I’m sure the people in ICE concentration camps, and the LGBTQ+ population, and people of color, and people who can’t afford health insurance, and women, and the Ukranians, and our allies, and people who oppose triggering the battle of Armageddon, and scientists, and environmentalists, and starving Africans are all happy that your conscience is clear.

I do know one group that’s genuinely happy, though - the billionaires who funded the Trump campaign and convinced you that the only way to fight evil was not to vote. So good job, chump.

No, I’m not okay at all. Sometimes I’m anxious, but most of the time I’m enraged. I’m enraged at the administration, the courts that enable them, the evil Republicans and the spineless Democrats. But mostly I’m enraged at the 60 some-odd percent of Americans who either voted for this catastrophe or couldn’t be bothered to vote at at. I can almost forgive people for voting for Trump 1.0. But, after fours years of that dumpster fire, it’s unforgivable that people voted to do it again.

My most incandescent rage is directed at progressive non-voters. There is nothing more careless and entitled than not voting because “both sides are bad”. It’s choosing to let millions of other Americans suffer because someone doesn’t meet your purity test. The Republican party has been captured by end times religious cranks and literal insane psychopaths; the worst corporate Democrat is orders of magnitude better for the health and well-being of the nation and the world.

At the same time, I have to go to work every day, interact with my colleagues, take care of my family and do all the everyday things that one has to do. I take strength in other people around the world living their lives in authoritarian hellholes. You survive and do what you can to effect change.

As someone who genuinely prefers small cars, I wish we could get vehicles like the Inster here in the US. I had a '07 Yaris and it was the bomb - airy greenhouse and more spacious inside than it had any right to be (considering its footprint). Give me that in an EV, please.

Currently, a 2019 Hyundai Ioniq EV.

Wish I had an EV with longer range and more upright seating, something like a Volvo EX30 (if it ever comes out of beta). And a Miata.

That’s just a signal to Alito’s paymaster that they haven’t offered him an appropriate bribe, oops, gratuity yet.

I have to say, though, that the fact that we - myself included - are rooting for the Supreme Court to rule in favor of a blatantly transparent Gerrymander shows how far down the rabbit hole we are as a nation. Just another example that the US is a failed state.

From what I’ve read, that only applies if the President is incapacitated (presumably temporarily). He can re-assume the office just by saying that he’s ready to return to the job. Removing a President who claims he’s able to hold the office require a 2/3 majority of both the House and Senate.

So, the OP shared a success story about switching to Linux and your response is to grouse about their choice of DE and text editor? No wonder people think the Linux community is difficult.

Anyway, welcome aboard, OP. Hope your Linux journey is a happy and rewarding one.!

Congrats on the new gear! I have a 2-in-1 Dell laptop and a Surface Go 2, both running Debian 13. In laptop mode, I really like GNOME, in tablet mode it’s… fine. The biggest problem is the GNOME OSK, which honestly is not great. It frequently needs to be manually triggered (instead of automatically opening when clicking in a text-entry zone) and it’s missing just about every modifier key unless you’re in terminal mode. And GNOME (in its infinite wisdom), decided that the user shouldn’t have the choice of when to put the keyboard in terminal mode. There is one extension, https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5949/gjs-osk/, which helps, but it just duplicates a hardware keyboard virtually instead of providing a fully featured mobile-style keyboard.

On my tablet I use Phosh, which can be installed on top of GNOME and provides a mobile-forward UI and a much better OSK. The Phosh-tablet metapackage in Debian 13 doesn’t take up much disk space and, IMHO, will give you a much better touch experience than vanilla GNOME (if you don’t mind switching back and forth depending on whether you are in tablet mode or laptop mode). Other than the inconvenience of switching back and forth, the only bug I’ve noticed is that maximize/minimize/close buttons need to be restored when switching from Phosh back to GNOME Shell.

The only messages Trump has are lies and bigotry, and even his supporters aren’t buying his lies anymore. Normalizing his demented horseshit as some kind of coherent economic message is how we got to where we are today.

There are two types of gerrymandering, packing and cracking. A packed district is where you concentrate voters from the opposition party into one district. You give up a seat, but the remaining districts swing more heavily in your favor. A cracked district is what you are describing, where you dilute the margins of the opposition party by breaking up their strongholds into multiple districts and combine them with areas that vote in your favor.

This was not a “middle of nowhere” district as it included a chunk of the city of Nashville and its suburbs. It was a classic cracked gerrymander as Republicans split Nashville into multiple districts and combined them with large swaths of red countryside (see also the notorious Austin gerrymander in Texas). The margins can sometimes be close enough in a cracked district for the opposition party to win, but in this case it was unlikely as it was Trump +22 in 2024 (in spite of including some of Nashville).

Posting from a Surface Go 2 running Debian Trixie with Gnome+Phosh. Everything except the webcam just works on the stock kernel (for webcam support you need the patched Surface kernel). Vanilla Gnome is fine, too, if you use a hardware keyboard. I run Phosh because the onsceen keyboard is much better than Gnome’s.

I don’t think a bullshit investigation of a high profile, decorated veteran is going to go as well for the fascists as they think it’s going to.

Yes, mostly rain on the west side of the Cascade Mountains. Rain and 45 F is pretty much the default for winter here; you’d probably like it. I don’t mind the cold (within reason), but the constant cloudiness gets to me. I miss the sun already, and the rainy season has just started.

The weather. Moved from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest. I like it here, but even after three decades the winter gloom still gets to me.

First thing that crossed my mind, too.

It depends on how many of the gerrymandered districts are packed (large Democratic majorities) and how many are cracked (Democratic population centers are split up into multiple districts with small-ish Republican majorities). Cracked districts can be won if Democrats turn out in record numbers. Packed districts just produce more lopsided majorities in favor of the Democratic candidate.

Of course, this gerrymander is only one of the voter suppression tactics that Texas Republicans will use to lower Democratic turnout.

They can have him. He’s already done far too much damage here.

I use Keep for checklists and disposable notes, and Joplin (similar to Obsidian, but open source) for my “forever” notes. I look for apps that give you the option of exporting notes in a common format (currently markdown), and I have notes that have followed me through several changes of note taking programs.

You’re already using Obsidian, so my suggestion is… Take notes! Take notes on cool software you’ve discovered, take notes on your settings and configurations, take notes on any issues and bugs you’ve had to fix, take notes on how to use unfamiliar programs, take notes on Linux terminology. You have a huge personal knowledge base from years of using Windows. Linux is not hard to use, but it takes time to become second nature to you.

I’m a huge fan of the Laundry Files books. Just finished Season of Skulls, the 3rd book in The New Management trilogy. It’s a little less bleak than the first two books of the trilogy and very funny.

I’m now reading War Bodies by Neal Asher.