Before the ArchLinux wiki became as good as it is, people like me used the Gentoo and LFS wikis as documentation for Linux.

There isn’t quite enough time in the world for me to be able to use LFS in anger as much I would wish. We make do with source distros with source managers like Gentoo (surprise!), Funtoo and others which give the source distros users just enough helping hands of dependency management.

Real tears would be shed were for LFS to disappear.

Don’t put parental controls on it. What do you want to control? Maybe put controls on the website that they can visit, but that goes on the DNS or router. Most kids will go to a mate’s house that doesn’t have any or as harsh parental controls anyway if they are particularly keen on seeing something that they ‘shouldn’t’. Parental controls are a fix for parents who can’t talk to their kids; they make the parents feel safer but just send the issues underground. Gen X will have been writing code for a while at your child’s age. I was. There was no choice if you needed to unlock a game you could’ve afford. At that time GUIs were a bad overlay over MS-DOS or DR-DOS. You had to know what you were doing to get the best out of it. Your kid will be fine with any distribution of Linux. If your kid is technically inquisitive likely to be good at maths/science, get them installing Arch. If not and they just want to use a browser, install one of the top five popular distributions from distrowatch.com. The Office suite for Linux is called LibreOffice. If you use Chrome as your browser you’ll easily tell if your child has been on bad sites because your timeline will be filled with adverts for unsavoury impotence remedies. Enjoy.

PS printers are still bastards in Linux. Happily they’re less bastardish in Linux (and Mac, because Linux and iOS use the same printing software) than Windows. If you like your life buy a decent Laser from anyone but HP - my generation bought the last decent HP printers they made.

Mostly in times of economic growth and very positive sentiment. It’s the antidote to the catch-22 that you can’t get a particular job without the experience but can’t get the experience without the job.

Simply put ‘fake it until’ applies when you can put experience you don’t (quite) have on a CV; get the job and acquire the experience before it is ever tested in any meaningful way. That only really happens in a period of rapid economic expansion (whether that be in your (their) business, sector, or country wide). In such cases no-one really knows what they’re doing.

I don’t have much experience of celeb or influencer culture FITYMI - finding someones parked Lamborghini or private plane and dancing in front of it for a TikTok pretending that is yours.

That’s an amazing set of references to throw my way. Thank-you. I’ll read through them in a while. My assertion was based on talking to real people: I’m only just not-Russian myself.

I don’t really think you’ve captured communism: Cuba isn’t. China has been moving away from communism for decades. Russia rejected the Communists for the Bolsheviks shortly after the revolution. There’s a huge difference between socialism and communism.

The West is in somewhat of a hard time. There’s a left shift going on since my golden days (as Gen X). Young people (Gen Z) rightly feel hard done by and the social mobility seems to have been damaged. It feels like the sodding seventies again here in Blighty ( I hadn’t even become a teenager when they ended but remember the mood and despair. Candles lighting the supermarket visits. Dead bodies of the unburied and the rats).

They already tax alcohol everywhere as far as know. Maybe you’re in the 'Mercan mountains and you’re a moonshine master; but noting the instance and name probably not!

Hullo to Deutschland!

About to reopen a matrix account. Mostly for tech support.

Didn’t really like Twitter, Mastodon holds no interest really.

I do like Lemmy a lot but mostly awaiting a search engine and the rest of the Reddit subs moving over.

Maybe there’s room for a fediverse fb in my life but I don’t see the world moving over anytime soon. I loathe fb but find some of the groups too useful to leave.

The West has lost the ‘war on drugs’, whatever that means.

The only way out is to regulate (and therefore tax) them. Cannabis is the gateway drug (pun intended).

I’m old and tried something mild ish when I young. It didn’t really do much for me so I never went down that path. I don’t even drink more than a unit a fortnight, usually I’m driving and I only drink socially. Just don’t fancy it much anymore.

As far as I’m concerned, the benefits of living today are mainly being funneled to an elite. Taxes were mostly levied on companies and have become taxes levied on the individual, with companies not really paying tax at all. People are struggling to hold it together. Drugs represent escapism pending some kind of revolution.

I’m one of ‘Thatcher’s children’ - A Gen X watching young people today giving up. If you had told me last century that I would have written such a thing today, I would have punched you.

