Lets say your worst fears are correct and this “female”, is trying to keep you as an orbiter. Get over yourself, you had no claim to her time.

She was willing to spend time with you before, probably because she thought you were genuinely interested in her platonically and wanted you as a close friend. You caught feelings and are blaming her for her actions and assigning motives to easily explainable actions. you crossed the line, and she pulled away. Shes a social person and wanted many friends. Even if she was interested in you at some point, you said/did something that superseded that. Maybe she felt like you werent reaching out to her enough. but my guess is using the word female unironically to describe a person.

Seems to me that she “Intended” to hop online, play some games and talk to strangers. You should probably back off and re-evaluate how you view people especially women.

Open Book by: Cake https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=YUkLbsc6434

Heres a song, very relevent to your situation.

Yeah! great read if you have the time. It can be used to explain alot of things since its a very open take on going from a state of ignorance or naivety to “seeing the light”. I think its an important read, since people still in the “cave” are hard if not impossible to “convince” with such a limited perspective on reality.

I further interpret this to mean If we want to pull our fellow man out of the cave, we have to help change their perspective and meet them where they are in their journey out.

“The allegory of the cave” Is another great example!

It is a good anime but Its been out for years and maybe if they keep seeing it referenced theyll get around to watching it. The episode in question is basically filler and doesnt provide much to the overarching story

This Is the best response Ive read so far. The only thing id add is that this falls under Epistemology. that word alone IMO is dangerous to any regime.

The news is a propaganda machine designed to output a dual-pronged attack ironically outlined by your post. For skeptics like yourself the constant stream of misinfo will have you fact checking senseless data that you instinctively know to be true or false based on observation, wasting your time. however when presented in the news or by aquaintences It challenges you to correct them, this is a job for a team of the same magnitude as the news stations themselves.

For the indoctrinated Its just a constant echochamber of new info that helps fortify new or previously fabricated info, and gives them talking points to repeat to anyone even minorly skeptical of the regime.

Your experience with your friend IS part of the manipulation. the only way out is to attempt to focus on what is local to you and within your control (dont ignore the macro issues obviously just try not to focus on them). Getting involved with local politics, speak with real people and rather than attacking their facts. Attack their logic, similarly to how you are trying to get your friend understand her bias and where that stems from.

being a victim of propaganda, being religeous, being part of a subculture, having unresloved trauma, having children, never being properly taught logic or Epistemology (edit:this word is so important cant believe i forgot it.), all of these and more contribute to bias.

To answer your question, there are organizations that do fact checking but im also skeptical of those because who watches the watchers? How do they afford to exist? Do the fact checkers have bias themselves? Its a never ending cycle of bullshit.

No doom and gloom though (they want you to feel defeated) because there is still tons to appreciate, so many people are waking up. Lots of individuals attacking “the system” from every possible angle all across the world. All it takes is some mildly uncomfortable conversations with the people you care about, and patience, LOTS of patience.

Braindead responses and honestly probably just bait anyone passing through, ignore this fool. Ubuntu base install(gnome), in my experience uses less than 2gb of ram at idle. (Even less when using xfce or lxqt) Dummy added bloat to his system and then came on here to bitch about nothing. either that or hes a bot, troll or both.

Dont forget the speed lines, flames and arbitrary number for the extra horsepower!

in all seriousness though the heatsink could attach directly to the backplate with thermal cement. since alot of phones are designed to disapate heat from there, great idea!

Hes saying that a HDD or SSD draws too much power for the usb port to handle on his mini pc. This would not be an issue if the drive was externally powered or, for example of he used a dongle that has a power input, the usb hdd or ssd “should” (maybe check the specs of the dongle) draw power directly from the wall and transfer data to the phone, so it shouldnt be an issue. This is actually very useful input even if the user does not plan to boot off the hdd. Definitely could have been worded better tho

I was assuming that the user would be using an older phone that would otherwise become ewaste (most phones have built in batteries now), some phones do clock down when at low battery but if you are consistantly plugged in it shouldnt be an issue. Alot of modern devices will draw from wall power before battery, but that doesnt solve the battery issue entirely since the l-ion batts are kinda dangerous when overheated or punctured so unless you have the skills to remove the battery and wire a bypass you are taking a minor risk. but imo ive used phones as permenent gps or as a wifi reciever and in those applications, i did not encounter battery expansion and or major overheating.

You can use mixplorer (6$ google play store) to quickly launch a local ftp or smb server. attach a hdd or ssd to the charging port, buy a dongle (<25$) that allows data transfer, charging, and ethernet. And you basically just made a nas. You could even port forward the ftp to make it accessible outside your network (i dont recommend this unless you are hosting a vpn).

do not expect good transfer speeds but as far as a persistant redundant secure storage this is a great solution. The phone used would optimally have usb c for better data tranfer speeds. But the phone itself may limit these speeds refer to your phones specifications data for that (just google it).

The phone might overheat so maybe slap a usb fan on it and remove the case. If possible make it “float”(put rubber feet on the phone or smthn idk) to allow airflow on both surfaces of the device.

