Cris_Color

Totally valid! Regardless of how you decide to navigate things I hope the choice serves you well :)

Have a good one!

I just wanna say I appreciate you taking the time to type all this out to speak directly to someone's anxieties from a place of knowledge about how the area of concern works. Thats pretty cool :)

I really enjoyed this article :)

I'd love to do more of this. I have a sleep disorder that makes me essentially nocturnal, and currently have no income, so my options are extremely limited, but I desperately need to find ways to get out and do new things with new people in spite of the challenges

To add to all the other answers about what to use and whatnot: try a few distros and desktops out by putting them on a flash drive and booting from the flash drive (this is the same process for typical installations)

Distro, or who the linux based OS is built, updated, and distributed by, mostly matters long term, but something that will keep working and be stable (in the colloquial sense, not technical sense like for servers), and that has a friendly and welcoming community, are definitely things to look for. Mint and ubuntu both have stellar reputations in both of these regards, though many folks (including me) have issues with decisions being made by the ubuntu folks these days. Fedora is pretty stable but has less of a big community with support for new people, and manjaro has a lot of newer users and is built around serving newer linux users, but the project is sometimes run in an awkward way that can cause issues if you're not choosing to manage your packages with intentionality (thats what I hear anyway). Debian is rock solid, and I dont know much about the community, but the versions of software available in the repos may be old unless you're installing a flatpak

Keep in mind, not all distros will support every desktop, so you may find your chosen desktop isnt available on the distro you find most interesting. You can theoretically install whatever desktop on whatever distro, but as a new user I dont reccomend doing this.

Definitely try out a few different desktops. "Desktop environments" are bundles of software that make up the desktop graphical user interface, and will make a big difference in the look and feel, and general user experience that you have on linux. There are a bunch of options- the two biggest projects are GNOME and Kde plasma. Gnome has a reputation for being more mac-like out of the box and has very specific workflows and usage patterns, and kde, more windows like and flexible to what the user wants. But both are customizable. Kde has lots of built in settings and options, gnome offers very few, but supports user made extensions that change the desktops look and behavior. Give both a try and try out the customizations for each (play with kde settings, see if you can make it more what you want. Install some gnome extensions, see what the options look like). Cinnamon is another desktop thats very windows-like but has a great user experience. Xfce is a well run project but predominantly aimed at being lightweight so it runs well on older hardware, you're less likely to be in its target demographic

That looks fantastic!!

Hey blaze ☺️ I'm doing alright!

Its been an iffy week in some respects but today has been pretty good and I'm excited to be back in therapy :) I hope life is treating you well! ❤️

I think I have the same issue on fedora using my tv's speakers via HDMI. I pause a video foe 10 seconds and when I resume the audio takes a moment to cut back in with a slight pop. Its kinda irritating 😅

How did you remove the suspend node?

Nice!

Sadly I'm a gnome fan 🥲

Thats super cool though, thanks for sharing, I'd not heard of that! I might try seeing if any of the cinnamon utilities work and are useful in GNOME though, just out of curiosity

God I wish the cinnamon interface was more my thing, I absolutely love the way they focus on user experience. I hope it continues to pay off for them and give linux users, both new and old, the best possible experience

I save the ones that are important memories I wanna hang onto for myself, and delete miscellaneous ones or extras

The reason this post connects with people is that it validates a very well understood connection between aging and difficulty sleeping

Turning around and invalidating people in response and telling people its their own fault is frankly silly. Just because you resolved your sleep/health issues by taking better care of yourself doesn't mean everyone else struggling with sleep is just an unhealthy bum who should do better

Aging tends to bring with it sleep problems that aren't caused by lifestyle factors associated with poorer health, and even in cases where someones health issues are because theyre not taking good enough care of themselves, telling those people its their own fault generally overlooks socioeconomic factors- it usually amounts to blaming people for being poor, or mentally unwell

Source: I have a severe sleep disorder and at 27, I've seen a multitude of sleep doctors (and am still searching for a Dr who is knowlegable enough about my condition to try and help me beyond what I'm already doing) and spent a fair chunk of my life at this point sitting across from one discussing sleep issues