Thank you for this post!
For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.
I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it's pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.
Yeah, that's another fun aspect of our culture. Jobs that many people actually want due to what they are passionate about lead to abuse.
It's the reason I never seriously considered getting into game development or becoming a teacher.
I am the rare father involved in the PTO (parent-teacher organization) along with my wife at our kid's elementary school. We were handing out basic cheap supplies to the teachers last month as a Christmas thing. We'd interrupt the class to give the teacher a SINGLE roll of paper towels and then a small box of tissues or some glue sticks or whatever, and they were excited and grateful every time!
My fellow americans and I look at this concept and tilt our heads to the side like confused puppies.
Fuckin' hell, I feel like a kid in 2226 reading this on some kind of wall plaque after it was discovered in the cautionary history archives that survived the great fires. I think it struck me when I read this line:
the rot is far too deep, and the purification of chaos is, unfortunately, the only remedy
It's just a very elegant way to describe the btshit craziness of living in "interesting times."
Oh and hey future people who have presumably learned to be excellent to one another: put me in the plaque! It's a thing we used to do on this old internet here with screenshots, you see.
Your use case sounds perfect for using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement. Opening a Word doc or an old Excel spreadsheet is effortless. You don't sound like the "I use Excel every day for my job and there is no replacement" folks with very specific needs.
And I will echo what the other reply said: try Linux on your laptop! Not only will it probably work fine, it will probably also feel much faster and more responsive.
Trying most of the big Linux distros is super easy and zero commtment, too. When you boot from the install media, it loads directly into the OS desktop running natively on your hardware! Then once you're ready to install it, there's usually a shortcut on the desktop or something.
I recommend trying Linux Mint. It is so simple to install and full featured out of the box, plus being based on ubuntu and being very popular itself, information and help is everywhere.
hopes that society will become more accepting of AI, or what Nadella describes as "cognitive amplifier tools."
Ok well this is a simple train of cause and effect that even Mr Nadella should be able to understand.
Make an actual tool that is so damn good and so universally useful that early adopters who pay attention would consider calling it a "cognitive amplifier."
Keep in mind that I have seen the term "second brain" used for note taking apps, usually easy to use and sync between devices. (I'm using AnyType free)
That is how poorly the "market" views your "tech demo with a price tag" product! It loses the brain title to a small collection of conveniently stored text files. Congratulations.
It was probably organized by corporations to slow down EU
Cries in red white and blue American tears
The owner class, their paid shills, and their useful idiots had half the population convinced decades ago that all regulation is bad and that government entities literally cannot do anything correctly.
I started believing some of that stuff when I was young and thought that people in the media argued in good faith. Plus I was more accepting of the cornerstone conservative axiom that money and "progress" are the marks of good people and good societies rather than silly nebulous concepts like "being alive is a positive experience for as many people as possible."
Yep! The most expensive equipment they might need is a magic smoke compressor, if that.
I can imagine a future device with an e-ink page that's so thin and flexible that it looks and feels like a paper book with magic changing text. I don't know how many consumers would pay a premium for that, but I would definitely buy my wife one.
I'm just here to point out that the fact you genuinely care about your carbon footprint probably puts you ahead of 80% of the population, and the fact that it has materially affected your device choices probably puts you ahead of 80% of the remainder.
There's definitely a unique satisfaction that comes from filling tech needs with hardware that already exists, and which does a great job at it too.
That goes across hobbies and mediums too. I just finished a big outdoor carpentry project where I was able to find perfect long-term uses for pieces of wood from The Initial Build in the construction of The New Hotness.
Ah yeah good edit, I wasn't even considering that you could have meant it that way.
I decided to go look up the rules in order to contribute something more useful to this discussion, and it turns out that the mere presence of offspring does not disqualify one from the award!
Given their reasoning, I think Kirk would qualify. And given that his whole brand was about spreading stupid dangerous ideas to everybody's kids including his own, and then he died in a spectacularly ironic and public way, I think he should actually win one!
If they want ubuntu, let them Linux Mint! :D