Dharma Curious

I started using Linux in 2008. A friend of mine on an old forum showed me wubi and helped me get set up. When he went AWOL and stopped posting, I went on some Ubuntu forum and asked for help with a problem I was having (WiFi had stopped working randomly). Those people tore me apart and spit on my bloodied corpse. It was brutal. Apparently, I was a disgusting moron for using wubi instead of replacing windows (on my netbook with no disc drive) entirely. It was insane. I’ve since discovered that I’d just found a particularly toxic group by chance, and that most of the community is actually very kind. But at the time, it was genuinely hurtful. I not only stopped asking for help for a long time, I stopped learning about Linux and computers in general because I felt like it was something I’d never understand, I was clearly too stupid to get it.

It’s a hobby more than an anything else.

So I’m what one might call a basic user. Mainly browser based tasks. I can use the terminal, but I don’t have really much of anything memorized. Imagine giving a desktop running Fedora to your great aunt, not that one, the other one, who’s constantly smoking and sexually harasses the busboys when they come to clean away the ashtrays. That one. That’s my level of Linux proficiency.

Are any of these things I might be able to do? I would genuinely love to help, but I use FOSS for philosophical reasons, not because I understand the techy stuff. If it’s doable at my level (or an achievable level), I’m eager.

… Don’t kink shame me

At least one!

I ended up on a massive Whatsapp group populated primarily by Indian women after I took a content writing class a few years ago. Made several very good friends. I’ve asked them about the whole Indian scammer thing. One of them said she knows a few, and they do it because they literally don’t have other options for employment. Which makes sense. Rampant, unfettered capitalism forces people to make decisions that go against their conscience for the sake of survival. I feel bad for scammers sometimes, other times I feel less charitable when they’re scamming my dad…

Whole situation just fucking sucks.