Awesome to hear! It’s easier said than done (like always) because I think sometimes we don’t even realize when we’re doing it.

In the first year of COVID my position got eliminated at the company I’d worked at for 16 years. I’d had different positions within the company, but that place was basically my entire career until then.

That shock to the system, coupled with the fact that several months later I realized I was the same person with the same loved ones, finally flipped some switch in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there. Then the next job I got was fucking horrible and served to weld that switch in its new position, lol.

So now I have a good job with good coworkers, and I appreciate that fact every day, but that’s not going to erode the healthy boundaries and mental compartmentalization.

MacOS is literally certified UNIX though.

I’m not a Mac user at all, and I’m lucky enough to be able to run Linux full time at work, but it seems like macs should be alright in many cases.

What has been working for me is not trying to make software my life or my identity. I don’t get home from work just to work on my side project, or my app, or my Arch install, or even watch videos about coding and shit. I hang out at my pond, play with my pets, play with my son, chill with my wife, work on the yard, or just watch/play something that catches my interest.

It’s like we all have a unique user’s manual for our unique bodies and minds, but we don’t get a copy of it and have to do some reverse engineering to figure out what works. Then you have to have the compassion and empathy for yourself to do the things that increase your happiness instead of doing the things that you’re “supposed” to do.

I know teams is probably the most hated product in tech savvy corporate America, but I do at least give MS credit that I can let it live in a Firefox tab and my audio & video work fine for meetings.

But when anybody tries to use a Teams-equipped conference room? Whoo boy!

Yeah, jira is going alright for us at work, but there are a lot of supporting people maintaining it and prioritizing things in meetings that we engineers don’t have to attend.

Everybody gangs up on hating Teams instead!

If he got the cinnamon version, that is indeed the default Ubuntu based one. I use the same thing.

One of the biggest draws of regular Mint IMO is that it leverages the advantages and resources of Ubuntu but it removes the parts that many people don’t like.

I’m good with cinnamon myself, but you can totally install KDE on mint instead. It is just Linux after all.

When I do a search for mint kde, this is the first result and has step by step instructions. It looks like it can be as simple as apt install kde-standard or kde-full.

https://linuxiac.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint-22/

I’m tempted, and I may mess with it some day, but honestly after tweaking some settings I’m pretty happy with how my cinnamon desktop performs.

That’s the proprietary app container system pushed by Canonical who maintains Ubuntu. That’s as opposed to something more widely accepted like flatpak. I’m not an expert on everything Canonical has done to piss of the FOSS community, but I think snaps are the biggest one.

And in regular old Linux Mint Cinnamon you don’t have to deal with that, and you can still lean on Ubuntu’s apt repositories.

And when Mint is right there too.

I have Ubuntu packages all through my system and I don’t need to care about whatever BS canonical is up to. Worst case scenario is I switch to LMDE one day.

My first was Sun Solaris Unix, but now I’m a middle aged engineer who wants to fix company product issues rather than personal workstation issues, and Mint rocks my socks.

The mundanity of my computer working seamlessly every day is right up there with the mundanity of my car starting every morning, as far as how much it bothers me, lol.

But there’s nothing wrong with messing with your car’s engine or your computer’s OS, obviously. Some people are just in a place where they want to do that and some aren’t.

The regular version uses a lot of Ubuntu resources but doesn’t have snaps either.

Yeah, unfortunately a huge chunk of the population is so negative that complaining about the world is pretty much how they interact with it. That and they define themselves by the things they don’t like.

Oof, I’m not in IT thank goodness, but I still feel this in my bones. I’ve had to write plenty of instructions for in-house trained users though, and it seemed just as bad. I can’t imagine what it’s like with real randos.

I’ve definitely seen some of these “please let us help you” getting sent around. And even in completely different types of organizations I’ve seen time and time again how the obnoxious entitled complainers don’t even show up.

This needs an extra top panel with the dude just chilling with no makeup, maybe reading a “clown makeup for dummies” book. The caption is “my last Windows machines are barely working but they know what happens if I have to ‘fix’ anything.”

That’s where I’m living right now. The PC I use all day is already Linux.

Any time you’re working with somebody who has to deal with the general public(or general workforce) though, you gotta be understanding.

They have to sort through the clueless people who turned off their monitor, and they have to deal with the Dunning-Kruger people who lie about what they did because they think they’re so damn smart.

And if it’s the first contact level 1 type support, they may not have the expertise to tell the difference and have to rely on the scripts.

I just had to search to find my work monitors’ controls yesterday! All the way on the back.

I get credit for knowing they were turnoffable though.

Oh nice. Does your system FINALLY provide enough addreses for every Planck volume in the observable universe? It’s been frickin amateur hour, this internet thing.

Nope, I’m not sure I even looked for one yet. I don’t need auto sync and/or backup for my work since that’s mostly in GitHub and JIRA and the like. But it’s still convenient to be able to throw a file in there at times.

Insert “use Linux” joke. But I’m absolutely serious when I say that using my company’s M365 stuff using the web versions in Firefox on Linux is pretty pleasant.

That’s how my Dell work machine is. The switch slides some red plastic over the lens.