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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2023

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  • Switched from the default win10 mail app to thunderbird about a year ago when the mail app started forcibly updating to the outlook and broke some shit on my windows installation to use a whole lot of resources. I quite liked the old mail app of the windows, but Thunderbird is quite enough of a replacement at default settings and much more customizable after fiddling. K9 has no difference than Gmail on default settings, either.








  • 5.15. isn’t that bad of a kernel version in my experience. Admittedly, I’m don’t have any latest gen hardware at the moment, but using one generation back RX 6700XT without problems on it with Mint. Alternatively, one can install the newer 6.x kernels with a few clicks if needed, they are not actively blocked or unlisted.


  • I had been using Reddit with my custom feed right from the very beginning. It was pretty good, I got more community recommendations from friends and people in the communities I had subscribed to, and I even started dropping some communities I no longer had much interest in, so my feed was pretty dynamic with popular and niche stuff alike.

    I still miss my custom feed and having content in some niche communities, but it has been more than 6 months since my preferred 3rd party app has been deployed for Lemmy and I have been completely scrolling and commenting on Lemmy only, still. Never scrolled on Reddit since July 1, never succumbed to desktop-only alternatives like old.reddit, although it is still my default with RES settings applied if I’m to click on Reddit links for info, since the platform was going to be at its shittiest moments from then on, not just the interface.

    Primary news communities are good enough to not avoid them like the plague they were in Reddit, riddled with propaganda bots. Big, general meme communities are the same, without many daily reposts in the same community. Movies/series fan communities are very much lacking, except a couple big fan communities. Tbh I prefer Star Trek communities here over any series/movies fan communities anywhere else, although I haven’t watched even one episode of Star Trek so far in my life. Game communities are almost completely dead, but I have started getting my game updates from Steam “Home” screen blog feeds on the library. Big, all gaming and new gaming announcement related communities here are the same as they were in Reddit if I want digital entertainment poisoning anyway.

    Overall, fewer content flood of Lemmy with also almost non-existent bot or discussion-disabled loud mouth count feels like a way healthier engagement procedure on this kind of a platform. Writing paragraphs-long comments never felt like a drop in the sea they were on Reddit, even if these comments get only a handful upvotes/downvotes here and maybe a couple replies at best.


  • Most niche communities from R*ddit are pretty much dead here unless you are looking forward to being a regular poster yourself. This rather requires sticking to the lemmy.world open feed rather than creating a custom feed with your communities only, if you are looking to scroll a lot instead, of course. Just stick around a bit, see how often what communities and people reach the general feed, elect to block the ones that feel flooding your feed or not to your taste. Maybe give some regularly-posted communities that are previously not in your area of interest some chance before going on a mass block. This place does have a quality and rather genuine people, but in a limited scope.


  • I’ve been trying out Mint (Cinnamon) for some months now. I have an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and an AMD Radeon 6700XT graphics card, both of which work splendidly on Mint out of the box. This installation is my first ever attempt at using Linux, with dual booting on top of it (on the same sdd with partitioning), but I’d say it set up more nicely than any Windows formatting I’ve ever done over the years. Writing the .iso file to a USB drive was a bit different than I’m used to using Rufus for Windows, but Rufus can write it.

    Mint (Cinnamon) is based on Ubuntu, which itself is a massively changed Debian but with still a good compatibility with it on the surface.

    While Arch is great and all, if you are looking for a life-line after years of being a Windows user but finally deciding to not move on to the next Windows version because of all the shit they keep breaking and all the other ad and data mining they do on those versions, Mint is a great starting distro. It gets installed with all the hardware drivers present, for AMD hardware at least but Nvidia should work, too. No need to set up a modern working computer environment with requirement to install anything to get your things working. As long as OS installation goes correctly and it boots up, you are good to go.

    As for regular stuff:

    1. Libre Office is pre installed, and I find it pretty good even tho I had quite the dislike for it before. Select a theme and a layout preset for the toolbar, you are right in your element as if you are continuing to use MS Office.

    2. Gaming with Steam is just turning on one setting in Steam settings, the compatibility tab (Proton), and that’s it. Most games work out of the box. For others, check ProtonDB for what people say about the game. They usually work, or there is a little basic fiddling required at best. I can play Hunt: Showdown with Easy Anti Cheat without a hassle on it. Just another little Proton file installed, that’s all.

    3. For Windows-only programs, you can use Wine. Wine works in the background, and when properly installed, it allows you to just double click any .exes and run them. Programs can be a bit slower than using them on Windows, but most of them work on Linux with Wine if it is what matters to switch from Windows. You can play a lot of non-Steam games through that, too.

    4. Mint has a Microsoft Store-like program repository where you can install programs and their dependencies with one click. This works well most of the time, but sometimes Flatpak versions of these can be problematic. I’ve had Steam, Discord and Wine installed through it, and they had problems to some extent. For these, I switched to grabbing .deb installation files through their own websites, or in the case of Wine, installed through its own instructions on its website using a few terminal commands, which isn’t more complicated than using Registry editor or Group editor in Windows.

    5. Most other common stuff has good alternatives, with downsides or upsides. Switching from MPC to VLC, from Photoshop to Gimp, MS Office to Libre Office, etc. The internet forums have many detailed answers to these, or you can always ask for thoughts yourself. There usually is an alternative most of the time.

    One thing to keep in mind: As Mint Cinnamon is based on Ubuntu, you can use answers for Ubuntu most of the time. However, while using the answers, keep these in mind as a form of cheatsheet when troubleshooting, or looking for implementing things:

    Mint (Cinnamon) v21 and above are based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS called Jammy, not Ubuntu 20.04 LTS called Focal(?). Almost all answers for 22.04 LTS will work on Mint Cinnamon, and all repositories and programs for it will work on Mint, too. 20.04 LTS, or recent 24.04 LTS, will have compatibility when looking for answers, but they are not directly what you are using.

    Mint Cinnamon also uses Gnome, not KDE, as the desktop environment, so keep that in mind when looking for answers. It also uses X11 of Xorg by default for its base graphics drawing, not Wayland.


  • Thank you for the insight! I rather work with logos, icons or other flat and vector drawings usually, a lot of the time upscaling or working up from zero so Krita looked rather irrelevant with how the those types of tools were not readily apparent. I’ll check Inkscpae for this.