I’m probably going to end up continuing on exactly as I please because it’s better than rotting. Even with sharing everything I feel like I’m dying of loneliness and I don’t care how dramatic that sounds.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Despite what people on here might say (and it’s a small echo chamber) there are multitudes of other people in the world, sharing their thoughts online, and in person, and they go on living. Is there a risk “of exposure”? Yes, life inherently carries risks. Frankly I would say to a privacy maximalist to simply unplug their internet connection, lest your ip data is somehow traced back to you.

I know you mentioned not being able to afford therapy. You’re probably aware of things like sliding scale payments, and therapists who offer “life coaching” to functionally provide the same service under different billing rates (buyer beware of course).

But as someone who didn’t get into therapy until they could afford it as an adult… Have you read any helpful books lately? They might not be a perfect substitute, but in my case, they kept me going.

Good luck!

Traditional distros have decades of guides, forum posts, and StackExchange answers. Atomic systems? Not nearly as much. When something breaks at 2am, knowing there’s a million Google results for your error message is comforting.

This is my reason. I’ve been using Arch exclusively for a few years, but have used it on and off since 2008. I still don’t consider myself an expert by any means, and I frequently pull the docs and old forum threads to solve issues I run into.

Documentation is the most important deciding factor for me. I didn’t use more fully featured distributions, even if they were “easier” becuase if I can’t look up the answer, and I have to live with something because I don’t know what button to press… I mean you may as well just give me a windows box again.

I can’t discount this very valid point :D

I’m sure the more cultural anthropologist types will have a more eloquent way of stating it, but the US has a hard time escaping it’s religious background, which views nudity as a gateway to sexuality, so people “must remained covered”.

And in the same way, if men are naked around each other, people are afraid of it being seen as a sexual thing. I mean non sexual nudity doesn’t really exist in “standard spaces” in my part of the country anyway.

And man, if an adult and young person were naked near each other, someone would call the cops!

I think Hollywood sexuality is exactly that, escapist fiction. The US is actually a pretty sexually repressed place.

You can sit around any bar and say “oh that girl is hot, I’d love to fuck her!” But you would get looks you’d get if you said “oh that girl is hot, I’d love if she pegged me!”

Maybe it’s changing, but it doesn’t really feel like it to me.

The technical term for this is called a collective noun in English. I did some quick googling, which unfortunately returned a ton of AI slop that I won’t repost here. But it did return tons of answers.

My thought is, your school probably did teach you it was called a Whisper, but who’s to say what’s the authority on collective nouns.

I believe truly having no empathy would make it impossible to form anything other than surface level friendships.

The only precious resource I own is my time, and who I spend it with. The thing in life that makes the hard times seem not so bad, and the good times twice as good, is spending with people I care about, and people that I know care about me.

To be pathological about it… My asking questions about you IS a means to an end. It gives a few useful things:

• I learn about you
• I learn about your worldview, I learn what motivates you
• and I learn where you tend to sell yourself short so I know how to encourage you

Talking about yourself is “giving” when only you share vulnerability. 1 word answers is keeping your guard up. Asking about them is “giving” because you get opportunities to learn about/support/uplift them. People like getting questions. It can make them feel cared for.

And I’m not saying anything is wrong with you. Just sharing my perspective.

And I’m a guy, so I guess you’d really be puzzled if we met IRL!

We’ve been called out, but deservedly so.

I second this. Fastmail has been a joy to use. Since the users are paying, the company has (less) incentives to enshittify. JMAP? Count me in!

I have a guideline I like to follow when putting together my pizzas, I like something spicy, something savory, and something sweet

Spice: banana peppers, jalepenos, or yes, hot sauce if that’s what I’ve got

Savory: bacon,chicken, pulled pork, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms,

Sweet: onions, picked red onions, roasted corn, pineapple

You can blend stuff (put tandoori chicken on the pizza) for even more interesting combos!

I feel like one of each gives a great result.

I’ll be slightly contrarian to others and give a different perspective: you may find yourself hitting some roadblocks, I’ll try to explain.

I set up Linux Mint for my elderly parents. The key thing is, I set it up for them, functioning as the administrator for that machine, making sure they had a non admin account and configured their desktop to only show the shortcuts they cared about (firefox).

It worked fine, and I only got calls once every few months. They got scared if some popup occured, or if they accidentally saved something to their desktop that they wanted to get rid of. I don’t know if that really meets the definition of seamless, and I don’t know if you’d even consider those problems.

The other thing that can happen, is hardware interfaces. I know that you’ve listed out your use case. I’m just saying that if your birthday rolls around and someone buys you a 3d printer where you “just plug it in”, you’re going to be in for a long troubleshooting day, if it isn’t natively supported.

With Steam games, you can often get away with enabling proton, but… Small issues like being able to select multiple drive folders have sent me down long troubleshooting avenues as well. And when I use the word troubleshoot, I’m inevitably referring to the command line.

Lots of people are encouraging you to try, and you can make that decision. I just want to toss out that it might not be seamless. But I don’t think Windows is seamless either. It’s just what most people are used to.

I do a mixture of ketchup, mayo, garlic powder, onion powder, and msg, and slap that on cold cut sandwiches!

I know I can’t actually help you, but I have to say, I’m excited for you. You sound like you have carefully thought through your ideas, and concluded “I don’t personally have a future in India”. You are in a tough spot financially, but I can tell you have the fire inside you. You’re going to find a better country to live in, and change your circumstances, like so many Indian ex-pats before you! You can do it.

Well, I guess spirit is technically the cheapest. So that might be worth it to people all on its own. But I find the seating to be very cramped, I don’t like the feeling of being “nickel and dimed” with their “charge for everything” scheme, and when I rode spirit they would have extremely generous take off and landing estimates so that even with many delays, they are still “on time”.

None of this is really malicious, I think they are clear about the fact that they offer cheap tickets for a cheap experience. But man, as a customer, it feels bad. I will just pay the extra money and go with something else.

Friggin’ Spirit Airlines!

Yes, another tragedy is when sales guy from company A talks to sales guy from company B.

You want a submarine to also fly into space? Oh yeah, we can do that! Our engineers are really smart, shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll have that design over to you in 2 weeks!

Later, when talking to the engineering team…

Well, I don’t see what’s so hard about it. We’ve had submarines and planes in WW2, you’re telling me we can’t innovative and combine those ideas? Well, this is an opportunity for you guys to really show off the engineering ability of the company… And I can’t move the promise date now, I already talked to him on the phone and I’m about to go on my cruise. Call me if you need anything!

Excellent point about government sponsored anti corruption measures, too. Here in the US our government contracts award “points” to businesses which are minority or woman- owned.

In practice, the same construction companies simply institute shell companies, and make their wives/daughters/sisters the owners of these shell companies, charge a premium, and have the “owner” subcontract the work back to the same old company, effectively making themselves an extra 20 percent…

Small businesses (which may be minority or woman owned, but they don’t play golf with the government buyers) are still totally forgotten.

I’m an engineer. When you see something really badly designed and think “wow, those engineers are so stupid! I could have done a better job myself!”

Please know that we did think about it. It’s just that some guy with an MBA decides the schedule, and another guy with an MBA decides the budget, and terrible designs get released no matter how much we protest. I’m sorry we couldn’t figure it out fast enough and cheap enough, though.

And yes, we do mistakes all the time too. It’s just that we usually know about the obvious ones.