SirBoostALot

@gpstarman THIS is the reason I don’t use Mint. I am otherwise the perfect candidate, more or less - I only want to USE an OS, not LEARN it, and all else being equal I much prefer using a GUI to a command line. But the big thing is I don’t want problems that have to be solved in order to use my computer. I want Linux to be as easy to use as MacOS and when I say I don’t want to do something a certain way, I don’t want a bunch of momma’s basement dwellers ganging up on me to tell me that’s the only “right” way to do it (in truth that is seldom the case). Also, I don’t want to be forced into the Canonical way of doing things (Ubuntu is turning into more and more of a shitshow with each new release, in my opinion).

The problem with Mint is that it tries to appeal to Windows users, and Windows users are used to having their machine come with a shit ton of preinstalled crap. Well I am not saying the Linux apps provided with Mint are crap, just that there are far too many of them, and most of them are things I would never use. Why they don’t let you start with a minimal system and then let you add the software you want is beyond me. Well, unless you are trying to appeal only to Windows users who for some reason expect that.

And to those who say why not just start with Debian, well the problem with that is the minute you run something like Debian other Debian other users ASSume you want to LEARN Linux (I don’t - REALLY, I DON’T) and therefore if you have any issues the first thing they do is say why didn’t you read the man page or something equally stupid. I didn’t read the fucking man page because man pages are written by PROGRAMMERS in a way that only other programmers can understand (with some rare exceptions). I don’t want to have to read ANYTHING, I don’t want there to be problems in the first place or if there are I want a GUI-based program that will fix them.

As an example I set up a media center PC to run Kodi and decided to try Debian with the XFCE desktop. I ran into a few issues but the big one was it didn’t automatically mount my external hard drives. Well the hard drive names have spaces in them. And of course every solution I found was to use fstab, So I tried that, escaping the spaces in the drive name with backslashes, which works almost everywhere in Linux, but apparently not in fstab. And fstab is too stupid to just skip over a line it doesn’t like; instead it stops the computer from booting normally. So when I rebooted the computer, it went into a black screen with a login prompt and NOTHING I could do after that would let me remove that line from fstab (because fstab is apparently a protected file in some way; even using sudo nano would not make it writeable). So I just started over from scratch, because again, I DON’T want to “LEARN” Linux, I just want to use it, and starting over took far less time then it would have taken me to figure out the “correct” way to do it.

But I still had the drive mount issue and I just wanted to mount the damn drives without using fstab (for obvious reasons - once burned…)- I know Ubuntu mounts USB connected drives automatically at boot, so why doesn’t Debian? Anyway I asked in a forum and the one thing I requested is “PLEASE don’t suggest fstab” and I explained why. Guess what almost EVERY response was? Both suggestions that fstab was the ONLY way (it isn’t) or that I should have figured out how to resolve the inability to edit fstab using some obscure program I have never heard of before. (For anyone else with this issue, check out a little program called udevil; that was what worked for me as long as I set it up to run at each reboot, I have also since heard you can use some kind of gnome disk utility that also works under XFCE and will let you mount disks at startup). And boy do those people get pissed off when you don’t just accept their “expert” advice even though they are telling you to do the ONE thing they were requested NOT to suggest (I had actually already tried most of what they had suggested anyway).

So that is the conundrum - you want a Linux distro that’s not Ubuntu, but that is designed for people who couldn’t care less about “learning” Linux any more than they want to “learn” MacOS or Windows. And from what I understand Mint is great for those people IF you can put up with all the random software they install by default; it’s very seldom you run into weird issues in Mint (that also USED to be true of Ubuntu). Whereas in some other Linux distros (even Debian to some degree) some users think that half the “fun” is solving problems (I can’t believe some people think that is fun!). But one big impediment to Linux adoption is you still have the old fart Linux users that haunt the forums and just don’t understand that things aren’t like they were 20 years ago, that most people don’t want to struggle with an operating system nor search half the Internet in search of solutions, and that being “spoon fed” answers is something they now expect (especially now that AI’s do exactly that, even if they are sometimes wrong). There ARE users that DO enjoy that sort of problem solving, just like there are people who enjoy tinkering with cars even though most of us just want to drive them and not have them give us problems. The people who enjoy getting into the guts of an operating system or a car will always be in the minority, and the rest of us kind of hate them when they talk down to us in a condescending manner or act like we just don’t want to put in whatever they think is some required amount of effort (no, we really don’t, because it shouldn’t be difficult in the first place!).

@Umbrias So the lives of the workers were totally meaningless to you. Well they were not meaningless to their wives and children, or to theie friends and other family members. It is a terrible lie to say there was no radiation poisoning; workers there got radiation poisoning. That is not something that should happen to anyone, and it is not a risk that any worker should have to accept just to hold a job.

