The richest 1% burn through their entire annual carbon share in just 10 days.

Ok. yes. That helps a lot. I think almost all of the items you listed have a GUI on most desktop environments for *nix, GNOME and KDE certainly. And that's part of the challenges with Linux, we say Linux but really mean KDE, GNOME, etc. Because if you had GNOME on Linux and GNOME on FreeBSD, they are more alike from the end-user's perspective than a system with KDE on either OS. And we can do maddening things like have mostly-KDE system with bits of GNOME installed because maybe we like a few of their apps but don't like their panels and widgets.

On GNOME there is a very basic user account dialog, you can edit your name, icon, set password, enable automatic logins. If you want to move your home directory or something, you'll be hitting the command-line. And it's quite easy to screw up, so have a recovery USB stick setup before hand.

Printers I always setup graphically on Linux. It'd been 20 years since I touched printcap or other lpr guts. Apple really did us a huge favor when they upstreamed CUPS. Way easier to setup a Linux box than Windows 11 (my wife's compute never seems to find our old Brother printer)

X11 and Fcitx5 (Wayland) make IME bother powerful and a bit of a complicated set of choices for the end-user to make. Ultimately you can have your input method very customized and working in just about every app, certainly everything that is using GTK or QT. But even old school stuff like xterm does indeed work (I use IME for emoji shortcuts in xterm & hexchat)

For both GNOME and KDE, there is an accessibly settings menu. You can turn on the screen reader and get most apps to do TTS when you focus on a window or GUI element. Using either the mouse or tab key to change focus. More detailed settings were hidden by the GNOME team, there is a gnome-tweaks utility to get at them but it's annoying they dropped a lot of "advanced options" from the main settings window.
Slackware Linux from the mid-1990's had screen reader and braille terminal support at the installer (I think BRLTTY), so the hobbyist teletype OSes have long been winning at accessibility.

For restoring the system to an earlier configuration, there isn't a good out of the box experience. If you have the foresight, you can easily install a program like Timeshift and have a GUI and even automate your snapshots. But I don't know of any distro that have any of this setup for you in advance. I think in part because there isn't an agreement on which backup software is "best" or how to have sane defaults that work for most people. I think as Linux starts moving to using Btrfs by default on the main distros, the answer will be obvious and cheap. Until then people are going to be using rsync or Restic with some GUI or shell script wrapper. Powerful and flexible, but unlikely to ever see any kind of backups made by 99% of Linux users.

Ubuntu added the ability to update, install, or blacklist graphics drivers and other proprietary drivers. Giving you fine-grained control. If you want to install the latest NVIDIA driver before your distro vendor has pulled it in, that's going to be a command-line affair and not well supported. But if you wait for Ubuntu, Fedora, etc to packaged it, it should offer an automatic update option several weeks after the vendor released. (not ideal, but trying to be honest here)

Overall, Linux and *BSD can function as a desktop OS. Now would most people prefer the experience the *nix desktop GUIs over macOS or Windows? Probably not, more a matter of preference now though than any significant superiority. But I think most days on any modern OS can be done entirely in a GUI. And there's a few things on Windows you still have to do with cmd line, if you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in that situation.

I usually download Linux on my Raspberry Pi and install it on a new x86-64 laptop. The RPi is my random tasks computer that is hooked up to one of the ports on my living room TV. The RPi comes in handy because it has some I/O ports I can use to hook up experiments. And I have some emulators installed. And I have a wacky arcade joystick hacked together and plugged into it.

If I were to install Windows today, I'd have to download the disk images from Microsoft using Firefox on a Linux computer. I think theoretically it would work, but I have no idea if I'd hit any roadblocks along the way.

Both solid choices. Debian is also a nice option that I fall back to.

Zorin is for people who want to pay Zorin instead of Canonical for nice installer and some roadmap for long-term hardware and security support. With Canonical and Red Hat being the stronger choices for the latter.

What's an example of a common task? Copying files onto a USB stick? Formatting said USB stick? Editing a WAV file? Playing movies and MP3s? Ripping a CD? I think Linux and several other OSes have covered these particular common tasks for quite some time now.