I believe that the move left of the politics of today represents the population asking for help.

If you’ve never lived in a communist state you’re much more likely to favour communism. People who have (lived in communism) don’t.

'Mercans believe that social healthcare is communism - until they get seriously ill whereupon they opt for moving to a ‘communist’ country: UK or Canada or go for the US healthcare provider called gofundme.

Second vote for Niagara. Admittedly I haven’t tried other third party launchers. [Pixel 7 Pro owner who balked at the standard Pixel screen on sight in a way that I hadn’t previously with any phone]

I hosted my email on a home Exchange server last century before finally settling on Zoho so can sympathise!

I should also say that my setup is backed with Google cloud DNS.

I can’t honestly say that I’ve had any problems with Zoho collecting/sending email for years. It’s the general admin side that causes consternation - adding a domain, forwarding, lists, where the f I set up an email address!

Hosting domain email for other customers is really easy too should the need arise.

Zoho mail has a domain hosting platform for email. About £60 pa in dollars for my setup. Pricing varies on the number of accounts not the number if domains. I have two accounts, personal and business, and a control admin account. The domains I host vary according to the businesses I run. I funnel each domains email to one of the two accounts and reply with the appropriate domain easily. Personal email is masked with Addy.io mostly.

They deal with the email very well. There was a time that they really didn’t and the system went up and down like a tarts knickers.

The front end is ok. They play with it a lot and there are many screens pushing some shit or other before you actually are allowed to get to the inbox. The inbox setup is excellent with all the expected functionality and toys and many toys appearing monthly.

Typical of Indian continent companies, as a Brit who has spent much of his life frustrated on the phone to “Dave” from Mumbai with a really really thick accent, Zoho don’t really seem to understand concepts properly, so their passkeys setup doesn’t work with Bitwarden. TOTP 2FA cannot be just pasted in (from Bitwarden again) because they’ve tried to be flash with the input field and one has to click on a specific place first. The support team try really hard, but their ability to grasp the problem and fix it is lacking before some other buzzword catches marketing’s attention and they add yet another screen to click through or subvert the problem somewhere else. Their help knowledge base is enormous, well documented but unorganized and they don’t archive stuff that has been superceded, so be careful.

That said I’ve been using them for well over a decade and have no plans to change.

Running your own mail server ceased to be a hobby thing when RBLs came in. Use a provider with the resources to do the hard/cumbersome stuff.

I’d give Zoho mail an easy 7/10. And it’s cheap. Zoho invoice is great too.

When a teenage mare says there party starts at 9 pm, are you there at 8:50?

/s

We haven’t seen this ‘them and us’ financial divide for a century or more.

In those times generations of families lived together. Until there’s another reset to allow the middle classes to thrive again, this is the new normal.

That said, the middle classes have been being silly and trying to keep up with each other and bankrupting themselves. Houses are at very high prices because people will pay higher prices: both parties in a relationship working and paying someone else, school or nanny, or child care to parent their kids. A divorced couple or a high proportion of singles needs double the number of houses as a couple. Leasing brand new cars. Eating out or takeaway every night … bigger and bigger government. It all costs.

Add in stupid net zero emissions policy for tiny nations like the UK, rather than tackle the real polluting nations and you’ve got kids living at home looking after elderly parents until they die and they can have a house to themselves.

The number of children per household many nations have is already well below replacement rate. So at least you won’t be battling for mum and dad’s house with your sibling. Look on the bright side! 😁

All of the remaining Reddit, after a search engine for Lemmy appears. I’m financially contributing to Lenny, in a meagre way it must be said, and to a post-charging Reddit app. I’d really really miss both of them if they/either disappeared: the shared wisdom is almost never available anywhere else. 😁

I always try Reddit first for every query and then Lemmy. Lemmy is a wonderful resource but needs a way to have its results indexed in the well known engines or a dedicated engine of its own. May https://www.search-lemmy.com/ return soon.

Thank-you to everyone who made Lemmy possible. There’s no way that Encyclopedia Britannica was going to cut it. 😁

Cries in Gen X.

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. – G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain (The New World )

Thank-you for this.

I’ve been using FDroid for some years but rarely see a list like this.

Cancer is a fairly safe bet; I’m in the western world.

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That the toilet facilities are up to (your) standard.