Also, I suspect that all the effects haven’t manifested yet. As the people that were in the vicinity of that plat get older I would not be surprised to see “cancer clusters” form. Of course we may never know, particularly if the Japanese government is complicit in burying the actual effects,

@fathermcgruder @Umbrias @usa I have no idea why you think global warming cannot be solved by wind and solar power, at least in part, and I especially don’t know why you keep insisting that dangerous nuclear fission power plants are a solution - there are MANY people who would disagree with you on that. At this point we are just talking in circles and it is clear we will never agree so if you think you are going to somehow talk me into agreeing with you, you could not be more wrong. So let it drop here, or else annoy me once more and I’ll just block you, but honestly I think you are just so wrong in your beliefs. The only thing we might ever agree on is that more effort should have been made to save the trees, but while that may seem really important to you, it’s not something that will cause me to lose any sleep. I’d actually be far more concerned about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest but there is nothing I can do about that either.

When I wwas in elementary school, there was a very large sand dune that was visible from my house. But a sand mining company had been taking it down by bit for years. There was one teacher at the elementary school I attended that was REALLY upset about that, in her mind it was terrible that they were destroying this dune and no one was doing anything about it. So she got the kids involved in writing letters to legislators and such, but the problem was she was the only one who cared that much. We kids certainly didn’t, the legislators didn’t, and of course the sand mine owners and employees weren’t paying a bit of attention to her and thought she was a kook. So, do you know what happened? They completely removed that dune, all but about the bottom 50 feet of it. And then they moved on and started mining other sand accumulations in the area, wherever they could get property rights.

I always wondered how that teacher felt at the end of her life, knowing she had raged against something she could not change and that almost no one else cared about. I wonder if she ever realized that many of her students thought she was a little crazy. I’m telling you this because I fear you are going down that path. People care about the Amazon rainforest. People care about majestic forests of spruces and pines. Almost no one outside of a few local people cares about a bunch what what many would call scrub trees. And maybe they are underestimating the value of those trees, that’s certainly possible, but it sounds like this project has already received all the necessary approvals so all your rage is very unlikely to stop it, and it will just make you bitter. I suggest, to paraphrase the old poem, that you have the wisdom to understand that there are some things you cannot change and that you accept that and move on to try to make a difference in ways where more people will support your efforts.

@fathermcgruder @Umbrias @usa And where I disagree with you vehemently is on the “safely” part. I don’t want to live anywhere near a nuclear power plant, and I think a lot of people feel the same way. I know you believe that Chernobyl and Fukushima were one off disasters that could not possibly happen in North America, but if you are wrong a whole lot of people could die very painful deaths, or very slow and painful deaths depending on the exposure level.

The Joshua trees are kind of a red herring; they are only incidental to the issue, and honestly few people actually care about them except perhaps those living in that area (and I’m not saying that is a good thing, but I’m just saying that most people would not think them a very desirable tree). We can have cheap, safe energy from the sun and wind but some people don’t like that and would prefer to take the chance of exposing potentially millions of people to radiation sickness. THAT is what is sickening.

By the way, do you have any financial interest in, or are you employed by the nuclear power industry? There are not that many people who want to see more nuke plants built so I’m wonder what your reasons are for being so pushy about this.

@fathermcgruder @usa

- Fukushima
- Chernobyl
- Threre Mile Island

Reasons why a new nuclear power plant within or adjacent to a city is beyond the pale.

The whole article reads like a few locals had time on their hands and maybe in the case of the high school teacher, needed a cause to make himself feel important (some teachers are like that, they got into teaching just so they could impose their beliefs on others. Everybody talks about the damage bad cops do, but no one talks about teachers unless they have gone the route of certain notorious priests). There has never been a major project of any kind that didn’t make someone upset but in the grand scheme of things I think the benefits of this one will outweigh the downsides, however if I lived in the area I might feel differently. But at least a solar project is not going to make the land for hundreds of square miles uninhabitable for years to come.

Funny thing is that when I went to read that article, a couple artices down was an article about how Japan and Norway are still killing whales (https://ca.news.yahoo.com/japan-determined-keep-hunting-whales-210015567.html). I would be a whole lot more upset about that that the loss of a few trees in the desert. What I don’t get is why if they are so concerned about the trees, the government down there didn’t require that they be transplanted rather that simply cut down. There are these big machines called tree spades that can transplant fairly latge trees, roots and all from one place to another. Let the compllaining residents take a tree or two in their yards, then move the rest to another location in the desert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m89Z0KkjIw