Well, either that or crimes, but some crimes can be seen as illegal work

Human existence requires work. Someone has to grow the food, someone has to fix the things, someone has to build the structures and plumb them and someone has to help fix us when we get broken. The only way to never work is to freeload off of everyone who is working.

What really sucks is that society expects us to be “specialists” in one thing for the rest of our live

Specialization is literally how humanity shifted from being hunter-gatherers who lived to be about 30-40 before getting mauled by a bear or killed by another tribe or dying of an infection because you slipped on a rock.

In the modern economy specialization doesn’t have to mean doing the same thing every day. Any kind of career where you fix things, you can easily find a job that varies wildly from day to day. A mechanic might be replacing an engine cylinder one day and rebalancing wheels the next and rebuilding the exhaust the next. An IT person can be troubleshooting a software error one day then tweaking network performance the next then imaging laptops the next. A project manager will have different work depending on what phase of the project it’s in, and the type of challenges and work will vary wildly by what kinds of projects they’re managing

The trick is, find something you don’t mind doing and that can turn into finding something you kinda enjoy. As long as you don’t wake up dreading work every day (which if you do it’s probably time to shake things up, both for yourself and for your loved ones!) you can have a pretty decent life

The other way to look at it is what are hobbies and volunteering but work in of themselves? Human existence involves work, but every human should be able to find work that they can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)

So here’s the thing, many people hate their jobs and just work them because they don’t really see any other option than to keep working the job they hate, but also plenty of people really enjoy their jobs. Depending on your interests you might have to get a little creative or try something you’d never thought about or something you’ve never heard of

If you enjoy problem solving (a very common human trait), there’s some lucrative corporate careers out there in things like project management, asset management or even just straight management. If you just want to zone out and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day there’s tons of machine operator jobs that will absolutely fill that role (and often in small towns with very low costs of living as an added bonus) if you want to just get paid go hike there’s jobs to be had in surveying and land management. If you like working with animals the ag sector has you covered, and if you like working with your hands there’s always tons of jobs in trades. If you like helping people there’s the healthcare sector and if that’s too much blood there’s always medical coding or outside of the healthcare sector there’s tons of banks out there looking for loan officers who will talk to people and fill in the blanks on the forms. Sales is also very lucrative and very cushy if you can get into B2B sales. There’s tons of jobs that exist and every job is different, so there’s bound to be one out there that scratches an itch for you and you can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)

And this is all assuming you want to work for someone else, you can always start something on the side while keeping another job that pays the bills, or if you have a supportive partner who’s willing to cover the bills while you take you shot at a business. Go start a hardwood furniture business, or find an obscure thing that nobody makes anymore and start making those. Go create an event that people can buy tickets to attend. Open a bar or a store or a pilates studio! Buy an old building on some unfarmable land and create a winery or fish farm or wedding venue! Sell pancakes out of your garage! Paint murals for people! Grow mushrooms to sell at the farmers market! Start a commune or a bus tour company or a bike taxi! Is it hard? Absolutely. Will there be roadblocks and challenges to overcome? Indubitably! But overcoming these challenges is fulfilling in itself and plenty of people start businesses successful enough for them to retire off of (or at least successful enough to sell to someone else who can make it successful enough to retire off of)

I could work in a movie theater or something similar, but then I’m back to making state minimum wage instead the almost double that I’m currently making.

You could own a theatre. You could also create a local film festival, even if that means just booking the community room at the library and screening public domain silent films to start with. Or if you want to make a job out of it, maybe you can snag the screening rights to some indie/deep backlog films and do a traveling film festival, maybe setting up in small towns where there isn’t already a ton going on where you could also get the venue for cheap.

There’s also companies popping up that have bought the rights to reprint deep back catalogue films. Like I recently heard about one that buys the rights to reprint B movies from the 70s and 80s on VHS, so apparently there is a market for that kind of thing too!

