>"We are clearly different then. I always log in, but i have a major incentive due to wanting to squash ads with youtube premium

There are other options. I also have no ads.

>"I'd say the same for YouTube. It's used to watch videos. The number of people who comment on them is minimal compared to the userbase."

That is exactly what I came to post. I use YouTube all the time. I have *never* logged into it. So for tons of people, it is not "social media".

Facebook, on the other hand, is mostly useless without a login. You can see a bit of it, then it stops.

>"I'd be very curious to the exact definition of "social media" they use is. I don't think it's what most people consider to be social media."

Bingo. Plays right into my comments last week about the stupid Virginia law trying to force "age checking" for "social media" and they don't even define what "social media" is or is not. As if everyone knows exactly what it is. Yet, somehow, stripping adults of their privacy and rights will save children (since parents refuse to restrict or withhold internet-connected devices from their children).

Is Slashdot "social media"? How about my local LUG's forum? What about the comments section on Amazon or Walmart product pages? Or reviews of apps on Google Play? A USENET group? Chat sessions in online games? If just watching videos is "social media" does that make broadcast TV or cable TV or a movie theater "social media"?

>"but really HSR should be focused on interstates. "

Exactly. That is about all we can expect would be workable/affordable. Otherwise it requires extremely expensive elevated tracks. The problem with many Interstates is that some of them now are nearly "full", having expanded multiple times for more lanes. There isn't an usable center area and sides are pinned in.

...it accurately identified and explained the problem so that experts could fix it, possibly with AI assistance, but always with expert review.
It would be really, really bad if clueless people believed that all they had to do is run it and it would magically fix everything.

Even in Central Europe where most lecce is nuclear, I could run a wood fired steam engine in my backyard and produce power for less than the municipal grid price.

Somewhere around 1990, pig piles of yellow pages would be delivered in neighbour hoods and businesses all over and go straight to the garbage. It took about three years for the infernal things to die.

Most jobs in a bureaucracy are useless and not productive. In ye olden deyz there were huge offices filled with pretty girls whose sole job was to make correspondence look pretty. An engineer would write a letter by hand in his chicken scratch, send it to the typing pool and after a week, they would return a draft done by a youngster with a typo in each paragraph. You would then mark it up and it would then go to a more senior and possibly less pretty lady to retype and you would get it back with maybe one typo per page. At that point it was already three weeks later and you then had to decide whether to return it again or mail it to the client. All those thousands upon thousands of jobs disappeared forty years ago when engineers started to type their own letters on an Apple IIe. There are however still vast numbers of people employed as data analysts and quants to name a couple, which are now in danger of death by AI.

>"The majority of the people you show it you will download it and do a full nuke-and-pave"

Doubtful. Although it might be a significant minority.

>"then wonder why this new 'Windows' can't run their favorite programs".

Like a browser? Because for a huge chunk of home users, that is all they really use now.

This in turn strongly suggests they knew how to position themselves in a marketing perspective in a way that shows all the other more venerable distros out there really dropped the ball.

I don't think so. I think it's more a case of Zorin being the only Linux distro that made an effort to have a look and feel that's as close to Windows as possible so as to make it easy for Windows refugees to make the transition.

Personally, I prefer Sam Gross' take on that: An Elephant is soft and mushy.

>"Even if all 1 million downloads turn into real OS installs, it's a drop in the bucket compared to Windows installs."

True. But if even if a small number of those people then show someone else and that other person switches, and on, and on, awareness keeps spreading. That is a great thing.

Generally, I don't care what OS people use (as long as I don't have to support it), but I do care if they are unhappy. Having Linux as an option is really great and works fantastically for a large number of people willing to really try it. The fact that it is free, fast/efficient, has no licensing mess, is more secure, more privacy-oriented, more controllable, more customizable, more open, easier and faster to update, and without forced cloud crud, no AI creep, no ads or nagware, and very little fake/forced hardware "obsolescence" all make it a very compelling option for lots of use cases. Not all use cases, but a surprisingly large number.

>"However, after Microsoft's recent announcement their own updates have broken their own system [slashdot.org] combined with no longer supporting W10, this can only lead to good things."

Microsoft obviously has its own agenda that doesn't mesh at all with what many (perhaps even most) users want now. And it shows. As MS-Windows has gotten significantly worse and more hostile over the decades, Linux/distros have gotten significantly better. Even people who haven't tried it in 5 years are often pleasantly surprised.

I tend to point people to Mint, but Zorin might be just fine, as well (I just have no experience with it).

Releasing immature tech to the general public is a strange strategy, especially when hypemongers exaggerate its capabilities.
The general public has a reputation for misusing tech and doing really stupid stuff with it.
The proper use of AI is for helping us solve previously intractable problems in science, engineering, medicine, etc. Using AI to create slop, scams and fake "friends" is a misuse of the tech.

>"I need an OS that I can plug a sound card into, start up my machine and it installs the driver and starts working"

Generally, that is Linux. I have installed various Linuxes over decades on hundreds of various machines. For the most part, modern Linux detects all the typical hardware and just configures and uses it. There is no need to "install drivers".

>"I want GUIs for all common tasks and I want it intuitive enough the I'm not spending hours looking up"

Again, that is generally the case with modern Linux. All the good distros can be completely managed through a GUI.

Could you end up with trying to install a not-so-great distro on a machine that has some unusual hardware? And have to take a dive into stuff? Sure. But that is the exception, not the rule, at least not in 2025.

The RF already won the war. The situation has been essentially static fir years. There is no way that Ukr will take their territories back - they are not able to. Therefore Ukr has to accept that and move on - rebuild what they have left.

This sounds like a case perfect for the Institute for Justice. https://ij.org/ Check with them because they love this kind of stuff.