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.

Selected because it's the information page available? Which

I don't spend much time on slashdot, rather in economics reading. Paul Krugman is probably the most-famous detractor of average, proponent of median, income reporting. I believe his best-known point was that when Bill Gates walks into a 20,000 seat football stadium, the "average attendee" just became a multi-millionaire.
He repeated his 1992 point in a longish 2014 article:
https://prospect.org/2014/06/0...

But my whole post was off-topic for this slashdot article, and we're now moving further afield, and should take this up when income inequality, or relative income of different states, is the actual topic.

But I gotta say - that St Louis Fed page says it rose from 27K to 45K in 45 years. That's 1.1% gain per year. Krugman's own essay above is about how that number is smaller than the percentage gains of the top 10%, much less the top 1%, much much less the top 0.1%...which is what the inequality debate is all about.

But my stronger point was the use of "wealth" rather than "income". Wealth is the integral of (income - living.costs) over time, modified by preference for saving over spending. (Japanese are great savers, so are Canadians). If your income keeps going up, but your inescapable living costs like housing and higher education also skyrocket, your wealth will do poorly, as with Gen Z not having housing.

Canada has THIRTY PERCENT higher median wealth than America. That's the sum of savings, despite lower income, because we have far lower medical insurance costs and precarity.

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.

Not nearly as irritating as having dozens of random dot subdirectories in the root of your home directory.

The first issue costs a few developers a few days of their time to fix. The second is a problem that nags millions of users for eternity.

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.

Because at this rate, by my math, the number of AI cores Google requires will exceed the number of atoms in the visible universe within about 120 years.

Don't discourage! Conservatives HATE looking at median numbers instead of averages, normally. This is my discovery-of-the-week, the "Median Wealth" by country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (click on the "MEDIAN" column and sort so that Iceland is at top)

If you think of 'wealth' as "the integral over time of (income - living expenses)", then it's a much better measure of whether your society maximizes the number of people with minimal stress...and on THAT metric of national success, the USA is way below Canada and nine European nations. But economists like Noah Smith still refer to Europe "catching up" with the USA, or "falling behind" based on *average* income changes...when most increases go to just a few percent.

Let's hear it for median economic stats.

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.

Oh, I think I saw that YouTube video!

Generally the "even engineer dads can't make heads nor tails of it" objection is that the engineer dads didn't spend a couple minutes reading the helpfully coloured highlight box in the textbook. There has been a push in math to develop teaching methods that emphasize understanding rather than memorization. Thus 5x3 becomes 5x5x5 or 3x3x3x3x3 instead of "STFU and memorize your times tables."

A better example, also from Internet memes, is a procedure where you add or multiply a pair of larger numbers by breaking them down into component problems. 37 + 55 becomes (30 + 50) + (7 + 5) and some "parent" on Reddit or Facebook with add a comment like "why can't they just do addition like we learned??" Someone sensible will usually point out that people who are good at arithmetic will often use decomposition on harder problems if they're doing them in their head.

The teaching algorithms are pedagogical tools used to increase understanding or illustrate problems from different perspectives, not the final here's-the-algorithm-you-should-always-use".

I said that the 5x3 answer being marked wrong was likely due to a poorly educated teacher. No, primary school children probably won't be multiplying anything non-commutative soon. That was a joke. However, it is important not to instill, and then spend years reinforcing, incorrect facts. You shouldn't tell students things like "multiplication is defined as commutative" because that kind of thing will eventually screw someone up.

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).