I like Linux, use(d) various flavors of it, and have had experience with / exposure to it for over 20 years. But no, I’ve never had a remotely flawless experience with it on a desktop or laptop environment. Wish I could offer more help or encouragement, but figured I’d at least chime in with some emotional support by affirming that you are not alone in that experience.

I would recommend Linux to technologically adept people (ex: tech professionals, computer science students) and only indirectly to less technically proficient people in the form of suggesting something like a Steam Deck for portable PC gaming to someone who might be interested.

But for an aging parent or my best friend’s kids? No. Sometimes I already feel like I’m a free on-call 24/7 IT support tech for friends and family, and that’s with mostly Windows and Android devices that pretty much just work the way folks expect (even if that way is broken/crumby/irritating/etc).

For me personally, I’m not sure I’d bother unless it was a medical necessity. And I definitely don’t want to be one of those much older guys who has the musculature of a 26-year old bodybuilder. I find it unattractive and off-putting, so if it is under my control, I wouldn’t want to look like that or have to live the type of lifestyle required to arrive there and maintain it. On the other hand, I don’t want to be the type of guy who would benefit from it but not get treatment because of shame, lots of that going on, too.

Biggest thing for me, having known a number of cis men getting treatment, is that it really needs to be medically supervised. I know it’s anecdotal, but it seems like side effects are very common, and there are a lot of very serious potential health problems that can occur.

On average, I find the less precise my predictions, the more accurate they become and the more precise my predictions, the less accurate they become.

So rather than predict that I’m 54.3% accurate, I’ll just say it’s probably roughly half the time at a minimum.

This is why I go out of my way quite a bit to poison the AI with my pointless boomer anecdotes, largely made up or confiscated. Plus, I rarely proof read my comments anymore, so apologies for the grammatical issues and the hard to believe and rarely either one way or the other but twice the times there’s another type of type that you can also quite not, right?

It’s like dun-dun dun dun-dun-dun dun dun dun-dun. DUHN-DUHN DUHN-DUHN-DUHN-DUHN DUHN DUHN DUHN-DUHN.

For me personally it’s the “almost nothing else” that went into the dishwasher with the plunger that truly pushed the narrative into holy shit territory.

I’ll be interested to read the other comments when I have the time/attention span.

It could just be the part of the country where I live (i.e. deeply conservative rural south), but everybody I know who identifies as a Libertarian (going to hand wave over the reality of whether the pedants and purists would agree) is basically what’s termed as “Republican-lite” or “Conservative-lite” aka right-wing.

If I tell you I’m a Libertarian, but my voting record is such that I’ve essentially only voted for Republican candidates in all prominent elections in the past decade (or sometimes more) and/or the majority of my political speech is in opposition to Democratic politicians and liberal policies, what does that suggest?

If I identify as a vegan but I like to eat meat with every meal, am I really a vegan?