The right ideologically represents consolidation of power and conformity. The left ideologically represents distribution of power and freedom of expression. All of those things lie in a balance, and all are necessary for a functional society. That balance is the big problem. When one ‘party’ is focused on unifying behind a powerful person regardless of the broad reaching implications of that accumulation of power, while the other ‘party’ is focused on wrangling different ideological groups towards the overlap in the EDIT: Venn (not vent. Thanks autocorrect) diagrams of their interests and goals, you tend to observe a relative ‘difficulty in organizing’.

Of course, there are other viewpoints that would disagree with this analysis.

Adding to the smoky mountain suggestion, the Gatlinburg area has a lot of fun touristy places to go. I haven’t seen the Apple Barn mentioned yet, but they and Cruze Farms Ice cream are both top notch dessert places. And I’ll 2nd The Local Goat for some good food.

Unfortunately, that’s all come at a cost of destroying and destabilizing billions of lives. I’m not disagreeing that a lot of people have benefitted from that. Competition - which is what capitalism is when you distill it and ignore all the inside ball that corporations and governments play - generates new ideas and promotes the ones that generate the most capital. But it also leaves a lot of people behind. And for now let’s just ignore the idea that there could be anything else as noble as the generation of more capital.

In the US, wealth inequality is only getting worse, with homeless populations and food scarcity continuing to grow and things like access to healthcare and quality education on the decline. And there are areas of the world that have been radically destabilized by the US to retain that position of dominance and prosperity.

If you look for a nation with the current / recent, per capita record for ‘lifting people out of poverty’ you’d have to give the medal to China. Do I think the way they’ve done things over the last few decades is producing a healthy society? Nope. I’d much rather live in the US than in China. But I don’t think the US is producing a healthy society either. We’re all just screwed up in our own ways, fighting for resources and acting like our way of doing things is ok because it’s what we are indoctrinated into from a young age.

The US focuses on generating capital as a metric of success because it enables geopolitical dominance and prosperity for just enough people to keep the wheels rolling.

But that’s just my perspective.

Ok, let me see if I’m starting to understand.

If something is packaged for a disto, then I can download it using the package manager and it should theoretically be compatible with the distro and the other packages available through the package manager. But if something isn’t available via the package manager, I could still find it online and download and install it, but it might cause issues because it hasn’t been verified by the people who maintain the distro’s package manager accessible repositories. Or I could still install it with flatpaks or snaps and something something container and it should still work? Or might cause compatibility issues?

And you’re saying that AUR has more packages that have been verified for arch than OpenSUSE has with Yast?

Did I get all that right?

Thanks, that’s a lot of really helpful info.

What do you mean by this though?

If you’re curious where a command lives you can use which cmd or type cmd from the command-line and it will show you (something I often wish Windows had).

A command can ‘live’ in different places? And this might be a dumb question…but what is a command in this context?

I don’t understand the issue here. Does that mean I can kill my BIOS bootloader somehow? Or the display driver? And how would screwing up drivers on one SSD with Linux affect my other SSD with Windows? Sorry if these are dumb questions, I’m just trying to get my head around as much of this as I can.

I keep hearing good things about both of those. They’re the first two distros on my list to try out after OpenSUSE.

Why would some software not be available on OpenSUSE? Would it be available on other distros due to a different way they handle packages, or do you mean in comparison to Windows?

Thanks for the advice. I plan on adding another internal SSD and installing Linux on that. I should have been more specific in my original post.

You’re saying I can access the filesystem on my windows drive from Linux? So I could directly copy files back and forth? I thought I’d have to copy them onto an external drive, reboot, and then copy to the Linux drive.

I have an SSD I’m using for windows and a separate one that I want to install Linux on. I want the ability to remove one of them and keep using the other. From what I understand I can set the BIOS boot order to load Linux first and use the Grub to select which OS to boot?

I realize now I should have been way more specific with how I worded things in the beginning.

Is a home directory similar to the users folder in windows, or like the program files folder? Is it ‘everything but the OS’? I’m still trying to get a grasp on how the OS operates conceptually.

That makes sense, thanks!

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Yeah. I probably should have been more clear about that.

Thank you! I’d welcome advice on any of the other replies I’ve made so far, and if I have any more specific questions I’ll give you a shout!

I’m a student, and I play games. So mostly I’m doing MS Office and Steam, but I’ve got a lot of random niche stuff I do too. Like I’m using Unity to develop a HoloLens app for a research lab, and I just use VSCode as my IDE. I use Bitwig Studio for audio production, Blender, Freetube, and some proprietary software from my University.

I guess I’m just wondering about compatibility issues I might face, and how to approach those. Are there just some programs that I won’t be able to use on Linux? I’ve heard about Wine, but it all feels conceptual. Like you ‘use’ wine to run windows programs but what does that mean? Do I run it like a VM? But it’s not an emulator?

I’m used to going to the internet, finding an .exe, and installing programs. But Linux has a package manager that you should do that through instead? But I’ve also seen a bunch of download links for Linux software online, so is there a difference in downloading something from the internet and installing a ‘Linux’ version of it, or installing that through a package manager?

Sorry I’m all over the place, i think my brain is a little scattered trying to figure everything out at once haha

I want to maintain my Windows 10 install for now as a sort of fallback. I have a lot of random software installed for my university classes, and I don’t know about all the compatibility issues I might face with those. And letting it sit there in the background in case I need it for something feels safer than jumping head first into a new OS.

Trying out liveUSB or VM stuff seemed like it would be an extra hurdle in transitioning to Linux. Like, I want to get settled in and actually use it as a daily thing, not just browse the internet a bit here and there. If I don’t like the distro I choose, I can always just install another one, right?

The only one I’ve seen is eminence in shadow and it’s a good time

I just got an Apple TV and I’ve been struggling through the setup. Connecting all the accounts, logging into everything and updating everything. I would think by now there would be some way to link accounts and have things manage themselves better.

Every now and then I remember how simple things felt back then. The internet was new and exciting, we didn’t even have cell phones yet. Technology was built with innovation. In some ways we’ve fallen a long way from those days.

Well this is huge. So many good things could come from this