna push back against your Ubuntu disparagement. In terms of “pushing” things, Ubuntu’s abuses are really very marginal. Compared to Windows, the difference between Ubuntu and any other distro is vanishingly minimal in this regard. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is undeniably a solid and dependable distro with a 20-year track record behind it. For a beginner that should count for something.

A complete non-issue. This was not “hate”, it was spam. I received the offending email this morning, deleted it and moved on. The whole episode took up two seconds of my life and was forgotten within another two. Except for the waste of another 4 seconds dealing with Codeberg’s inevitable grovelling apology a few hours later.

Stop giving in to provocation! This kind of histrionic response is exactly what the spammers were looking for. It doesn’t matter what rude words were in this email. It was spam.

Sure, images and video are the exception. But I figure that a redshift app can only help so much when a video suddenly cuts to a picture of a white sky. That’s really another problem: choppy contrast. Only solution is to increase ambient light behind the screen.

Use dark mode at night and you won’t need Redshift any more. It’s only relevant for white screens.

PS: This IS in fact the optimal solution - if not for you then for others. I used Redshift for years, suffering its periodic breakages, babysitting the timezone issue, and it was worth it, because a retina-searing reddish-white screen is better than a retina-searing whitish-white screen. But a dark screen is SO much better for my eyes than either of those. I can’t believe I waited so many years to do that and I’m never going back.

Why is this a problem for us and not for ordinary dummies on Android? It’s been the default there for years already.

Absolutely. LUKS full disk encryption. Comes as an opt-in checkbox on Ubuntu, for example.

And I too cannot understand why this is not opt-out rather than opt-in. Apparently we’ve decided that only normies on corporate spyware OSs need security, and we don’t.

Just to clarify this comment for other “total newbies”: yes, the UFW default config is fine and “you don’t need to mess with it”.

But by default UFW itself is not even enabled on any desktop OS. And you also don’t need to mess with that. It’s because the firewall is on the router.

OP said clearly that this “is just my personal computer” and here we all are spreading unintentional FUD about firewall configs as if it’s for a public-facing server.

This pisses me off a bit because I remember having exactly the same anxiety as OP, to the point of thinking Linux must be incredibly insecure - how does this firewall work? dammit it’s not even turned on!! And then I learned a bit more about networking.

This discussion should have begun with the basics, not the minutiae.