The real problem with Linux on the desktop, in my experience, is the first time a new user goes looking for software somewhere other than the distro repository.

Back in my foolish days of trying to change the world, one family asked me to fix their incredibly ancient old Windows 95 machine that was infected up the gazoo with malware, and had failing components too. I ended up giving them a much newer Pentium III machine totally free, with a highly customized Linux install I tailored to their tastes and needs. I offered this with free around the clock tech support. About a week later, I got a call asking how the guy's wife could get her emails back. Apparently they got some incredibly tantalizing piece of malware they couldn't live without installing, and the malware wouldn't run on Linux, so they hosed everything, including their emails, in the process of installing Windows on the machine. So they could install the malware, and infect the computer, no less!

That is when I finally accepted Linux on the desktop was a pipe dream. Both of my children eventually moved to Windows too, after growing up with Linux from the time they first started using computers. They wanted to play video games, and even though Linux has Steam, Steam on Linux is a joke.

I barely care myself anymore, but every time I think I'll just go with the flow and join the rest of the world, it only takes a few minutes to change my mind. If you haven't yet experienced a Linux installation on a brand new Windows 8 machine, you're in for a treat there. It took two hours and repeated Windows boots to negotiate my way to the damn BIOS screen to get it to boot something else. Disposing of that hideous garbage was a joy, but I am a weird freak, and I am in the 0.0000001% or something. Long live Windows! Hallowed be thy name!

Sigh.

Watching from over here, I thought it was a cool experiment, but I didn't really expect it to work. In spite of its many problems, it has, on the whole, turned out better than I ever expected.

A loose confederation of independent states didn't work over here either. We ultimately settled the matter with a brutal civil war, and the federal government won. I suppose it was a good thing on the whole, though where I live, people are still bitter about it more than 100 years later.

I once stumbled onto a series of pictures some tragically self-loathing girl had posted of her self-mutilation. She started with garden variety cutting, then she started cutting horrifically deep, to the point where you could see muscles and tendons. She cut her own breasts off. She removed most of her genitals, and sewed what remained into some strange and featureless slit. Unsurprisingly, she eventually succeeded in killing herself. The photo album concluded with some message from somebody who knew her in real life, and a whole lot of "we love you" and "attagirl" type comments.

I don't know whether I am more disturbed by the existence of such a girl, or by the fact that I looked through all of that. The fact that I even know things like this exist is kind of the Pandora's box of my own dark psychology. I'm going to leave the fucker closed for once, and move on. Anyway, after seeing that girl, I wouldn't be remotely surprised if people performed their own amputations at home to get bionic super legs or whatever. Never underestimate the twistedness of a freak.

I killed around a dozen deer in 2013. One of them did $25,000 worth of damage to my truck.

I was almost literally the only guy at work who didn't hunt, so in 2014 I decided to go deer hunting. I figured I may as well eat a few of the damn things before they got splattered in the process of damaging motor vehicles.

It was a pretty radical paradigm shift for me, I have to tell you. I used to tow the liberal treehugger party line about "caveman blood lust" and all that. I looked down my nose at all the disgusting redneck vermin in my midst. I have to say that having gone hunting really changed my outlook on caveman blood lust.

For one thing, it's a LOT more difficult to kill one of those damn things than you'd think. I invested on the order of $1,000 and around 100 hours, and I never fired a shot. My hunting partner, who was showing me the ins and outs of deer hunting woodcraft, did shoot a small buck, and he walked me through gutting it. That was interesting. Deer are made out of stuff that looks and feels just like meat from the grocery store, except it's very warm.

They come apart almost like someone designed them to be used for food. It's pretty easy to remove the guts, and what's left is a big shell of meat and bones that even has a membrane separating it from all the internal stuff. I guess that would be the peritoneum, but when you look at a peritoneum in that context, it's just a convenient barrier that separates all the pissing and shitting parts from the tasty muscle. Fascinating.

The whole caveman blood lust thing is hard to describe. All your senses are heightened, and you feel like a predator. I see why guys who are much less repressed than I am live and breathe this stuff. My scrotum is too empty to really get into the whole chest pounding animal lust thing, and I'm probably not going to become an avid hunter. I'm going to go out again next year, and try my luck though. I'd like to eat one of these things one good time, just for the hell of it. If I didn't eat it, somebody would eventually hit it with a car anyway.

Mom had a blog and a collection of around 80,000 digital photographs. After she died, I didn't have any good options for keeping any of it up. I mean yeah, she was my mother, but $120 a year in perpetuity to preserve her life's work? Not to mention various tech support providers were entirely unhelpful when I contacted them about transferring all her data to accounts I controlled.

I tried ripping a mirror of all that stuff to a local archive, but it proved to be a major challenge to grab full sized copies of all the images, and every single interconnected thing, without sucking in half the damn internet. My script blew out a 500 GB hard disk, and got my bandwidth throttled for a month, and still missed most of what I was trying to capture.

I had her original hard disk with the raw image files, and decided to settle for that. I had no record of which ones she hand picked, and no rhyme or reason to tens of thousands of files with random date-based names. I wanted to do a coffee table book or something--anything, really--but I never figured out what to do with any of that, and never got around to doing anything with it at all.

