It’s fine to be paid for labour eg programming.

If you see a game you think you’d enjoy, go for it.

Personally I find that I’m not super into video games as an adult just because I don’t have the time, and I don’t find them very fun in short bursts. And when I do have the time I always think to myself I’d be better off spending it on a “productive” hobby like programming. That’s an entirely personal thing for me, but it may be something you want to consider, ie if you want to learn a hobby that’s also considered a real world skill so to speak, and one that could give you products of your hobby you can actually use and enjoy (eg programming, crochet, cooking, woodworking, etc—so creative hobbies).

Also, feel free to pirate a game if you don’t know if it’s worth the investment, especially since you won’t have a reference point of games you do enjoy. I have no ethical quandary with pirating any game, but if you do, you can just buy the game if you like it, and that way you won’t waste money on a game you only get 5% of the way through before getting bored.

It is legal but in any case why do you care. If it were illegal it’s not something that would be enforceable or something they’d be likely to “catch” you for, and it’s definitely not unethical. Everyone should be free to do whatever they want with published literature.

Yeah, I do miss that, but idk how much of it is nostalgia and how much is an absolute aesthetic preference. I think the main reason for the change though is Microsoft trying to make Windows work well on mobile devices though, meaning forgoing the aero and more expensive VFX.

Wish some DEs would make their default style more like a win7 era style. Would be nice to have the variety.

What communities are you subscribing to where you’re seeing all this political content? I hardly see any posts about politics and I’ve made no particular effort to filter it out of my feed. I just subscribe to tech communities. Just subscribe to communities about the topics you’re interested in and don’t subscribe to politics/news/current events communities?

Others have already advised you on how to run Windows games, but in my experience with these games:

The Sims

I’ve been playing it just fine on Wine, check EA App on AppDB

Cities Skylines

The first game has a native Linux version, not sure how the second game runs on Proton

Stardew Valley

Native Linux

Minecraft

It’s Java so cross-platform, including Linux

Generally you can check ProtonDB for Steam games, and AppDB for others.

I also haven’t had issues with my self-hosted Nextcloud, DAVx, and Fossify Calendar. Has worked without hiccups for me.

If only the user has the key then there’s no real concern with the data being handed over

Sure, but tracking period data can be very helpful for people. For a threat model of abortion criminalisation (or maybe trans healthcare criminalisation with treatments stopping periods, or really any kind of restrictions on medical autonomy), encryption at rest of locally stored period data is perfectly sufficient. They are not going to send military intelligence agencies after a random person having an abortion. It is actually a relatively low threat model, like equivalent to buying drugs online or something like that.

I wonder how many average users would be bothered to export their period database and transfer to a new phone every time they get a new phone. I do that when I get a new phone (not often, I use my phones till they break/are literally unusable and unfixable), but I’ve had real trouble getting other people to do these kinds of things.

Prefacing this by saying this is in no way directed towards you/meant to undermine your post, but IQ really is racist pseudoscience. “Low IQ” is always used as a cudgel against people who otherwise do not come across as unintelligent (such as yourself, imo) to discredit them. I’m thinking of a lot of instances of young Black people who have been subjected to the criminal justice system and their demands for autonomy being dismissed with BS “low IQ” claims (despite the fact that they come across perfectly eloquently in their writings).

I don’t have personal experience with addiction so I can’t give targeted advice there, but I know there is support out there to help people overcome addictions. If you’re worried about getting a job, definitely you can learn a trade, find an apprenticeship or something like that. I do also have a diagnosed learning disability btw, and didn’t finish high school because of it, and in my opinion the only ways that has held me back is through school systems refusing to accommodate for my learning style. I’ve had no problem self-teaching myself skills aligning with my interests like programming. I’m not saying that applies to all intellectually disabled people, but evaluating your intelligence by school performance is a really shit way to do so especially if you have any kind of learning disability or neurodiversity. Some years at school I would get Cs and Ds, some years at school I would get straight A*s; is it more likely that my intelligence wildly fluctuated between years, or more likely that there are so many circumstantial factors that affect academic performance far more than inherent intelligence?

The KDE spin of Fedora could be a good option if you want to avoid Canonical. KDE is also Wayland, though probably less touchscreen oriented than GNOME (which you can install on Fedora obviously, but a requirement to install a DE is not the most noob-friendly)

Even if they owned the whole LF, the Linux Foundation does not develop systemd lol

You and I define “heavily left-wing” quite differently then. The far-left has always supported gun rights and armed struggle. It’s the political centre and parts of the right that are blanket anti-gun.

Maybe your partner is giving birth through sperm donor, you don’t have to have had sex

Feel free to not take this advice, but I feel it wouldn’t be negligent if I didn’t at least share this. For me, the way I got over any despair over personal circumstances or difficulties, a very long time ago, was to focus entirely on the social root causes, not any individualised approach. The issues you talk about with employment, cost of living, even the nuclear family, are rooted in capitalism and class society. I don’t distress about my struggles with these things; I focus my time on communist organising and am at peace knowing I am doing all that I can do to change things. If things don’t get better for me personally, I have the hope that they will be better for the next generation, or generations down the line, and I know I have lived a life of dignity and self-respect by resisting. I read the book Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, when I was a teenager, and found the concept of, and Huey’s explanation of, revolutionary suicide to be very good at articulating all this.

Of course, this is quite particularised advice if you aren’t already inclined towards far-left politics. But this is why I have never seriously entertained the thought of suicide since I was 12, and it is what I would’ve needed to hear/know at that age, so I figured I’d share. The whole “it gets better” bullcrap never worked on me cause my life was objectively awful due to societal factors, so if I had only followed conventional advice for these kinds of issues I would definitely be dead by now. So maybe this more unconventional advice will help someone. If you want it in more conventional terms, you could think of it as “live for a cause, not for yourself”, but I think it’s important to recognise how it is also to improve your own conditions and the conditions of people like you.

Why on earth do they need to know hostname? MAC addresses?

We don’t replace prisons, because putting people in cages is bad. There’s nothing to “replace” them with. If I wanted to “replace” prisons I wouldn’t want to abolish them. That’s like asking what you’ll replace slavery with, how on earth are we going to get cheap labour otherwise.

Bourgeois law should be abolished too. I have no respect for “the law”.

Idk about other sources, but I get my apk directly from GitHub via Obtainium, and my app recently changed from K-9 Mail to Thunderbird. Icon, app name, and app theming changed. This has been in the works for a while but seems like they’re officially switched the apk.

I don’t have many so I just put them all in ~/own_repos (as opposes to another directory I have for other people’s git repos). Maybe if/when I have more projects I’ll have a more elaborate system.