To everyone down voting and assuming this is ragebait, I would ask we take a step back. I think this is a genuine question and I can’t help but feel a bit heard that someone is asking it.

In the midst of all this ridiculous culture-warring, creators have a ton of anxiety now. It’s one thing to be afraid your creation will get you laughed at for being cringey, (as if that’s not a huge barrier already).

But it’s another entirely when it feels like in this era of “all art is political”, writing anyone who has recognizable human qualities will forcibly put you, the creator, into some ideological category where you’ll be scrutinized and judged personally based on your work’s perceived “agenda.”

The right with their relentless “woke-hunting”, the left with their “purity tests” to blame you for not championing their particular social cause. Showing your art seems to inevitably involve chumming the waters to the terminally online. This can also produce anxieties of being doxxed or something if it’s high profile enough.

That being said: My heart is warmed by all the overwhelmingly level headed responses in this thread. Seriously. It gives me hope.

Please notice I said FEELS a lot up there…Our perception is definitely muddied by how social media tends to megaphone the worst of society, and it tends to discourage us from being seen or interacting with others.

I’m glad threads like this demonstrate how genuine people can be. It provides quite a contrast.

While we’re at it…

Don’t make life choices based on the opinion of white supremacists.

Now your great life advice is even more universally applicable! :D

Also OP, if you want pretty and Cinnamon can’t do it for ya, you can always install KDE (my fav!) or GNOME or what have you right on top of your existing system.

Research before doing so! But it’s possible. :)

I also love Tumbleweed and rock it as my daily driver!

To complement this point, OP, you can also get that sweet rollback functionality in any distro! Usually the easiest way is selecting BTRFS as your file system on install, and installing a software called “TimeShift” that will manage snapshots for you.

BTRFS can be complicated, but basically, it allows remembering the changes in files, without needing to copy the ENTIRE file. This saves a ton of space. (You don’t need to get into the weeds deep diving if you don’t want to. Snapshots are great, everything else is great, as long as you aren’t doing crazy specific RAID setups or something lol)

Otherwise, on EXT4 for insurance, your rollbacks would just literally be copied files, which can eat your storage fast. :)

Tumbleweed is known for rolling (heh!) this in quite smoothly by default, but this is just an example how any distro can be tweaked how you like! (Highly recommend setting up Timeshift on ANY install.)

I absolutely second the advice in this comment: Try some live USBs or virtual machines and just play around for what feels right. Distro hopping can be lots of fun, but you’ll find one that “feels like home.”

:)

I agree with most folks here that usability-wise, both are truly fine! Mainly I think philosophy is where Mint might have an edge here.

Ubuntu, run by a corpo named Canonical, has had some controversial decisions in the past, such as inserting amazon ads into the system’s search feature, or “opt out” analytics being default, and lately, a system called “snap.”

Snap is controversial because it has a closed source backend, but effectively works just like its open-source counterpart, the “flatpak.” It’s packaged so the software has everything it needs to run.

Some people say they work great, others hate them, but Ubuntu doesn’t make it very easy for you to have a choice in the matter.

If you don’t like the idea of snaps, it’s a bit of a pain to get rid of it. And otherwise, Ubuntu will sneakily use it as the default way to install most software. Philosophically, this can feel a lot like why people left Windows behind!

Long term, that’s why I favor and recommend Mint to most newcomers: It doesn’t play those games, sometimes the drivers work even better, the community is fantastic, and the vast knowledge that works on Ubuntu should work on Mint too.

So that’s mainly where the difference will lie.

Either way, I wouldn’t sweat it too much while you’re learning, as long as it does what you want! And purple-orange is pretty snazzy. ;)

Mint just feels a little “cleaner” in my humble opinion. Most software you’d want the latest of, like GIMP or Discord, will be found as a Flatpak in Mint’s app store.

Hope this helps you get a clearer view!

I like that idea, although I think we need some simpler guides as to what exactly one might he getting into if they’re setting up an instance that’s not just a domain name. (Costs, potential usage blowing up, legal issues with content, etc…)

Also, I really think there needs to be a smoother way to navigate between instances. I guess, so you’re still aware of “jumping nodes”, but also don’t feel locked in there. (Although maybe I’m just a newb still haha)

Truuue!

