You think LM being “too old” is a problem for newbies? I’ve been running some distro or other since RedHat 5. I it took me 6 weeks of waiting for Fedora to sort out most of the issues, (and I STILL have some minor ghosting issues and I ain’t no gamer), and 4 tries to get Fedora 40 to successfully take the nVidia drivers for the GTX1650 chipset in my laptop.

You think a new wannbe convert is going to put up with that?

Perhaps or perhaps not. Every new desk top was going to be better than Gnome when introduced. I remember having such high hopes for Elementary back in the day too. It was so elegant and smooth to use.

Only if it becomes the default install of the major distros. That, I think is a major hurdle, not even KDE has been able to leap that.

Being content with being alone isn’t quite the same thing as knowing the world you lived in is gone and you are all that’s left. And all that you have left is dying.

Everyone lives through history. But few live to see so many wrenching changes as his generation did. The best I can say I lived through was the beginning of the internet and the inter-connection of every person on the planet.

It’s kind of a sad way to live. Your family is mostly dead and all your friends are gone. And the world isn’t what you knew anymore. So you just sit there and wait to die yourself.

Same for my Great-Grandfather, but it was much more than that when I look at his life.

Went from horse and buggies and steam trains, lived through 2 world wars, saw rural electrification - 1930s for him - bring lights and washing machines and telephones, survived his own pandemic - Spanish Flu 1918-1919, saw the invention of automobiles, radios, and TVs, heavier than air flight, the Great Depression, the beginnings of the digital world, and watched the Moon Landings with me sitting in his favorite chair in our living room.

When he died, no one really knew how old he was - there was no official record of his birth certificate since he was born at home in a very rural area. While I’m old myself now and have seen some few changes, I cannot fathom the sheer number of societal upheavals and disruptions he went through every decade of his life.

Ironing clothes died long before millennials. Grandma quit ironing before you were born. Wrinkle Free shirts and pants started showing up in the 1970’s and were common within the decade.

Source: I was there.

Oh my bad! Of course it needs sliced had boiled eggs! I’m prepared to be shunned for the next year…

That was from a fear of food poisoning from it being left out in the sun to warm. But it was more of an issue if real mayo, (with raw egg yolk), was used. If you used some type of industrial grade Miracle Whip untainted by anything real you could ID as an ingredient, it was far less of an issue.

Besides, what’s a little e.coli gonna do? Besides make you all shiny clean on the inside.

As a Midwesterner, potato salad is made with a mixture of real mayonnaise and yellow mustard. Finely diced onion and celery with a dash of old and flavorless paprika for color to round it all out. Salt and pepper to taste. You wouldn’t want it to be too spicy you know.

Some heretics will add diced dill pickle on occaision - my one Grandmother would sometimes do this after drinking too much. This is generally considered a social faux pas, though us Mid-westerners are too polite and kind to actually say something about it. But we will look askance at you. And your children will never play with our kids ever again.

I’ve come to the conclusion that lumping in Android/ChromeOS to the broad term is a stat padding exercise. It makes the whole of Linux look like it’s the most used OS in the world. But I’m OK with if you want to do so.

Call it GNU/Linux or Linux I don’t care. I just refer to it as whatever distro I’ve hopped to for this month. So to me, right now I’m typing this on my laptop running Fedora 40 KDE and my mini-desktop is running Fedora 40 Atomic Budgie.

When the heat death of the universe arrives, the Sackcloth and Ashes that is Slack will be there to mark it’s passing.

Not even Debian will survive, but Slack will go on. Tar Balls Yum!

Perhaps it is a tragedy that we seem to have lost the GNU part. But in the end, the great unwashed masses get to decide what something is called.

Personally, I blame the Brits for this, (and NOT the French this time), because of their penchant for trying to chop every multi-syllable word down into as few as possible. See: Football vs Soccer silliness.

Only if you want enterprise solutions. RedHat does the same. So does Suse. A business should pay for enterprise level supports and solutions don’t you think?

It’s also called ‘the old free stuff’. If free matters that much, you could run Slack or better yet LFS.

Being comfortable IS Dad Mode.

All of them.

Extended compliance support. Enterprise level needs require a lot of paperwork just to make sure you are in legal compliance with all rules and regulations. The paperwork alone can be a very heavy costly burden on the IT department.

Any distro wanting to be serious in the enterprise space needs to offer support for that. And businesses will pay for it because it’s cheaper than having a large staff only dedicated to it. It’s part of how Ubuntu can offer you the free stuff and remain a top used distro for the masses. RedHat does the same. RedHat just rebrands the free stuff as Fedora. At least Ubuntu doesn’t hide behind a different brand name when offering sercives they charge for.

From my look at it, Ubuntu is making it clear that they guarantee support for 10 years, rather than just the standard 4 of LTS releases. And they are also guaranteeing compliance for enterprise uses, saving the paperwork load and time. This could make Ubuntu Pro attractive for enterprises and the IT department. Everyone wants to limit the paperwork checks. Us plebes, can make do with the free standard 4 years of LTS support if that’s what you want.

I’m quite sure that any distro that offers enterprise solutions is doing similar things just for the money. RedHat does it for sure. But us plebes don’t ever see it because we use Fedora instead.