The only one or two power outages I had my entire life in Germany: were planned weeks ahead.

You've been lucky, then. I live now in southeastern Colorado, where it's currently monsoon season. That means lots and lots of thunderstorms, hail and flash floods. (The standard advice for dealing with flash floods is "head for the high ground." We never bother, because we are the high ground.) Lightning and flash floods cause power outages, so they're common this time of year, but generally only for a few minutes.

The biggest outage I ever lived through, however, came before moving up here, when I lived in Los Angeles. That was caused by the Northridge Earthquake, back in '94, a real E-Ticket ride! One of the side effects was a better look at the night-time sky than I'd had since I left the Navy.

I'm retired, and it's long been my habit to update my Fedora box every morning while making breakfast. I agree with you that the kernel's getting updated far more often than it used to be. Recently, it was updated at least three times in one week (maybe four, I'm not sure) which seems excessive. I think that was while they were getting rid of the insecure forms of string manipulation, but I wasn't involved in that and could be wrong.

As a long-time Linux user, I have two questions. First, why does Microsoft insist on holding on to all of these bug patches and security fixes so that they can be released all together on Patch Tuesday instead of being made available right away as Linux does? Second, why do so many people insist on paying money for such a flawed system and putting up with such a slow update pace?

I mean it's roughly 30 years past the "Year of the Linux desktop".

And that's because Windows fanbois moved the goalposts and people either didn't notice or didn't realize what was going on. Back then, "the year of Linux on the desktop" meant the year when Linux was good enough to be used on a desktop as your daily driver, something that's been achieved decades ago. However the Windows lusers started using the term to mean the year that Linux was on the majority of desktops, something that clearly hasn't happened yet and Linux users let them get away with it.

Actually I do want to memorize. But not random idiotic key strokes that have nothing to do with the action/command they execute. EMACS is a prime example for that. ^G for example, what has that to do with "help"? Good, ^H is backspace, so during normal editing not available ...

If you want to memorize the commands, knock yourself out; nobody's stopping you. And go right ahead and use ^H as backspace, as that's what it does in nano. I'm not saying that you must, or even should be using it, I'm explaining why I've been using it for the last quarter of a century.

wine you have to install and setup, while there are tools to help. steam itself install the proton and do the setup...

I use Fedora, so I can only talk about that. With Fedora, Wine is in the standard repos and all you need to do is tell the appropriate package management program (I use dnf, the CLI program, because it gives me the control I want.) to install wine, and away it goes, finding and installing wine and all the needed dependencies without any further work on your part except accepting the transaction. I'd think that most if not all of the mainstream distributions do the same, although the details change, but unless you really want to do it the hard way, there shouldn't be any need to descend into Dependency Hell.

But you don't need to memorize it; all of the most common commands are listed at the bottom of the window. And, if you need one that's not listed, there's always ^G, the first command listed which gets you to Help, a complete list of commands. Nothing to memorize unless you want to.

4. Volunteer for the military in a related field, or even in a general occupation. A two-year military enlistment qualifies for the GI bill which will fund your 4-year degree with perhaps some left over for other education.

The GI Bill is important, but it's not the only thing this gives you that will help you for the rest of your life. You also get VA medical benefits that never end even if you come out without any Service Connected conditions. And, judging by all the complaints about the high costs of Health Care that I see here, it's a good thing to have.

As a personal example, back in early '22 I lost my balance on a patch of black ice and came down on my right knee like a pile driver. That led to two weeks in a hospital and I still have a rod in my femur. As I was already retired at the time there was no way I could have ever paid off that debt, but as I have my VA benefits I ended up not paying for any of that care.

Back when I was first learning Linux, back in the prior millenium, I took one good look at The One True Editor (vi) and knew that I didn't want to waste the time and energy needed to memorize it. Instead, after a little experimentation, I settled on Mork's Editor (nano) and have stuck with it ever since. One of the many things I like about it is that with vi, if you get into it by mistake, it takes you five keystrokes to exit without saving. With nano, if you haven't entered any text, one keystroke (^X, classic geek-speak for Crtl-X) does it. If you've entered some text, but don't want to save it, two keystrokes (^X N) does the trick. As you can see, when working in Linux, KISS is my motto.

Wrong! Just because you started out using a GUI and had a hard time adjusting to a CLI doesn't mean that nobody's comfortable working in a text-based interface. Those of us who were using computers back before GUIs were invented find a command line quite comfortable, TYVM!

A long time ago, back when you had to go to the Unemployment Office every two weeks to turn in your paperwork and get your check, I was told that by a clerk. So far, I've seen no reason not to believe it, even though I've seen supposedly authoritative claims that it's not true. It's the type of thing the PTB would deny even though it's true.

No, it means that they've lost their jobs and their Unemployment Benefits have run out. The various government agencies responsible for these numbers assume that if you're not receiving government handouts you've left the workforce and they stop counting you as unemployed.

My parents' retirement home was on the flight path that the shuttle used to land at Edwards, and I remember hearing the double BOOM as they went over. Not the loudest thing I've heard. That was my ship's 5"/54 doing shore bombardment while I was topside back in '72. Yes, I was wearing hearing protection but I still have a notch in my hearing range because of it. I also heard the Newport News firing a full broadside of 8" guns one night but that wasn't as loud, both because it was several miles away and because it was firing away from us. It also wasn't using flashless powder, giving us a nice fireworks display as a side effect.

Are you sure that the telescope isn't named after a sandwich?

... I really liked the first Superman they did.

So you managed to find and watch the Superman serial that Columbia put out in 1948. And if you liked that so much, did you hunt down its sequel, Atom Man vs. Superman that came out in 1950? If not, you really should as they used footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing as part of the first chapter's cliffhanger.