Very cool Idea. Please make an update post and link it in this thread if you make it and test speeds <3

Edit no idea how i forgot to mention this, but ADB can also be used to send commands directly to the device over the network you have alot of fine tune control over the device, you can run, close, install and uninstall apps, run scripts, remove default unessary bloat and even the launcher! After setup you may never have to touch the phone again, barring power loss etc. If that seems like alot there are also methods of remote desktopping into the phone. But in my expereince those solutions are laggy and slow. But if you just need it for simple tasks this might be optimal for you.

Did you even read the whole comment?

just stick with the free version and find free viable alternatives. Libreoffice, kdenlive, etc.

If time is a factor and you just need a distro that “works” stick with what you have, and find FOSS alternatives for zorin. Best of luck

I respected their time and was simply making a suggestion because zorin seems scummy locking default features behind a paywall.

Most distros come with a built in software downloader. If you consider it “work” to type kdenlive and click download ive got nothing else to say to you.

Yeah fully agree, i just wasnt willing to outright call them scummy. If anything the 50$ price tag should drop to ~20$ since the software they are packaging is not even their own work.

Zorin itself is foss but paying for features like themeing and software Is imo against the spirit of linux, they should, (again imo) release zorin pro as the default and simply accept donations. Like most distro maintainers. Even more frustrating, is the advertised features are just normal features and software readily available for free on other distros being paywalled. Its very likely that a user could get all of the listed features on the free version without paying. I also misread the website, ms office and adobe premier are not even what is included. In fact they do not list the specific names of the alternatives that they use in the pro version. I would bet that the pro version Has all foss software that is being hidden behind the price tag. I will do more quick research and edit this comment if that is the case.

Edit: Yeah i nailed it, its all foss software available through most package managers or flatpak heres a list.

Additional Software Included in Zorin Pro: Office & Productivity:

LibreOffice: A comprehensive office suite compatible with Microsoft Office/365 documents: https://www.libreoffic…​

Scribus: A desktop publishing application: https://sourceforge.ne…​

Graphics & Multimedia: Krita: A powerful, open-source image editing and painting software: https://krita.org/

Inkscape: A vector graphics editor: https://inkscape.en.so…​

Blender: A free and open-source 3D creation suite: https://www.blender.org/​

GIMP: A free and open-source image manipulation program: https://www.gimp.org/d...​

Evince: A Gnome document viewer: https://apps.gnome.org…​

Foliate: A simple and lightweight e-book reader: https://flathub.org/ap...​

Kdenlive: A non-linear video editor: https://kdenlive.org/e...​

FreeCAD: A free and open-source 3D design application: https://www.freecad.or…​

LibreCAD: A free and open-source 2D CAD software: https://wiki.librecad…​

Darktable: An open-source digital photo management and editing tool: https://www.darktable…​

ALL of the listed features from zorin pro have free alternatives, unless you really want microsoft office, screen sharing, adobe premier, etc… just stick with the free version and find free viable alternatives. Libreoffice, kdenlive, etc. How did you land on zorin to begin with? Most new users are recommended to use fedora, ubuntu-gnome, and linux mint. To me, just looking at zorins website they do not share the most basic principles of the linux space (being free and open source). I highly recomend switching, if you could run

echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

This will output the name of your display manager like gnome, kde, etc. The version of zorin you are running is more than certainly using a popular one. Just find a distro that uses the same one. And your user experience will be almost exactly the same. Zorin might have some QOL features but definitely not anything you couldnt implement yourself.

Feel free to reach out here for more help if you run into any brick walls. You already dual booted your pc so i have faith that you have a pretty good grasp on what you are doing. If time is a factor and you just need a distro that “works” stick with what you have, and find FOSS alternatives for zorin. Best of luck

I used the plasma-meta package and to be sure I just now used arch-chroot on a flashdrive and removed plasma entirely. Cleared pacman with -Scc and then reinstalled plasma-meta and all its dependencies.

Also breeze-gtk and oxygen-gtk were the only themes in the long list of dependencies. Maybe they removed them to shorten install times and shrink the size of the DE install?

Youre comment is greatly appreciated. it also gave me an idea. Im next going to install downgrade and check if the dependencies change to add more themes in a previous version.

I could also be crazy and manually installed a bunch of themes one night. but i barely put any work into the look and feel of the DE so im almost 99% sure this is not the case

Update this did not work downgrading breaks dependencies and will not let me since force was depreciated…

After some tests with many different keyboards from f-droid, not a single one of the roughly 12 I tested were able to send capital letters. My workaround would be use a keyboard that allows for custom keys and add shift or a capslock input to the keyboard.

I tried “unexpected keyboard” which had the option to do this but i cannot for the life of me figgure out how to actually press capslock when its added to the keyboard its set to the letter A but its not useable through normal means i must have to hold it or something and i cannot figgure it out.

My other solution is to buy one of these

Its a dinky wireless keyboard with a left click on the top left making it holdable like a game controller and all mouse inputs are useable with only thumbs. Its great for using a keyboard from a bed or couch.

Best of luck

I use fossify, im going to test this on my device later after work and see if i can reproduce any issues you are experiencing. Any specifics would help. (just want to see if the problem is limited to you)