Bob Smith

This is the biggest problem that I have with the Windows ‘Just download the program from the internet’ mentality. All that it takes is one brief moment when you let your guard down and everything falls apart. On top of that, modern search engines seem to be very happy to show bogus results as prominently as possible. Package managers aren’t perfect, but they’re a big step in the right direction. When I have to use Windows outside of a corporate or managed setting, I use something like Chocolatey.

I’m a married person and I had a few reasons. First and foremost was the feelings-based subjectivity of absolutely adoring my long-term girlfriend who was also my best friend. I wanted to be there for her for as long as we’re both around and I wanted her to trust that I would be there for her. She felt the same way and wanted to demonstrate that she was all in, which was just as important. For a lot of people (if you look at the divorce statistics), marriage doesn’t offer peace of mind. For us, it did. This has everything to do with our temperament, how we are with one another, and the things in life that we want, and what makes us worry about the future. I had a lot of options, but I certainly wouldn’t have married anybody else that I’d met.

We also have careers that could involve moving to another region from time to time. There’s a significant cost to walking away from a job to be with your partner, so being on the same page about the long-term nature of the relationship is an important part of the decisionmaking process. Health insurance/other benefits is a small but significant thing. It wasn’t a factor in our initial decision to marry, but marriage makes it easier to share some things depending on where you live and what type of people are running your government. For me personally, it also made it easier to wrap my head around estate planning, life insurance, and stuff like that.

A minor note based on post-marriage experience: The wedding ring is a decent weirdo-repellent. It isn’t foolproof, but it cuts down on some of the social nonsense that single people have to handle. If that interests you, you could just stay single and wear a ring.

It sounds like you want something that doesn’t lend itself to troubleshooting or useability. It can be done, though: pull your hard drive and run everything from a live USB with no persistent storage. Or just don’t use computers.

I tell a lie: the specific computer that I mention in the above post has a cleaned-up version of coreboot on it, not libreboot.

I had a much smaller chromebook with libreboot on in a few years ago. Booting was fine, the rest of the hardware was too weak for my daily use. It was an Asus C201. I vaguely remember having to disconnect the battery and bridge some board contacts to get it switched over.

I have libreboot on an old chromebook that I converted a year or two ago. I followed a guide. Minor disassembly but nothing weird.

The computer boots just fine with one issue that is hardly worth mentioning. I accidentally left some cruft around when I switched from one distro to another, so it fails to boot to the old system before successfully booting the current one. That’s a ‘me being lazy’ problem, not a ‘libreboot’ problem.

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Bahhahhah!

Make friends with some PC repair people. Depending on where you live, a LOT of Win10 stuff is getting thrown out right now. If you present yourself as an alternative to recycling/scrapping, you might get a good deal.

Then Friday night shows up.

And my experience is limited. I opened up an especially large book earlier today to test things out and it took the better part of ten seconds to load. That seems to be the case every time I switch from a different book to that one, so there’s still a bit of an issue. Not as bad as I remember it being.

I’ve had the large file issue with Librera too. Bundled epub collections with absurdly large page counts have sometimes been extremely slow to load. I’ve had better luck recently, so it might be a partially solved problem.

I use Librera on Android. I generally convert to .txt when I read fiction on Linux because I can use a wide range of text editors/viewers that way. It has been a great way to familiarize myself with a lot of features that I don’t use when I’m tweaking config files.

Beyond that, I use Okular or Calibre’s reader for epubs on an as-needed basis.

The Illustrated Man, also by Ray Bradbury. Welcome to the Monkey House is a great collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works, many of which are in the vein of sci-fi.

If you want to go weird with it, Harlan Ellison’s short stories are great. I’d also recommend Gene Wolfe’s The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.

I agree.

A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.

Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven’t bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.

I always assumed that a lot of this boils down to semantics and trademark law.

OpenIndiana is a direct code-line descendant of Unix System V through OpenSolaris via Solaris. Thank you for that, Sun Microsystems. I understand (but haven’t looked) that a lot of code these days is simply ported over from BSD or Linux. If you compare the source code to an old copy of the Lions book, you’re probably not going to see any line-by-line overlap. Thank goodness - we shouldn’t be literally running old operating systems from the '80s. I don’t think that OpenIndiana is Unix-certified by the Open Group (Trademark).

The BSDs started out as a sort of ‘Ship of Theseus’ rebuild of an academic-licensed copy of Unix around the time that AT&T was getting litigious and corporate Unixes (Unices?) were starting to Balkanize.

GNU/Linux started out as a work-alike (functions the same but with totally different code) inspired by MINIX, which in turn was an education-licensed Unix work-alike designed to show basic operating system principles to students. I think that one or more linux-based operating systems have obtained UNIX certification from the Open Group, just like Apple did for MacOS (paying money and passing some tests). It doesn’t seem like any of them are still paying to keep up the certification. Does it matter if they did at one point?

Going back to proprietary corporate Unixes, I believe that IBM AIX and HP-UX still exist as products. They started out as UNIX and have been developed continuously since then. They are both Certified Unix. By now, their codebases probably diverge substantially both from one another and from all of the Unix-likes. IBM also has a mainframe OS with a fascinating history that has nothing to do with UNIX. It is Certified Unix because it passes the right tests and IBM paid for certification. It is not UNIX code and doesn’t descend from UNIX code.

Simple as.