I am spending ever less time on social media.

This is because I have come to specifically distrust SM. Twitter was useful until Musk bought and trashed it. FB was interesting but overfull of people in the USA who thought their country was the only free one in the world and anyone rational wanted to be a US citizen. Not much useful conversation there then.

I commented once just how awful Mrs Thatcher was and the harm she had done to the UK.I had some people try and speak to me like I was 5 and tell me how I was ungrateful for what she had done for us!

X is brimming with tabloid hate press and fake news. No thanks. Its getting harder to find the news. Even the BBC has not recovered from the Conservative donors who were placed in its management. I had hoped that when w got adults in government in July, they might get rid of them but they haven't yet.

With social media so far down the tubes, where can I get my news now?/p

Keeping the home directories in another tree has been a thing for a very long time. I was working with Xenix in the early 1990s with a second hard drive, and kept all the home directories on the external hard drive. When I needed to do an OS reinstall, it just a matter of mounting the external file system on the path. Same would apply if you're using NFS or any other network file system.

Ubuntu LTS has "Pro" offerings that take it out that far, and Windows isn't free, so it seems fair to include their paid expanded support.

The reason I wouldn't use the RHEL/Alma/Rocky is that I am impatient for new features, but if I was a "I don't care I want to run this for 10 years", then I'd run it on my desktop. I think this is mostly the reason enthusiasts dislike them, which is an opposed concern to "not supported long enough". RHEL10 recently released based on Fedora 40, where desktop enthusiasts are running a Fedora edition a whole year newer.

For Fedora, the "click here to upgrade" is pretty similar to the Windows "click here to upgrade" experience. Unless you get adventurous in ways you couldn't have gotten adventurous in Windows.

As a Fedora user, sometimes you have a period of software instability when they push something not yet baked. It may be for a reason, but that reason may be nearly impossible to discern.

It's not news because the community is broadly used to it and they generally accept it as the cost of getting stuff faster.

Fedora is not as bad as it used to be, but they are really aggressive and inflict oddities from time to time.

If I were really bothered, I could go run something extra conservative, like Debian Stable or Alma Linux, but I prefer the fast-ish delivery of Fedora even accepting that sometimes things can go a bit south.

What LTS editions only do 5 years? I just checked SUSE, Ubuntu, and RHEL.

RedHat is up to 13 years, with the the first 5 years being "full" including releasing for brand new hardware and backporting as needed with another 5 years of "you can keep running it on the hardware you have, but we aren't promising support for new hardware" and another available 3 years of paid extension. Note that Windows 10 pretty much went "maintenance" with the release of Windows 11, so the RHEL lifecycle largely imitates the Windows lifecycle.

SUSE is a bit more generous on paper, but roughly this is about all the LTSes.

However day to day users are not interested and go for the options that favor rapid delivery of new capability, so people don't talk about them as much.

What distort? We're running Ubuntu LTS on workstations, and we keep the updates rolling, and have no significant issues. Generally when we want to do feature updates, we don't do in-place upgrades at all, we just build a new image and roll it out. We want complete control over new feature rollouts, including any major new upgrades of key software like LibreOffice.

And honestly, that's pretty much how we were managing Windows prior to beginning the migration. Updates in general are always a risky business, and I've seen upgrades in every OS I've worked with since Windows 3.1 go horribly awry. I've baked Windows systems, Linux systems, BSD systems, and even had to finally give up and reinstall my M1 Mac because the major release upgrade worked about 90%, but there was enough peculiar behavior that it just wasn't worth trying to track down.

In all cases in an enterprise environment, regardless of OS, you don't want feature updates, significant changes to functionality, or installs of major version of updates to software. When it comes to that, you're working in a lab environment, rolling out to a few users to test stability and interoperability, and then pushing them out to all the workstations. This isn't a Linux thing, this is just how an IT department stays sane and doesn't screw up the whole organization's workflow.

There are only a few circumstances I can imagine where LTS support over three or four years would even be desirable, and most of those are pretty niche use cases dealing with specialized equipment or legacy systems. In general, whether it's Linux, BSD, Windows or even MacOS, it's always better to do a full reinstall with the new OS. Heck, by the time Windows Server 2003 went mainstream, only madmen were doing in-place upgrades on domain controllers. The better solution was always to build a new DC and then decommission the old one.

All my worst upgrade disasters in any OS came from in-place upgrades just fucking everything up. At best, it left a lot of old cruft hanging around, at worst it rendered a system almost unusable, and it was usually a bit of both.

The way I'm rolling out Debian and Ubuntu at work these days is just working images. Sometimes there's some funky hardware that requires after I clone an image that needs some intervention, but generally it just works. New images are generated every six months, or when a new release has been tested, rinse and repeat. In the business world you don't give a crap about anything but quick up time, and I have a stack of spares in a closet that get refreshed regularly, and when something blows up, you grab one off the shelf and move on. New OS upgrade, new image.

Exactly. Even if a technology might have a shot at being desirable, I often see seller interests trample the value and then the seller surprised that the customers didn't go for it after they did absolutely nothing to cater to the user base.

One company I worked at had this persistent issue and a strong warning sign was that they just absolutely worshipped the fictional Henry Ford quote about customers just wanting faster horses and the inventor knowing better than the customer about what the customer should want.

It's almost like elections have consequences, and America has elected that it and its businesses are going to be treated like the plague. Well, even more than that, even visiting the US is dropping, and now with US Marines on city streets in a major US city, well, fuck that banana republic. I will never enter the US again.

I've had rendering nightmares in Word, including docx files. There are most certainly version and rendering issues in Word just like any other word processor. It gets really horrendous with tables and frames, particularly when they are used as some sort of typesetting system, at which point try to open up on a different version of Word than the documented was created on, and it can turn into a mess.

I can get native Zoom apps on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS and Linux. It isn't perfect, and they've added a lot of cruft, but all in all, I've had less problems than I've had with Teams.

It's not like the writing in the original Star Wars film was all that great. Guiness's dialogue was cheesy enough that he begged Lucas to kill his character off (and Lucas, to his credit, found a way to get Guiness into two more films).

But if I were making fun of the third trilogy at this point, it wouldn't be so much about the bad writing (though in general it's bloody awful), but the almost complete lack of any kind of plotting.

The Producers? Young Frankenstein? Blazing Saddles? High Anxiety?

I'm not sure there's a funnier scene in any movie ever made in history than Springtime For Hitler (the reaction shots in that scene are the best I've ever seen in a movie), with the possible exception of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster doing a song and dance number to Putting On The Ritz.

For me, at least, Mel Brooks is probably the pinnacle of comedy filmmaking.

The only one I can think of is John Candy (which is a big hole), but Rick Moranis has been retired for many years now, and he's rebuffed most attempts to get him in front of a camera again.

And that underlies the reality of WYSIWYG, that there are limits to what any word processor can actually do to guarantee formatting and fixed placement. It's why Tex/LaTeX and PDF were invented to begin with, and why there's really a point at which trying to force any WYSIWYG word processor to behave that way is going to lead to fragile misbehaving documents that fall apart. As a very good example, the use of tables and frames in documents (both docx and odt) to guarantee the positioning of various elements creates can quickly lead to documents so fragile that any attempt to update styles causes havoc.

I'm working my way through some biology and general science courses right now in my spare time, and I'm seriously looking at re-familiarizing myself with LaTeX to produce reports and papers, because the amount of work I've had to do to get diagrams and images to stay put, and to break my cardinal rule relying solely on styles for formatting makes me think the kind of work I'm doing is much more in typesetting than in word processing.