Lisa needs braces

To me “do you believe in ghosts?” and “do you believe in UFOs?” are basically the same question.

It depends how loaded the word “ghost” (or UFO) is in your mind.

Do I believe we have an immortal soul, or that consciousness can exist outside of a human or animal brain? Do I believe in angels, demons, spirits and entities etc? Absolutely not.

But do I believe that people who aren’t lying, and are being 100% genuine, truthfully report seeing things we cannot explain? Yes. Whether it’s pure hallucination of the human mind or something else that is genuinely being witnessed I don’t know and don’t suggest to know.

As proof that “ghosts” don’t actually need to be anything to do with the dead, I saw my mum at home once as a child, when she wasn’t really there at the time. She’s was wearing clothes she owned, but not what she was wearing that day. She was and still is very much alive. I’ve always remembered that I didn’t make this up, but the memory is too distant and vague at this point for me to put any real trust in it now.

Maybe I genuinely saw something unexplainable. Or maybe our brain hardware that generates the reality we perceive around us can occasionally vividly generate what isn’t really there. Who knows.

Instead of making me think about space, the solar system or the universe… this just gives me an existential crisis, visualising how few weeks are actually in a year and how brief a lifetime actually is.

Then I try to think about space instead.

Recently changed to top.

Occasionally you’ll click on an article or photo and there’s a really important explanation or disclaimer as the most-upvoted comment, but you’ll only see that first if you sort by top.

The tiny thumbnail for this looked like a belly button on my phone, had no idea what I was tapping on at first

No, I was still being cheaper with phones at that stage.

I remember my friend getting an N95 and how that was a big deal back then haha.

After looking through an extremely long list of Nokia phones on Wikipedia, it might have been a 6120 classic.

My last ever Nokia phone, a half way house between old Nokias and smartphones circa 2008.

No touch screen, but could play music, videos, had a calendar etc.

Absolute piece of garbage. Got super hot at times doing who-knows what, and had a software bug where the audio would completely stop working until you rebooted it… which meant that multiple times my morning alarm went off completely silently and I was late for work.

Bought an iPhone 3GS as soon as my 1 year contract was up, Nokia were never relevant again after that era.

Contrary to most advice, if you find something that’s compatible with a Wayland session (basically Gnome or Plasma) you might be pleasantly surprised.

I found that to be by far the closest I got to a macOS-like experience with Linux on a retina Mac, in terms of fluidity, trackpad scrolling and responsiveness.

If the Mac has a Retina display then I actually found XFCE runs worst of the various DEs at native resolution. Not in terms of resources but very choppy scrolling, video playback etc. Gnome and KDE Plasma actually ran better than XFCE for me on my 15” 2012 retina.

Presume it’s some kind of graphics acceleration thing, not 100% sure.

Oh wow.

I’ve had so many issues with black screens on so many distros with my mid-2012 retina 15” MBP and never knew this was the reason.

Definitely perfectly comfortable on Mint for day to day use… but would still struggle for anything that hasn’t got a GUI. Obviously can copy and paste commands but would like to be better than that.

This is installed on my old computer and I upgraded to a M1 Mac as my main one, so this is more a hobby project and learning experience than a daily driver.

Have had a lot of issues with previous installs from other distros failing, I think due to this Mac’s 2012 Intel/Nvidia hybrid graphics.

Can’t take any credit, but found this after doing some searching

https://github.com/andeon/conky-simple

Yeah, it’s nice!

I can’t take any credit for it, I found it here and figured out how to modify it slightly, mainly to remove the bits I couldn’t get to work.

https://github.com/andeon/conky-simple

Yeah, I foolishly shopped around a whole host of distros and DEs after seeing things on reddit and getting ideas above my station.

Most couldn’t even boot either the live USB or following install, and I didn’t really know how to find out why.

Others worked for a week or more before failing after an update and I hadn’t figured out Timeshift yet.

Probably my 2012 hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics played a part if I was guessing.

A lot of it seems at least partly deprecated, had to just delete a few presets I couldn’t get to show any data

Thanks!

I’ve nuked and started again with Linux so many times at this point.

Did the usual ill-advised distro hopping instead of just using Mint, to see if the grass was greener… and it wasn’t.

So many distros couldn’t even load the live USB and locked up with a black screen.

Others would install… but then wouldn’t boot.

Others ran for various amounts of time before failing after an update.

At least now I’ve done what I should have done at the start and figured out Timeshift. If anything goes wrong again I’ll make sure I take the time to see if I can understand why, to learn from it.

Interesting. This was one of the many distros I couldn’t get to install on my 2012!

Others here with old Macs seem to have had a much smoother run than me!

You can absolutely run Linux like a champ on that machine, but for reasons I’m not advanced enough to know/understand I’ve struggled with even booting the live USB for multiple distros on my Mid-2012 15" Retina. Maybe it’s the version of the hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics on the model, I can’t really say.

I’m currently writing this from Linux Mint on said Mac, and all is well; but I’ve experienced the following:

• OpenSuse installer couldn’t even be seen at startup manager
• MX Linux would freeze during boot to the installer
• Elementary OS wouldn’t boot following install
• Pop! OS installed the wrong Nvidia driver for the computer, and with the open source drivers stopped booting after running a few updates
• Nitrux would freeze during boot to the installer
• Ubuntu stopped booting a few days in after an update
• Debian might have worked but wouldn’t detect my trackpad, wifi or USB ethernet adaptor so I couldn’t properly get it installed
• Manjaro worked for a while but eventually failed after an update
• ArcoLinux wouldn’t wake from sleep running the live USB

I totally recommend Linux Mint overall. I’ve decided I like Cinnamon best, “it just works” far more than anything else I’ve tried. I consider it the closest to macOS in terms of being thought about from every angle and set up and ready to go as a beginner or as a more advanced user.

Yep.

And if you knew it was bad, but didn’t know how bad:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/oct/12/girl-loses-fingers-school-art