Caveman

As an example I’m on Linux for a decade now but I also use proprietary services. I use Jellyfin and Netflix, Vim and Jetbrains IDEs, Chess.com instead of Lichess, WhatsApp instead of Matrix.

Sometimes the value proposition does it for me, sometimes it’s the network effect. I’ve ditched reddit because I like Lemmy more but I can see how someone wants to stay in touch with their niche communities that don’t really exist on Lemmy. Probably some people use both.

If you want to get into openings I recommend getting a set of openings for yourself for white and black.

White: 1. d4 and then London System is easy to play and works most times to get a good setup. Super easy way to have you prepared almost 50% of the time. I personally don’t play it though, I’m an 1. e4 player.

Black:

Don’t start with Sicialian. It’s good but it’ll take a long time to learn enough lines to handle whatever the opponent throws at you since they almost decide which variation you play.

Against 1. d4… King’s Indian defence allows you a straight forward path to casting and develop 2 pieces. Then strike in the center. For a more spicy option there’s the Benoni which has traps for people who blindly go London System.

Against 1. e4… French defence is pretty straight forward since you end up doing the same stuff every game. Attack the pawn on d4. You could also go for 1. … e5 but since it’s the most common move you can get opening knowledge advantage way faster by playing French or Scandinavian. You’ll have to know both if you decide to play 1. e4 at some point and play Italian or Ruy Lopez which IMO are more fun to play.

After learning the main move order for the first 4 or 5 moves then watch some videos on each of your defence. Remote chess academy is a very fun channel on YouTube for learning openings.

Good at tactics?

Try some gambits. You sacrifice a pawn and come out guns blazing. If people don’t know the gambit you’re playing they’ll have to spend a lot of time calculating. You force them to thread the needle or at the minimum lose a piece.

If you want to know how it looks like check out some games with Paul Morphy. He’s winning against players that would 2200+ FIDE rating with the King’s gambit. That opening develops wicked fast but has the King naked.

Use a filter and remove everything dedicated to US politics and Reddit to reduce the quantity by 80%

Patience, the price will drop and the game will be just as good

That will depend on what type of Home Ownership Association the house is on. Some of them mandate a well kept grass lawn and you get fined for not moving.

I torrent a lot on Linux and use Qbittorrent. Surfshark has a great VPN on Linux.

If you want to get into it then Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and nzb360 ($10) with Jellyfin is a great stack to manage your library but needs a bit of work to set up. You can then use the phone to download and search and watch it with an android TV app.

I had some issues setting it up with a ublue fedora immutable distro which are pretty non-existent on most standard distros.

Fairphone comes pretty close.

Many of the problems with security and disk space are limited by flatpaks using same base layer for applications that is shared and easy to update.

Maybe but probably not. People that develop applications can save a major headache by choosing flatpaks so the ecosystem will gravitate towards it.

At some point new applications that didn’t launch a Linux version will do so but only on flatpak and older applications will start moving towards flatpaks since it’s less dev time.

It looks to me as inevitable that the best versions of an app will be a flatpak but if you’re on Ubuntu based system you can probably get by for very long without them.

I blame capitalism for this one. Misinformation and lobbying is very profitable. Using prior knowledge of what laws are coming into effect is also very profitable. Retiring and becoming a lobbyists is also.

In the US hard facts have become debatable and there’s a shitty system that massively benefits two political parties.

I don’t necessarily blame the people since the system is rigged against people’s interest. They get mad and vote anti-establishment which is still very much the establishment.

Bacteria technically live in the tube of “outside” on your inside. Digestive system is just one hole all the way through the body that your body interacts with just like the air in the lungs.

Voting for lesser evil is important although the lesser evil is still evil

Only if he gets a boner

I use a password pattern. I have hundreds of different passwords all stored in my head and all between 10-20 characters long. The trick is to have a deterministic formula for picking a password.

Example: short word + First 6 in url + symbol + short word capitalised + number

Let’s say the first word is cat and second is dog, symbol is - and number is 5 and you have a Gmail it would give you

“catgmail-Dog5”

https://www.passwordmonster.com/ gives it 61 years to crack this one but if you use longer words you get better times.