All of the things I listed are examples from my personal experience that I ran into within the past 6 months. The sharing folder adventure happened just about two weeks ago. Don’t try to tell me that it’s all so easy now, I literally just went through hours of research and experimenting and samba settings and changing my disk’s fstab file just to get a folder to show up on my home network. “Oh well you should have done x or y or not used z” Well, frankly it doesn’t matter what the optimal workflow solution would be, what matters is this was my user experience. This was something I went through and was not some whacky fringe use case. Sharing a folder on a home network is not black magic or calling upon arcane demonic powers.

Now, I’m not going back at this point and I’m committed to Linux now, but pretending it’s all smooth sailing and so easy and polished is misleading. It’s certainly more usable than it ever has been but I think most people on Lemmy have no idea how hands off the average person is from their tech. It’s important to be honest about Linux’s shortcomings and prepare new users that they will probably gave to look up info or documentation for some tasks. You also can’t expect the average person to ever open Terminal without hyperventilating.

It’s fast and easy and no big deal until you want to do something radical like create a shortcut and pin it to your taskbar, or share a folder on a home network. Or share your screen with a TV… there have been too many damn times where I’ve wanted to do something that should be simple and the matter of a couple clicks but it sends me down a rabbit hole chasing dependencies and searching terminal commands and spending hours doing something that takes less than a minute on mainstream operating systems. My user experience has drastically improved since I swapped to Plasma but don’t pretend everything works perfectly and intuitively immediately for everyone unless the expected use case is literally turning it on and opening a browser.

I enjoy a pot of spiced black tea, usually a chai blend with cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Sometimes I will add cocoa powder and pour the tea over that with sugar and milk to make a chai tea/hot cocoa drink that is a highlight of my day.

I just installed Debian with Plasma, and have been using a system with Mint and Plasma as my daily driver for a few months now. I used the default Cinnamon for about a year. Plasma is definitely way more polished and allows almost everything to be done via menus which is NOT a given with most Linux things. It does work most of the time but expect to run into some basic task you didn’t even think about on Windows and having a frustrating experience chasing solutions to untangle how to do it.

I’m never going back to Windows but the amount of times I’ve had to do something convoluted to attempt something you’d think would be easy is too damn high.

There are some lower sugar sodas, or hybrid sodas that use fruit juice along with Stevia or monkfruit in order to cut the weird taste. Olipop is my favorite, and Spindrift has some good flavors.

Hobbies, I can’t get enough of them, gotta collect 'em all. Every couple months it’s a new fixation.