Ubuntu 9.04, because of WUBI (anyone remember that?). Unstable as hell, but allowed you to run a near bare metal Linux install without the hassle of setting up dual-booting and a separate partition. Liked Ubuntu it so much that I soon replaced Windows completely. Currently running Debian, so I haven’t strayed far from the family.

I would say Mastodon already has. I’ve been spending a lot of time there over last few weeks and there’s more content than I can consume. Breaking news stories are covered well, including live blogging, although a lot of that content is cross-posed from Xitter. Plenty of people to follow, including authors, photographers, journalists and scientists. An increasing number of media outlets have a presence there, as well.

Xitter still has an order of magnitude more users, but Mastodon is mostly Nazi-free (which is nice).

I knew someone was going to ask that and I’m going to give you the lame answer that I don’t remember for sure. It’s been a while since I used my Chromebook, but it was a fairly mainstream application that wasn’t compiled for ARM. I ended up using the Flatpak version, which worked fine but was a resource hog on an ARM Chromebook with only 4GB of RAM.

The S330 has an ARM processor, so definitely avoid that one (and any other Chromebook with an ARM processor). To be honest, I would buy a cheap Windows laptop and install Linux on that rather than fiddling with trying to get it to run on a Chromebook.

Or, as others have said, leave ChromeOS on the machine and run Linux in Crostini. If you have a reasonably speced machine it runs pretty well. Although again, I would avoid ARM as some Debian applications aren’t available for ARM Chromebooks.

I agree with the posters who are telling you to stick with Windows if your career depends on software that isn’t Linux compatible. If you want to play with Linux you can install WSL on Windows, run Linux in a VM on Windows or buy a cheap used/refurb business laptop and Linux to your heart’s content on that.

I’m not sure that actually works. You can search for a Mastodon user, but when you try to subscribe the sidebar buttons are missing on Lemmy.

My understanding is that you can subscribe to a Lemmy community in Mastodon, but not the other way around. Maybe there’s a trick I’m missing?

I think it depends on what sort of content is posted. If it’s mostly promotional stuff some people may feel that it doesn’t fit the vibe of Mastodon. If it’s thought-provoking content (especially journalism) then it will be a win. Either way, having The BBC on Mastodon seems like a big deal, to me, and maybe it will induce other journalists to explore the fediverse.

There are more than enough people on the planet and the answer to falling birth rates in the developed world isn’t more births, it’s more immigration.

Unfortunately, the xenophobes seem to be winning in most western countries, to everyone’s detriment.

I’ve used Lemmy Account Settings Instance Migrator, which migrates your blocked communities and settings as well as your subscriptions. It worked for me, but YMMV as the developer says it’s alpha software.

In addition to a large instance being less likely to shut down and (presumably) having more resources, there’s an additional advantage to being on a larger instance: you have a more comprehensive “All” feed. Since federation with a remote feed isn’t established until (IIRC) someone subscribes to it, an instance with a larger user base should contain more subscriptions to a wider variety of content. Of course, not everyone will like that and you lose out on Beehaw content if you’re on the two largest Lemmy instances, but I think it applies in general.

I’ve always used Xubuntu. It’s reasonably lightweight and the Ubuntu USB creator does the heavy lifting for creating persistence. The only downside is you have to have a running instance an Ubuntu flavor (bare metal, VM or USB) to use the tool.

Here you go: RISC-V Exchange: Available Boards
EDIT: Good luck finding any boards in stock. Sorry.

I’m part of the cohort of programmers that learned to code in pre-dotnet VB. VB6 (my precious) was the most popular programming language for years.

I’m part of the cohort of programmers that learned to code in pre-dotnet VB. VB6 (my precious) was the most popular programming language for years.

Mine was powered by hamster wheels. The damn wheels squealed all day long - drove me crazy. Not to mention the feed bill.

I am a Boomer when it comes to coding

Hey, OP, I think it’s cool that you’d like to learn to code. I made my living as a coder for many years and it’s a good career path. But I would not say it’s an essential life skill and the vast majority of people of all ages get by fine without coding skills.

With that out of the way, I’m going to defend the honor of Boomers here. Boomers (and the Silent Gen before them) built the technology industry as we know it today. For example, here’s a list of popular programming languages and their inventors:

• Java: James Gosling (1955) - Boomer
• C: Dennis Ritchie (1941) - Almost a Boomer
• C++: Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) - Boomer
• C#: Anders Hejlsberg (1960) - Boomer
• Python: Guido van Rossum (1956) - Boomer
• PHP: Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) - X Gen
• Perl: Larry Wall (1954) - Boomer
• JavaScript: Brendan Eich (1961) - Boomer
• Ruby: Yukihiro Matsumoto (1965) - Cusp of Boomer/X Gen
• SQL: Raymond Boyce (1946) and Donald Chamberlin (1944) - Boomers
• Go: Robert Griesemer (1964), Rob Pike (1956) and Ken Thompson (1943) - 2 Boomers and an almost-Boomer

<Adjusts onion>. Thank you for your indulgence.

I’m not sure what’s being implied here, but the quote from the article is true. ChromeOS is FOSS, was based on Ubuntu (a long time ago) and is now based on Gentoo. Early versions of ChromeOS, which were basically just a full-screen browser, didn’t feel very Linuxy. But I think current ChromeOS versions look and feel a lot like using a simplified Linux distro.

I don’t have a strong opinion on whether ChromeOS should be grouped with traditional Linux distros for statistical purposes. But it is notable that Google maintains the two most most popular non-server OSs built on the Linux kernel.

No “average person” troubleshoots their own Windows machine, but they know someone who can. if you install Linux on someone’s machine, you are their tech support. Most of the time that’s fine, because Linux is pretty damn reliable. But when something goes wrong an average person is going to have a harder time finding support.