Is there a way to do that??? I can’t find anything other than adding new words to a personal dictionary, but I do have an older version of android.

Hell I’m still trying to figure out why the spell checker changes “i’ll” to “i’LLC” every time I type it. Auto-correct on phones is just worthless and I spend far more time correcting it than I do trying to correct actual mistakes.

I’m not in the least bit surprised, most of these bastards aren’t willing to live by the same rules they impose on everyone else.

Yeah that’s what made me think of this… before you go indoctrinating children against their will (and the will of the parents), maybe you should become better role-models first.

What was I thinking? Oh that’s the problem, I was thinking…

Obviously it’s time we started!

Since our politics cannot hold one religion above another, I say we have a scoreboard for every religion with a final board listing how good or evil each politician rates overall.

I was kinda thinking the same thing… Since we can’t trust the various networks to be equally honest about both parties, maybe we could do something on lemmy similar to how reddit does livestream news feeds, except we put the scoreboard on the side and let participants vote on new additions for each delegate.

Scoreboards have buzzers, lets make it obvious every time they ‘score’ a new sin!

So you mean all of the things that are legal for Biden to now do thanks to SCOTUS? 😆

Wouldn’t that just trigger the “thou shalt not lie” commandment? We’re not their god, we can punish them with immediate judgement.

It may not be a hazard in your area, but around here there’s about a million bicyclists who have no objection to riding out into the middle of the road in front of fast-moving traffic to go around parked vehicles. Also that parked vehicle could be someone changing a flat tire and walking around their vehicle, or present some other type of hazard. You don’t know why they are parked there, and if you’re driving at night you might not even see them until it’s too late. Obviously other people in your area want to know about these parked cars or they wouldn’t be reporting them.

If you want less information, why not switch to Google maps or OsmAnd?

Guess that makes me king of my own domain! 😆

Apparently the port is optional but it makes me wonder what you would do if it wasn’t installed. Luckily it was there on all three of the machines I picked up from ebay.

Back in the days when people still had floppies and cd drives in their computers, yeah things were dead-simple. You pop in a disk, format the hard drive, and walk away while the process completes. I miss that. The machines I’ve worked on in probably the last decade, it seems like I have to fight against the hardware every time I want to wipe the system or replace a failed drive. The last set of servers I got, I couldn’t figure out why the linux image (with full EFI settings) refused to even boot up properly. Turns out Dell had made these machines so you could easily boot a Windows installer from any of the external USB ports, but to install linux you had to use a hidden internal USB port. Once I found out about that then yeah the installation went as planned, but this is the kind of BS I’m referring to about manufacturers trying to prevent users from getting rid of Windows.

Just curious, but have you ever tried installing Windows from scratch on a new computer? I’m just wondering if your comparison of “simpler” is the same installation of both operating systems, or if you’re comparing something that somebody else set up for you to something you’re doing yourself?

And yeah, it DID used to be dead simple… throw in an installation media and boot up the machine. These days there’s so much garbage in the way that they’re complicated the whole process without much gain.

Don’t feel bad, that’s a shitty process even for those of us in IT. Sometimes it doesn’t work for certain models of memory sticks, sometimes something on the computer gets in the way of booting to the drive. I recently worked on some servers where I had to disable EFI, grab a 15 year old installer to get linux booted up on it, then switch to the newer installer to complete the process. So far Dell has been the worst (but also the most frequently used) I’ve had trouble with for getting linux installed. Unfortunately the solutions usually involve combinations of disabling EFI, changing the hard drive to a different mode, or even changing what mode the memory stick is booted with (all selected from within the BIOS at boot time), and it’s not always the same process even for the same release of a machine.

It’s not you, it’s Microsoft working with the manufacturers to make it difficult for people to switch.

I’ll just add that nearly all linux distributions have a package manager you can access from the desktop. Simply open it up, find the software you want, and click to install. Not much different than going to the play store and installing an android app. The only time you need to do anything different is if you’re trying to install some obscure software that isn’t directly supported by your linux distribution, then you might have to resort to the command line.

To answer your first question, ALL of the mirrors are safe. The idea with mirrors is that you choose one that is geographically close to your location (same country, maybe the same region or state) to help reduce lag in downloading the files. Any selection is valid, all of the mirrors will have the same content, but for your location some mirrors may simply be faster or slower than others.

One other thing you might run in to is different types of installers. Some may be a very minimal install which only give you a command line, while others will provide a fully configured desktop. You might also see an option for a “Live” version – that is something you put on a bootable memory stick and you can test out a working version of the operating system without actually changing anything on your computer, but all of your settings will go away when you reboot.

I haven’t used Mint so I can’t provide specific info, however some things that are common to ANY linux desktop – You probably want to start with printer drivers (install CUPS) and some office software (install LibreOffice). For internet access, Firefox and Thunderbird are good choices. LicreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird can all also be used on Windows if you want to check them out ahead of time. There are many lists online that can point you to equivalent software, so like if you use Lightroom on windows, you might try Darkroom on linux. basically you just need to make a list of what Windows software you use and then install a similar package in linux.

Yes you will need some time to learn the new operating system and all the new software, very little will be 100% exactly the same, but they are “close enough”. You figured out how to use all these things once before, so you can do it again, and it will definitely be worth the effort.