I’m not really a tech guy at all and I let these nerds talk me into trying Linux Mint, I haven’t bothered with Windows 10 for several months now. There was some frustrating troubleshooting at first but once the settings are tweaked how you like them, the updates don’t negate your tweaks like with Microsoft. I’m sure there’s a lot of functionality I’m not maximizing but I don’t feel the need to. I got my productivity stuff figured out, my game stuff figured out, the last thing I really need to get sorted is why my printer is being such a wiener but I use it so sparingly that there’s not much motivation to mess with that. I did dual boot for a while so I wouldn’t feel overwhelmingly stupid when it came to Linux, so I was able to familiarize myself with the new setup at my pace and that helped quite a bit I think. No harm in going that route, then you can see what happens with Warzone before fully taking the plunge

JustWatch has some choices, I’d be partial to Pluto unless you wanna rent/buy it

My dad’s the same way, he hasn’t pleaded with me about my vote but that may only be because I don’t talk to him.
Have you seen “The Brainwashing of My Dad”? I think that’s what it’s called, a friend recommended it to me and I need to make some time for it, sounds like it covers the impact of garbage like fox news on old men

I grew up in the eastern half as well and they’ve talked about that merger for decades, seems it’s little more than another talking point to keep people angry and give them another thing to be complain about regarding all those godless communist child-eating liberal coasties

Turns out I can unmute my phone when I realize it’s a person I want to talk to. It’s just crazy how tech has improved over the years

I answer unknown calls and then immediately mute my mic. Most of the time it’s a bot that might call back once more, occasionally it’s somebody that gets an explanation of why i just made things weird. been doung that for years and now I only get spam calls maybe once or twice a month tops, if even that much

I installed Mint this past spring and fiddled around with it briefly every once in a while but I’m not a tech guy so there was a little bit of a learning curve on stuff like getting a second monitor to work, stuff like that. I’m sure you’ve already found out that there’s TONS of documentation and forums for questions, it’s just a matter of feeling kinda dumb for a little while as you troubleshoot. I switched over to Mint full time a few months ago and haven’t looked back. I’ve still got Win10 on an extra hard drive just in case but I think more and more of reclaiming that space for Steam now, I don’t miss Windows at all

The guy suspended his practice in 2022 and somehow still got 3rd place in 2024 Best of Utah’s “fertility doctor” category. That state ain’t right. For so, so many reasons.

It’s both fun and frustrating learning how to operate it.

This should be emblazoned somewhere in the initial Linux setup. I’m not in tech by trade, just a hobbyist nerd, and playing with Linux is like if a soulslike game were an OS. I had a terrible time figuring out how to get both monitors to work but eventually did and that felt like a huge win when it finally happened. Had an equally bad time trying to figure out how to install some game software but finally got that sorted and it felt like another big victory. But I still dual boot for now because some days I’m just not ready for the heartburn of dealing with my own ignorance in Linux

There’s a real cognitive dissonance there. Their version of Christianity takes a back seat to politics because they’ve been told all these visions of grandeur about how “Jesus is coming back” and how they are the “sheep” and all those godless liberals are the "goats. They’ve been trained to look for reasons to feel persecuted even if they don’t come directly out and say it, even if they don’t realize it themselves. There’s a real “us vs. them” mentality in a lot of those types of churches and they’ll gladly go rub one out to stuff like where Jesus said to his disciples in one of the gospels that if people aren’t for him then they’re against him. Nevermind that one of the other gospels says the opposite. A lot of Christians I’ve come across just have this persecution fetish where any slight inconvenience or call for accountability from pretty much anyone (because their church won’t take them to task over things) turns into a ‘righteous’ cry to their lord about how the godless Philistines around them are normalizing oppression and sodomy and trans rights or whatever and these holy little Christian’s are the only beacon of hope in society even though they insist on treating anyone who isn’t like them like absolute garbage. I’m not a social scientist or anything like that, hopefully people smarter than me chime in. But conservatives treat equity in a community like a zero sum game, you know? If poor people are given a hand up by the government then it’s interpreted by these (at best) middle class Christians as an affront to their hard earned money. They worked for their income but “these filthy poors just get handouts at MY expense?” You can tell by their actions that they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus regardless of how they try to present themselves. They’re full of crap and they deserve to be treated as such.

Source: Grew up in a very conservative farming community, did all the church stuff, then moved away and found myself.

Also, I know I abused quotation marks but my bad on any grammar or spelling errors or general incoherence. I treated myself to vodka for dinner.