When the rent came due on the online stuff, I threw up my hands and pulled the plug on everything. I set the hard drive aside to do something with one of these days, but I lost track of which identical old drive was which, and accidentally formatted that one.

My mother was a very depressed, unhappy woman who drank herself to an early death. In the end, one of the things she lamented about most loudly was the fact that her life's work was nothing more than pixels. In a tragic turn of irony, she was exactly right about that. It fell on me to preserve her legacy, and I totally fucked it all up, and it's all gone. Poof. Literally the only thing I have to remind me that my mother used to exist is a print-out of one of her last emails, where she was telling some guy she knew what an asshole I am.

I guess she was right about that too. I fucked it all up, and what can I do about it now? Nothing.

I drive two trucks that were both brand new in 2013. One of them is a Freightliner Cascadia, the other a Ford F150 with the 5.0 "coyote" engine.

The Freightliner has almost 400,000 miles on the clock now, while the Ford has a mere 25,000. The inside of the stack on the Freightliner is still as silver and shiny as the day it was new. The inside of the tailpipes on the Ford have been black since about day two of operation.

With all the advances in gasoline engines, and all the technology in this 5.0 I'm driving, I was really surprised by how comparatively dirty it is. Considering the days when my trailers used to have a black streak running their whole length, I never expected a diesel to be radically cleaner than a gasoline engine. The key to the whole thing is the diesel particulate filter, and it obviously works very well.

Not posting anonymously, because who cares if people know I'm fat. I'm fat, in a nutshell, because you can't make any money exercising, and working for free is bullshit.

Yeah, I should work for the health benefits, my "payment" for tying up a bunch of my limited spare time doing boring sweaty things, because extending my life to the age when I shit in my pants and can't remember my name is totally worth all those reps in the gym.

Meh.

I think it's illegal to be reasonable on Slashdont, but after thinking about it, I agree with you. I know intelligent guys who have a totally different perspective. I don't know Arnold Schwarzenegger personally, but I've read "Total Recall," and he seems quite intelligent while also being the sort of "in the moment" person I was talking about. There was even an interesting passage where he talked about how he liked to make decisions without having too much information, because knowing too many details was crippling.

Now I'm starting to wonder if it could be an introvert/extrovert thing. I can't think of any intelligent introverts who aren't the same flavor of maudlin, introspective basket cases that I am. I can't think of any extroverts who aren't "in the moment" types, whether they're intelligent or not.

Hmmm.

I can relate to that. People who live more in the moment are happier, because the long view always involves decline, death, and dying. I'm petting and really enjoying my dog, and somewhere I'm thinking how I might have another eight years before I have a 120 pound problem who is pissing and shitting huge logs everywhere, who is going to be a royal bitch to dig a hole for one day. I'm having sex with my wife, and somewhere I'm thinking how much it's going to suck looking at her when she's 80. The big picture long view always seems to have a down side, and it's depressing.

I can relate to the expectations thing too. Everybody looks up to you, and a lot of them are jealous of you, and it makes it that much harder to choose an ordinary life. I'm a truck driver, and I like my profession fine, but I constantly feel a need to apologize for not owning the trucking company or being a professor or something; for not aiming higher in general. I've found a lot of people don't like me, because they don't think they're good enough for me for some reason, and yet I feel the same toward them. I'd love to just be normal, and not have to think so much about everything. Too much knowledge can be crippling, instead of helpful. It's hard to invest in a business idea, knowing every conceivable way it might fail, and what all the odds are.

My mother was even more intelligent than I am, and she died young, of alcoholism. She was a miserable woman.

Intelligence is overrated. One side effect for me is that I can never enjoy the opiate of a nice handy sky daddy to make me feel less infinitesimal in the scheme of things. We evolved to see sky daddies in everything, and I have the same need in my brain as any other human, but there's nothing to plug into it. I haven't found the religion yet that wasn't just totally inconsistent and goofy.

I read that book in high school. The butchered movie version came out while I was in college. I officially feel old now.

Or a fake blonde going the extra mile to fake being natural.

When I was a Linux dad with young kids getting access to the net, I spent some time worrying about this. When I grew up, you might score a copy of Penthouse, but today, you might find "Two Girls One Cup," or back then it was probably goatse. Nothing I ever encountered in Penthouse could compare to goatse. What would stuff like that even do to the mind of a child? Not to mention all the pedophile stalkers and lions and tigers and bears. I felt I had to try to protect them.

In the end, I found some stuff some guys said I could use to create a net nanny thing. It involved reading several PhD dissertations, a lot of programming, and at least three rubber chickens. It was all way over my head, and I never got anywhere with it. The kids ended up having totally unrestricted, unfettered, free reign of the whole big ocean of sleaze and pedophile stalkers and everything, pretty much from kindergarten on.

They turned out fine, and eventually thanked me for not trying to net nanny them. As my now 21 year old son said once, "Dad, I never wanted to watch donkeys fucking midgets anyway, and you never had anything to worry about."

Both of them have switched to Windows, incidentally.