Of course, if you're used to Windows or a Mac, the steps and names of the programs are going to be different on Linux/*BSD. But at a high level it's going to be a very similar process to complete any "common task".

I run Zorin on two machines, I went for it because they tweaked the UI a bit in a way that I thought might be nice. Overall happy but there are also things I wish they would change.

XDG and other Freedesktop.org specs are careful to identify the concept of a Unix-like operating systems. And nothing in the spec requires it to run on UNIX specifically, although the spec does identify features from UNIX that it depends on. Implement those features and you can implent this spec. Linux and several others have done so already.

D-K just describes the phenomenon. It doesn't excuse the behavior. It's basically an observation that low performers are poor at self assessment of their abilities. This should not surprise people today, and it did not surprise philosophers of ancient Greece.

I'm not aware of such a dementia diagnose. Do you have more information? Sounds fascinating if it exists outside of your own head.

Epidemiology covers the study of this. You would be better served having a population with broad immunity in order to protect a small population of those that lack immunity.

In short, no man is an island. And we need to quite trying to solve every problem as if we are individuals that have no duty or consequences outside of our own doorstep.

Or white mothers are making a lot of noise about nothing. And black mothers are complaining due to systemic problems in the system, problems she faced herself, and she now sees her child facing.

You can't dismiss the "race card" because from the outside the symptoms look the same for all races (parents complaining).

"Of those who responded to the survey, 40 percent of those in the U.S. House of Representatives who have school-aged children, and 49 percent of those in the Senate who have school-aged children, send or have sent at least one of their children to private school.", source: Heritage Foundation

That organization has an agenda to represent the position of so-called "school choice", so I think if anything they would pump the numbers up higher for private school (kind of already have in the phrasing: "at least one of").

That said, I'm willing to accept that 41% of Senators use public school exclusively. That seems realistic. For politicians at the state and local level, it's going to vary far more than a small group that lives in D.C.

I know of some local politicians who have kids in the public school system. But I live (or used to live) in the SF Bay Area, which has several good public schools and many bad ones. Live near a good school, then why wouldn't you send your kids there. If you paid a premium to live in Cupertino, part of that is because it is desirable for its school district (Monta Vista, etc).

No, let's have bands of uneducated losers that have nothing better to do than breaking into our houses and steal our stuff. Then we can invest 10X more money in our police force than we would have in icky socialist public education.

On the plus side, these uneducated rabble will have the right to vote and to own to fire arms. So perhaps after a few generations of this nonsense they'll overthrow our great-grandchildren's regime.

Wow, you trust the Trump administrations values so much you want to pass those along to kids?

That's certainly a choice.

Journalists kind of suck at communicating science to laypeople, in part because journalists are laypeople themselves, and in part because they suffer from Dunning–Kruger syndrome and are too stupid to realize their their journalism degree doesn't mean their expertise extends to all areas.

Under the Biden administration, you'll see several phrases from the CDC that are more measured. Such as "a path forward" or other variations using the key word "forward". I don't know why anyone would pick up some random journalists, especially one like Maddow who has been more about shock titles and opinion pieces, over some sort of expert, such as an epidemiologist. I guess picking sides based on Left versus Right politics is just how some people's brain works. Forgive my harshness, but that's a stupid way to operate. Rather viewers/listeners should invest in weighing if someone is wholly unqualified to comment and doesn't belong in the discussion (with Maddow*, she rarely belongs in a serious scientific or economic or military discussion).

* Maddow's partner is a wonderful woman and I enjoy her art (photography but abstract?)

Annoying and overly literal puzzles are my generation's jam. And really any generation going at least as far back as those who read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or the Oz books.

I still haul Zork out once a decade and play at least the first one. I rarely have the energy to power through the second or third. I also occasionally pick up Return to Zork (1993) which is more of a full motion point-and-click game. A genre that really has no equivalent today and is perhaps more obsolete than a text adventure, as the low-res videos and acting have not aged that well.

No, but 30 years ago people thought I was being paranoid, a crank, or just being difficult (troll, contrarian, etc)