First of all, thanks for being on Lemmy. I get nothing out of it when the lefty hivemind argues against a strawman. At least you give us the real thing. Fuck gh0stcassette.

Second of all, Trump only campaigned on a populist platform in 2016. He railed against CEOs, various special interests, and other “swamp creatures” under the premise that he was going to fund his own campaign and didn’t need their money. It was honestly kind of refreshing, even if he was ultimately full of shit and failed to deliver. But I haven’t heard Trump’s 2016 rhetoric in a long time. Not regarding the ruling class. Maybe he still says “drain the swamp” now and then, but many of those who opposed Trump in 2016, e.g. Wall Street, now largely support him, and Trump openly panders to them for their donations. It’s not that people in power hate him; it’s just the people you don’t like in power who hate him.

Vote third party if you hate the elites.

Anyone who disagrees with you isn’t a troll. Biden looked how he looked, and moderates/independents don’t have the same appetite for copium as you do.

The age isn’t itself the problem. Cognitive decline is the problem. Biden is in rapid decline; Trump is still a ways off.

People think Biden may actually do it? I hope I’m wrong, but I think that’s pure fantasy. One ego is definitely bigger than the other, but you don’t become President by being a good person.

I don’t hate flatpaks, but flatpaks require more disk space than the same apps from traditional repositories, and they only support a handful of the most common default themes. Since I only ever use older and slower computers, my disk space is limited, and I like to rice my desktop, I personally avoid them. But your use-case may differ.

You’re thinking in reverse. Walled gardens keep you in, not out. Without logging into your Steam account (pretending you don’t have one), try to download a mod for a game you bought on GOG and see how it goes for you.

This is silly. Valve is already a profit driven company. You don’t see the walled garden? The DRM? Valve supports proton because it’s in their monetary interest to do so.

Disclaimer: I’m incredibly ignorant. Wouldn’t wireless necessarily mean high-latency?

It does not run well. You can’t see the performance difference between KDE and XFCE on neofetch, but you absolutely can on on old machine.

Source: I have an old computer.

Mabox!

Enable the chaotic AUR and you won’t even have to build from source.

Wait, are they actually doing development work, or are they just merging from downstream?

Thank you for providing an actual answer. Most of the comments in this thread are condescending as hell.

This is a popular opinion outside of Lemmy. You won’t find many lowercase “l” libertarians here though.

How important is the Windows-style desktop? If the VM is designed for one thing and one thing only, I’d pick any minimal WM that can alt-tab, say JWM, and then just add Firefox and Thunderbird to the autostart file.

Either scalloped with cheese, boiled in chicken broth until the broth boils off and the potatoes are basically already mashed for you, or my laptop.

I’m shocked Lemmy has so many users. Feels like only a few thousand.

Minecraft. It desperately needs some QoL improvements for it to be anything but tedious.

You can skip this comment if you’re avoiding anything arch-based; I don’t have any additional distro suggestions beyond what’s already listed (they really are mostly the same), but in regard to the arch-based suggestions, I would only add that you can reduce the maintenance by choosing a DE with a slower update cycle (e.g. XFCE or any WM) and, more importantly, remembering that you don’t actually have to update your system every day. Even once a month is probably fine. I don’t get the impression you want vanilla Arch though; Endeavor or even Manjaro minimal will have the defaults you’re looking for, or literally any other non-Arch distro if the AUR isn’t important to you.

Adults are worse at passive learning than kids, but focused learning works just fine. You’re probably better off buying/pirating something like rosetta stone than you are watching sitcoms.