Mint.

I use that on my gaming rig. Most everything runs fine through Proton or Lutris (Stellaris, Mass Effect, Fallout New Vegas, the Witcher, Age of Mythology, lots of classics). Minecraft Java Edition runs fine natively, including mods. Old games run great through Dosbox.

Mint itself is super stable Linux for your grandma. My dad’s been running it for five years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a word processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”). It was also my son’s first OS when he was about 8.

In fact, my wife and I already have a self hosted LubeLogger.

Since when does lemmy.ml ban political content? Is it on a specific community?

Epic protest garb. Want.

I’ve set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.

Matrix is like “Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn’t work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that’s NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?”

It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.

Jokes on them, I don’t keep shit in ~/Documents, all my goodies are on a network share mounted at ~/Netstore

No, my username is my stage name from another life. One of the most interesting questions I’ve ever gotten about it though in over 20 years of using it.

You have the next low budget Netflix teen supernatural / fantasy / romance / horror / drama / latest ripoff of BtVS right there. Either filmed in England and set in England or filmed in Canada, but set in the US.

Got to get some unknown but super hot gen Zer to play the dragon boy… Who obviously is a normal hot boy who shapeshifts into a dragon. He’s either orphaned and doesn’t know he’s a dragon and is “Why are these weird things happening to me? Oh god I’m a monster!! Better not talk to my friends about this cuz they might reject me!” OR, he’s like the black sheep of his super rich dragon family, hanging out with and dating humans while his dragon parents are all super judgy about it. He either has a hot dragon sister who tries to sabotage his relationships and is mean and condescending to everyone only to turn out to be an actually pretty cool person in season 2 when she ends up dating the <highschool quarterback / nerdy head of the science club / nerdy film club kid / possibly the youngish hot teacher if she’s older>. OR he has the aloof, loyal to the family, arrogant older dragon brother who turns out to be an actually pretty cool person in season 2 when he ends up dating the <highschool quarterback / gay best friend / grungy band kid>.

Meanwhile the redhead girls are sisters who are actually <witch / vampire / werewolf / fairies> and are in a complicated will they / won’t they love triangle with the hot dragon boy (which wouldn’t be so complicated if the characters would just have honest, open conversations with each other instead of hiding from their feelings and lying to each other constantly about everything). They can’t be with the hot dragon boy anyway, because <contrived nonsensical reason that witch / vampire / werewolf / fairies can’t be with dragons>. In spite of that, their gay dads (who are concealing some terrible secret that’s not actually terrible and not actually that secret, but we won’t find that out until season 2 or 3) are super supportive of their romantic choices and just want them to be happy no matter what, in spite of the pressure they’re getting from the <coven / conclave / high council / fairy court> to make sure their daughters follow “the Code / Pact” and don’t fraternize with dragons (This could mean war with the dragons or something, or opening a portal to hell, or…who the fuck knows… The audience certainly doesn’t know why, and won’t find out until the season 1 finale, probably because filming started on the first five episodes before the writers figured out what it actually means).

Whichever sister ends up with the dragon boy (probably not until halfway into season 2, you gotta milk these things as long as possible), the other sister will get a hot boy / girl toy as a consolation prize. That character is either a best friend / sidekick who has been there from episode 1 “just waiting for them to notice” OR is introduced in the first episode of season 2., in which case they’re either a totally normal mundane human (and wiley shenanigans will ensue to hide the supernatural world from them as long as possible) OR they appear to be a totally normal mundane human until the BIG REVEAL that they are a <demon / warlock / dragonslayer knight> working for / a sworn enemy of the <coven / conclave / high council / fairy court>.

Anyway, pitch that at Netflix, they’ll probably make it.

There’s a learning curve, but if you’re familiar with WAF’s it’s not hard.

If you want to DIY something, I have a bash script that builds OpenResty with NAXSI from source. Most of the web apps I write anymore are actually in Lua, for OpenResty, maybe with an API written in something else. But I also help other members of my team deploy their Node and Python apps and stuff, and I always just park those behind OpenResty with NAXSI, just doing a standard nginx reverse proxy.

Every computer I own is an autobot. My primary machine is always Optimus Prime, has been since 2008. Other machines get other names generally slightly inspired by their role / nature. Bumblebee and CliffJumper are miniPCs of various persuasions, Preceptor is my “mess around with AI” box, my big server that handles most of my data and network services is Wheeljack, my Macbook is Mirage, my backup server is Powerglide, my TV (which is an old Dell all in One running Linux Mint) is UltraMagnus.

Back in the day I had like five Reddit accounts. I still log into one of them sometimes (no it’s not my main one, that one turned into obscene invitations for u/spez to bugger himself with a hot poker, I’m not exaggerating).

You can’t take the sky from me.

I know a guy who worked on Unix in the '80s and he is very clear that Linux / MacOS are just Unix.

This isn’t a problem with Lemmy, it’s a problem with clicking on links in general. Most top search engine results anymore are crappy content mills serving who knows what ad network ads that may contain who knows what malware. You’re probably way LESS likely, by an order of magnitude, to get something malicious from any given random Lemmy link than you are from any given random search engine result.

You can’t do due diligence on every link you click on. That’s absurd (at least for most people). The best thing you can do is make sure you have a reasonably hardened browser and reasonably secure operating system.

How hardened? How secure? Depends on your threat model.

I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.

The gist of it was

• A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
• A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
• A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn’t, they move on.

As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.

Of course these aren’t hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it’s a definite trend.

The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It’s UI appeals to those people.

Pretty, but

Can’t even get dinosaur hands right.

Mint.

It’s extremely stable Linux for your grandma, that comes with every tool that she will ever use and on the cinnamon interface all those tools are exactly where she will expect them to be if she is used to using Windows.

I’ve gotten three boomers to use it and they hardly ever ask for tech support because it’s so stable.

I’ve managed to ditch every single one of those except LinkedIn. We simply CANNOT get new clients without it. The lockin to that platform is truly terrifying. LinkedIn is a crime against humanity.