Interesting take. I definitely agree that the ease of “just do it in Windows” that comes with dual booting was a thing for me, in the years when I was dabbling and thinking about switching for good.

What finally motivated me was getting fed up enough with Windows and M$ to not care about possible collateral damage from switching full time to Linux. My switch was helped by the fact that I left a job with a lot of overtime work that needed to be done in Windows for corporate compatibility. Once I was free of that, my dependency on one or two critical Windows apps was gone, so it was easier to switch as well.

What I really enjoy is the freedom to keep exploring/learning/changing. I set up Home on a separate partition, so if I can distro-hop without too much downside,if and when I get bored.

This is beautiful.

“a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin”. 😂

Thanks for the summary. I signed up for it just in case, but don’t think I’ll end up using it. I have a similar experience with Mastodon, but then I was never really into Twitter, either.

I share your feelings on the importance of open platforms. While reddit may have been shitty for a while, the whole third-party apps thing was an eye-opener for me, and started me thinking about (and moving toward) open source.

My next big challenge will be to de-Google, but I’m increasingly up for it. Problem is I have a ton of site identities associated with my email address there, so we’ll see how that works out.

I agree that if you’re finding it hard to go in every day it may be time for a change. The main strategy I have used is to try to get clear on what you want, what you would consider to be need-to-have vs. nice-to-have. You can do this by making lists of things you like where you are now and things you don’t. The things you like are what you want to try to replicate somewhere else.

The main thing is to try to be more about moving toward something you want, and less about moving away from something you hate. Not always possible, but good to strive for. Otherwise you could end up repeatedly changing jobs to get away from bad people and drama, which, as many others have pointed out, will always be there to some degree.

I wish you well in your search. Stress is a real killer, and sometimes we don’t know how bad it is until we’re out of that environment. Trust your gut.

Agreed, great book. There is a second book in that series, The Boy On the Bridge, I believe. Also quite good.

I found the movie on Kanopy through my (Canadian) public library. I’m not sure how easy to find it is on other services, as it’s not exactly blockbuster stuff. I discovered it quite by accident.

The Girl With All the Gifts was pretty good, based on the book of the same name.

For comedy, one of my faves is Stranger Than Fiction.

I’m tuning up the sole of my #5 bench plane so I can use it for more reliable edge jointing while I continue my half-hearted search for a #7 plane.

When I’m done with that I am going to start work on a Morris chair using plans from Norm Abram’s New Yankee Workshop. I’ll use mahogany and plan to make my own leather cushions. It will be my winter project, I think. :)

I used to be responsible for the app portfolio in a 1000+ user company, and every 3 years or so I would go back out to the market and try hard to replace Adobe, just for PDF operations. Couldn’t do it because so many products were integrated with them, often in ways we could not reproduce with other products. The best we could do would be to pay for a different product for 1/3 of the cost for Adobe, and then still end up having to carry a significant number of Adobe licenses for cases when integration failed with the other product. No-win situation, and just easier to stay with the evil we knew.

I hate them.

I’d you can eat meat, beef jerky. Generally any high protein, low carb diet will be low output. Not sure about the sweating though.

The longer this goes the more it reads like the onion.