In my experience, installing Linux Mint onto just about anything is trivial. IMO, the learning curve is more about using a different operating system than it being pre-installed.

That said, as long as you have a preconfigured distro like Linux Mint I think it’s about as easy to use as Windows or Mac. The main difference is that people are already used to how Windows or Macs work, and have forgotten there’s plenty of jank that they’ve learned to avoid. There are still things Linux could improve on w/r/t new user experience but I think the gap is getting smaller every year.

Wow you weren’t kidding lol. I watched the 2.0 demo and at this timestamp there’s a CSAM-related room title that Matthew was invited to (at the top of the right window). Granted it’s probably someone stream-sniping, but it goes to show that there’s apparently active bad actors trying to interfere.

Yes, almost certainly.

There’s an unnerving lack of substance over on reddit. Recently I decided to look at reddit for the first time since last June, and every post’s comments had 1k people saying absolutely nothing worth reading. It feels like I’m reading AI-written posts that are in the uncanny valley of almost making sense and almost being on-topic. News articles have people that literally only talk about the exact words that were in the headline. Every single post’s top comments must be lame “jokes” or one-liners, and those must have several replies that riff off the joke in decreasingly-funny ways.

I’ve picked up a strong habit of immediately looking in comment sections for good discussion and TL;DR’s on Lemmy posts and it took me a while to realize that I wasn’t actually reading anything in reddit comment sections. The words pass through my brain and nothing of value is absorbed, over and over. It feels like low-hanging fruit to say “reddit is all bots now” but there’s something seriously wrong about how it feels over there. You only really need ~10-20 top-level replies on a post to get a broad spectrum of answers, and Lemmy comment sections feel solid for the content that’s here. I wish there were more communities here (especially niche ones), but I’m grateful for what we have.

This video (series) is so cathartic. Love when people reach that moment of frustration with a company and break it off completely, instead of just eternally bending.