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!

Frodo’s initial task was just to get The Ring to Rivendell, after all.

(Smash cut to Frodo and Sam clawing their way up Mt. Doom)

" 'Ah, just take the Ring to Rivendell and I’ll catch up with ya! ’ he said.

'Elrond’s pretty sharp he’ll know what to do!’ he said.

‘It’ll be an aDvEnTuRe!’ he said!"

Microsoft knows this has so much power with a certain computer user demographic and I hate it so much. It was the worst, having to teach people to install certain useful software while also directing them to override big scary warnings…“But just this time! Don’t do it all the time!”

It made me look shady, it made the software look shady, for no good reason.

…And you just know, sadly they’re the same kind of users that will probably repeat that pattern with a suspicious .exe they got in an email.

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.)

Just wanna say, I’ve seen you on a lot of posts and I really appreciate your fervor in trying to reach out with hope and education after this dark turn of events. It’s important work and I’m really glad to feel we aren’t alone.

I don’t know if we agree 100% on a lot of things, but if we win a world where we can keep peaceably debating the merits of various pro-human policies, then we’ve won, and that’s worth fighting for.

Please make sure you’re taking good care of yourself and getting fresh air once in a while too, amigo. All this doomsaying by people can weary the soul. But thanks for putting so much effort into your outreach posts. :)

–Sincerely, A Christian-Anarchist (USA)

Bough it

Twish it!

Pull it!

(Yeah I know this joke is a stretch lmao)

“I work at Burger King making flame-broiled who-ppers I wear pa-per hats…”

It’s so dumb but also that was the joy of the old Internet. Stupid silliness like that lmao.

“mostly”. The optimism in this statement LOL.

Oh my gosh that’s so much closer, you’re right. Bet you could totally make a nature-oriented specialization too. :D

I really appreciate this. I’m stuck awake and exhausted too. My house all voted and did what we could, here in NV, but I hate that nagging feeling that it wasn’t enough.

I’m praying to maintain that fervor, that raging fire to believe in good and fortify against coming evil… But it’s one crisis out of our hands to the next, and I’m just so tired. :(

I find myself returning more and more often to the ever and increasingly relevant:

Sending hopeful feelings for you to wherever else in the country you are.

You too, friend. We’re still here. We’ll get through this one day at a time.

American here. I would totally take you up on that hug there, mein bruder. This feels pretty damn awful. :(

I’m still holding out some kinda vague hope for the “final numbers” but…right now I’m not alone in feeling a little lost and confused at what we’re about to go through and what the heck life will look like in the near future.

A lot of previous elections felt like empty hype and doomsaying but this one feels like we’re gonna feel it immediately.

God help us all.

Also I don’t want more Americans moving here.

I have a sad feeling the rest of the world feels the same way.

I’m at the point where I want to leave these borders. I want to go somewhere relatively quiet and developed that has worker’s rights and isn’t some major turbulent player in the game of global domination.

I’d respect my new home and integrate and do my best to get along with my new neighbors.

But I’m pretty sure we’re stuck here to endure this madness.

The rich have already departed though. So you’ll probably end up with less humble American refugees and more pompous real-estate moguls. And for that, I’m sorry.

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!

An INT-maxxing Druid? :p

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…