I mean one side has literal Nazis, is building detention facilities while sending a poorly militia into cities to arrest and attempt to disappear people without any charges, the other side just wants a half-assed European social democracy (because you know the Democratic party is currently captured and unwilling to make any meaningful change that isn’t incremental and trivial to reverse)

“I’m sure they were just good friends”

I work in IT and run a number of Linux servers and desktops, but my main gaming computer hasn’t run Linux since about 2021. Around mid-2021 I got tired of not playing certain games due to lack of Linux compatibility and realized my Windows skills were slipping so I switched it over to Windows 10

September of 2025 I installed a new SSD into my desktop and installed Bazzite (I have a bad habit of breaking my Linux desktops through too much tinkering, so they accumulate configuration quirks that I can work around but become more and more of headache. I describe it as being like a mechanics car to non-technical users, it works perfectly but you can’t use third gear, you have to cycle the heat before the AC goes and you use the screwdriver in the glove compartment to change the radio station) so immutable seemed like a really safe bet, plus its already preconfigured 80% of the way to how I like things which is closer than other distros

I fully expected to find some key game that I play a lot or software that I rely on wouldn’t work under wine/proton, but everything just kept working perfectly so it’s stuck for over a quarter of a year already. Also I’ve had less problems with KDE than I’ve previously had when running KDE 5+ years ago, so definitely some improvements there

Running Forza Horizon (a historically Xbox-exclusive game that’s still heavily integrated with Windows/Microsoft services) on Linux feels so wrong but it runs flawlessly

Will have to find a web browser based tax software instead of what I’m used to

I just went to a tax preparer this year. Costs about the same and my 2025 taxes are going to be all sorts of fun because I did fun new taxable things like contract work and a Roth conversion that I need to make sure are accounted for correctly. But yeah I just give them the documents and they file it all for me.

Right now might be a little late though. Most tax places will already have their clients for 2025 locked in and very little opportunity to take on more clients

If you’re having OOM issues you might have have good luck enabling ZRAM

On Debian based systems it’s as simple as running sudo apt install zram and rebooting

I generally prefer to manually install and update my own mods so I’ve never tried running a mod manager in Lutris, but generally the thing you want to be mindful of is if you have everything running in the same wine prefix that needs to interact with each other. Each wine prefix is kinda isolated from another, so when you change which wine version (and therefore prefix) launches a given software, it loses all of its stored data from the appdata folder because that was left in the old prefix

Most of a continent is about to see much colder than usual weather. Forecasts where I am are predicting windchills down to -40, and I have a friend north of me who’s looking at windchills down to -60F. I have a coworker in Texas who’s looking at snow and ice in the next few days as well. Tips like this are useful for folks who live in places that don’t get snow and ice

Off the wall idea, but what if you apply a static IP on that network? Then you’ll only have issues when the DHCP server happens to hand out the same IP which you can simply change the IP and have a decent chance of getting a free one

That’s odd because I’ve had a ton of luck adding random crap to Lutris including obscure model railroad software

There was one time years ago I was working on some unholy mess of mods for Transport Fever and the game kept crashing and bringing the whole X session down with it, and instead of just rebooting like a sane person I instead started a new X session on a new terminal session. I think I got up to 4 or 5 dead x sessions before I finally finished sorting out my mods and rebooted to clean it all up

Really just needs one vendor to provide a unified way of configuring and managing a fleet of laptops/desktops. All of the bits exist, just needs someone to bring it all together

That’s kinda the limitation with Cinnamon, it’s not as customizable as it could be.

I wonder if maybe it’s a governor problem. Laptops are often super power limited, sometimes even more so thermally limited, so they rely on increasingly bonkers power profiles to try to balance it, but pegging the laptop at 100% utilization such as while transcoding can still cause it to fall over. Have you played with adjusting the power profile at all?

My other thought is screen tearing and similar. I think Mint still ships with X rather than Wayland and screen tearing is a pretty infamous limitation with Xserver

Vorta only supports SSH and local backup repositories while pika allows SFTP through some kind of compatibility layer with gvfs.

That’s kinda wild given SFTP is just SSH.

If you’re flinging files across the network, rsync is usually a really good option. It’ll typically be run over SSH/SFTP and is capable of resuming if interrupted, verifying the copied files match the original, etc. and rsync can be super fast compared straight SFTP in some cases. In a pinch you can always cobble together a pretty robust backup script purely based off rsync