I probably engage here a little much too, but I’m glad there’s not a ton of “You also might like based on where your mouse hovered 0.4 seconds longer” panels on every single page!

Let’s be honest, corporate was just mad they didn’t think of it sooner! :p

Yeah you make a really good point there! I was perhaps thinking too simplistically and scaling from my personal experience with playing around on my home machine.

Although realistically, it seems the situation is pretty bad because freaky-giant-mega-computers are both training models AND answering countless silly queries per second. So at scale it sucks all around.

Minus the terrible fad-device-cycle manufacturing aspect, if they’re really sticking to their guns on pushing this LLM madness, do you think this wave of onboard “Ai chips” will make any impact on lessening natural resource usage at scale?

(Also offtopic but I wonder how much a sweet juicy exploit target these “ai modules” will turn out to be.)

Bough it

Twish it!

Pull it!

(Yeah I know this joke is a stretch lmao)

massive recession. What smart thing do you think were going to do about it?

I remember 2008 like yesterday. “Nobody hiring. Mass layoffs. No jobs.”, and then it seems like that same cycle has just been on regular repeat the rest of our lives up to this point. (Meanwhile, record profits because of course!)

This is what I really worry about. I’m still trying but still on the same treadmill. I’m not a super genius or a heartless grifter, so I don’t really know if I can be clever enough for us to get through this… And that scares the crap out of me.

Had us in the first half, not gonna lie. LOL

Dammit, Manjaro. Why you gotta be WEIRD?! I used to love their branding, but they keep doing crazy things that would clearly alienate the userbase that’s left…

NGL on pretty much any install, I’d end up looking up pros and cons of every filesystem AGAIN…

… It’s BTRFS now. Simple. Easy. Lol

But it was a lotta research to reach that conclusion. So yeah I get that newbie apprehension!

To be fair: “For each answer it gives”, nah. You can run a model on your home computer even. It might not be so bad if we just had an established model and asked it questions.

The “forest destroying” is really in training those models.

Of course at this point I guess it’s just semantics, because as long as it gets used, those companies are gonna be non-stop training those stupid models until they’ve created a barren wasteland and there’s nothing left…

So yeah, overall pretty destructive and it sucks…

Why’s this feel like a car-dealership special: Where you negotiate and negotiate and FINALLY they seem to relent…

…but it’s still in their favor and they simply shifted the numbers to different variables so you feel like you’re getting a fair deal…

So yeah, we will all be old one day. But that doesn’t mean we’re all destined to be sad old narcissists.

Right! Of course not! My point is that in this case, age isn’t the problem, it’s still just narcissistic power hungry jerks voting. They just so happen to curse us with their longevity.

So taking voting rights away for all after a certain age wouldn’t serve us, but if overall we keep voting in altruistic ways, we can still do a lot of good into our later years.

If you mean they shouldn’t be in office calling the shots for us at that age though, I TOTALLY agree.

I think more people will trend against that with time, and we will kill the “you lean more right with age” myth once and for all. :)

Wishing you a long and prosperous life, BTW. <3

I see what you’re getting at, but we need to be careful here as we’ll be 70 too at some point.

Under that precedent, gen-Alpha conservicans would likely unanimously vote to have us all thrown into the sea to save on healthcare costs or something. Lmao

I legit wouldn’t be surprised at this point if Qanon was right, but it was just another case of their own ilk blaming others for what they’re already doing.

The entire party is “weird” at this point and refuse to die whilst leading incredibly unhealthy lives. Who’s to say they aren’t up to occult dark-ritual weirdness, mad science, and siphoning lifeforce from kidnapped youth around the world?

(Yes I’m being satirical but also if it had any truth to it, it would TOTALLY be THESE GUYS doing it and blaming it on “the others” amirite?)

I mean, he’s right in one way, you certainly ought to be able to talk about who you are voting for without fear.

Absolutely. And if you can’t, you’re in the wrong marriage. If women were free to leave Republican husbands without fear of harm, red-cap affiliation would be a more telling demographic for social isolation and lonliness than it already is.