I once met an AWB member. Actual quote: “We don’t hate racial slur. Don’t think we hate racial slur.” Just as casual as talking about a cup of tea.

I’m on Cachy myself, but I have put in a lot of time with vanilla Arch. Cachy has an easier installation process, although the archinstall script is also quite simple to use. Cachy takes better advantage of your specific hardware, so it’s good for squeezing a bit more performance out of your machine. Arch is more bare-bones, the idea being that you get to and have to customize it yourself, from near the ground up. It’s a matter of use case and temperament, really. Both are good, and the differences aren’t huge in the end.

Honestly, I didn’t report it. I just ducked out. Since I seemed to be the only concerned party, I assumed the mods wouldn’t care.

Yeah, it’s pretty bizarre. Regardless of the intended level of irony, it’s a very bad joke, in all senses of the word ‘bad’.

Yeah, it’s a bummer. Why must they come for everything we like?

Yeah, I read that he was a nepo baby. Also, people say “But he dropped out of university to start Microsoft.”

He dropped out of fucking Harvard. His life was easy as piss from the get-go.

Yeah. He has shaped the world in very negative ways through his decisions. He could donate his entire fortune today and live out the rest of his life in a monastery, but I would still hate him.

Wonderful; thanks for sharing. I’ll check him out this weekend.

Very well put. I cannot stand the entitlement in the original letter.

Fair point. It’s not an excuse, but it does explain a lot. Nobody is the villain in their own story, after all.

I don’t know The Hated One; I’m assuming they are a content creator. What kind of stuff do they usually do?

Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past him.

That’s a good point, as illustrated by things like the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Well, it would make sense. Rich people have always creeped me out, just instinctively.

Yup. He stole a bunch of ideas and code, then got upset that people were stealing his ideas and code. Do as I say, not as I do.

I read about that, yeah. All hail Mammon; money above all. Sometimes I think wealth changes something in a person’s brain, like psychologically or neurologically. It’s as if they get so detached from reality that they lose all empathy and sense of community. I’ve heard the term ‘affluenza’ used as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense as a legitimate thing.

Yeah. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and it has been a really good experience. There are some bugs, of course, but hopefully those can be worked on.

As a general rule of thumb, I usually recommend Linux Mint to beginners. The installation and update processes are easy and intuitive, and there is a ton of software available, as well as good support if you know how to do web searches properly. The main trick is to try and remember that a paradigm shift needs to happen here. Linux is not Windows. It doesn’t work like Windows, and it has different aims and priorities. She will also need to be prepared to learn a bit and be slightly more hands-on with her computing. The learning curve with Mint is comparatively gentle, but it does exist.

This is all very broad and general, but I hope it helps. Good luck to the both of you. I hope you are satisfied with whatever you decide on.