It’s amazing how quickly they get it.

My kids use Linux. They are 5 and 7. They do just fine. They are “normal”… as in just beginner users.

The 5 year old only cares where Steam is, and where the games are in the menu.

The 7 year old is a master at it all already. He’s installing Minecraft mods all the time… downloading, unzipping the mods… running java -jar XYZ from the terminal… yeah I had to show him the first time, but TBH, I didn’t show it all to him. He read up on how it works and watched YouTube videos on it.

It’s all about what you’re used to and if you’re actually interested in learning the bits. Normal is what? Someone who treats the computer as an appliance? Yeah… with those users as long as the machine actually works… they don’t care what the underlying OS is… OSX? Windows 11? some Linux distro? It’s all the same to them. The computer is a magic machine that does things and they have no clue how or why.

dye a hero

Yes… but what colour?

The US Regular Army (RA) was founded in 1775. State militias supported the RA through the various wars fought on what is now US soil (including the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). In the Civil War, the RA was supported by volunteers and fought on the side that ultimately won. The Confederate Army was similar to the RA at the time. Currently, the RA has been absorbed into the US Army (including Army Reserve and National Guard).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_Army_(United_States) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Army

So… yes there was a federal military, but it was a different thing than the US Army is now. How that would play out if things went bonkers in 2025… who knows. There are a LOT of people around the world watching VERY closely though… and really hoping (not that confidently though) that sanity will prevail.

Yeah I see it (as a not American looking in from outside the country). Every time I visit the USA, the changes in things are more and more visible.

There’s probably not going to be a civil war.

So… there’s still a chance then…

Hmmm… Infineon has been doing work with graphene semiconductors for years. Something seems a bit off with this article.

They manufacture and sell the buses in Canada… There are BYD buses in operation in at least Toronto, Victoria, Longeuil, St. Albert and Grand Prairie (and probably more by now). https://en.byd.com/news/byd-opens-first-canadian-bus-assembly-plant/ If you’re in Montreal, there’s a decent chance you’ll see BYD E6 taxis.

There’s been rumors of the cars being prepped for general sale in Canada… but I can’t find any proof of that right now.

Lol. You’re not a parent are you?

It’s not lazy, it’s being involved as a parent. I teach them. I council them. I explain the good and the bad.

They don’t have unfettered access to the internet either. I carefully limit to what is appropriate to their ages. As they get older and are more able to understand the implications I relax the restrictions.

My kids will survive just fine not playing in an environment that encourages bed behavior.

Roblox is filled with “quality” content like this: https://www.roblox.com/games/8110845141/POOP-WITH-FRIENDS

My kids used to play on Roblox… then they invited me to try it… and I started watching what is going on in there. It’s pretty bad. LOADS of grooming going on… shitty games… games that encourage anti-social behavior… horror games targeting under 5s… now they aren’t allowed to play it anymore.

That would explain a lot… things seemed normal until about 2013…

Sounds like Ubuntu underneath your Plasma. I’ve had the exact same experience when using Neon, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu+KDE. I install any non-Ubuntu based distro with KDE (like openSUSE) and whiz bang everything is working again.

Kinda depends where you work.

I’ve been working full time in software dev and hardware dev since the mid-1990s. Through that whole time I’ve worked almost exclusively on (in the early days) Sun workstations, AS/400, and HPUX machines. This eventually transitioned to Linux and macOS (once it became Unix based). Over the past 7-8 years, every company I’ve worked for (primarily in backend software and “big data”) has actually heavily restricted Windows within the company. Most have required high level approval to have a Windows machine… you had to have a damn good business reason to run Windows as your primary OS.

Windows is definitely the leader in generic desktop work, but… there are pockets out there of Linux/macOS-only. And… given the strong shift to browser based everything… Windows has lost its shininess for all but the most specific applications - eg graphics editing in industry standard tooling like Photoshop.

Thankfully the school my kids go to doesn’t really give a crap what you run at home on on their laptops they used for school work as long as the kids are able to to their assignments. Almost 100% of what they do is browser based interfaces anyway, so it doesn’t matter what the underlying OS is. I’ve made a point of teaching my kids Linux, macOS, and Windows. They’ve both asked to run Linux on their personal PCs… it was, and remains their choice.