Same here. Nothing could convince me to go back to Reddit or Twitter at this point.

Slant’s one of my favorites too, I also play a lot of Loopy, Dominosa and Bridges.

I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?

I haven’t checked to see if someone’s mentioned it yet (it’s a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I’m always touting: Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection!

It’s a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it’s completely free, has no ads, doesn’t track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don’t. But you should know about it.

I think you’re overstating things a bit, but it’s true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.

I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image’s borders was actually dead space, and it won’t accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what’s happening it’s not so bad, but until that point it’s the software working how you don’t expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.

And just now in 3.0 I’ve discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.

It seems like it’s purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don’t remember it being like this in the past. What happened?

Back in the day there was Hardware Wars.

I know FlyingSquid from another community, and sent them a private message just a few days ago saying hello. (I didn’t know they had been missing at the time.) FS is awesome, and I really hope they’re okay.

I handle this, as do most poor people, by not asking ourselves this question, not even fantasizing about it, for why torture yourself with something you never can do?

The secret of Linux is, if all your hardware works, it’s actually easier to use for casual users. Most people nowadays use computers for web browsing and maybe playing media and light office tasks. A Linux Mint setup will have everything you need for that either preinstalled or ready to get fun the software store. If you don’t need anything else, then it gets it of your way and just works. No viruses, little danger of malware, no crud to uninstall, no Microsoft account, no nagging apps, no ads, no attempts to upsell to paid cloud services or Pro, and no AI.

The problem arises when you want to go beyond that, and there’s no obvious path ahead,v then people not used to the Linux way of doing things may run into trouble. But 90% of users, if someone sets it up for them, will do fine.

Along these lines, I have several important memory locations memorized. POKE 53280 and 1 to change the border and background colors. 828 is the cassette buffer, and 49152 the free memory above BASIC ROM. SYS 64738 resets the machine.

I also can recite the powers of 2 up to 65536.

Way back in Sunday School at the church we went to when I was growing up, they taught them to us in a song. I still remember the whole thing.

While the “recent troubles” put energy to my leaving, I have always been uncomfortable with Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Stack Overflow, Quora and Fandom, as corporate-owned repositories who work by, in one way or other, profiting off of freely contributed work.

It used to be that if someone wanted to help people with freely-given information, they’d offer it in a forum, on Usenet, or on a website they started and hosted themselves, or if it fit in there, put it on Wikipedia. Now, people add it to a freaking pile that corporations monetize. Don’t just hand them value! Put it somewhere that won’t beg you to install an app, or beg you to “upgrade” to “Nitro,” or force you to watch intrusive ads, or force people to create an account to see it, or track you! Your volunteer labor should not be a profit center!

Doom, for multiple reasons.