I use Mint and so does my wife.

Two laptops that Win11 doesn't want to support, but we need them both and we don't have the budget to replace them. No problems on mine, but the wife's HP has some issues with closing the lid and I haven't found a good solution to that yet.

Sleep doesn't work because on wakeup the wifi and bluetooth are both dead; bluetooth doesn't matter but the wifi's needed for the internet and the only way to get it back up is to reboot the machine because it insists there's a hardware failure and refuses to accept that there isn't. I've even tried modprobe-ing the network stack but it has to be a full system restart (warm restart, not power cycle).

Hibernate threatens something nasty, can't remember what offhand but I'm not even considering it.

I don't want a lid shut to mean shutdown because shutting the lid shouldn't mean losing work. So I'm left with the only remaining option that shutting the lid does nothing, and the LT stays on, but then if she puts something on top of the LT as she's prone to do, some stuff can end up in a weird state, like taskbar icons following the mouse around even though they haven't been clicked on, and there's no way to stop them doing that without rebooting. I'm not sure how that happens; my hypothesis is that the keyboard and/or trackpad get activated, but no amount of me pressing on the lid in various places reproduces the problem.

Other than that she's had no problem adapting to Linux Mint. Everything's where she expects it. I've had to do some command-line jiggerypokery for various bits and bobs but a bit of DDG-ing finds that easily enough.

What a shame. Used to be such a great place. And to be fair some of the wider StackExchange communities still are (the PowerShell crowd stick out in my memory as being a friendly bunch).

But people need a place to be able to answer their dumb questions and have someone be kind to them. SO's insistence on being the primary repository of useful knowledge and having that principle take priority over user experience is what killed it. I tried suggesting they implemented a 2-tier question/answer system, where "quality" questions got promoted to the repository and the rest didn't get indexed, but it got marked as a duplicate of something it wasn't a duplicate of, so that was the end of that.

What StackOverflow also fails to understand is that as technology moves on, the "right" answer changes. So an answer that got 20 billion upvotes in 2003 could well be completely useless by now (heck, you don't even have to go back that far).

There are a few basic things you need to sort out first. Keep it as simple as possible so start monochrome, and just add functionality to draw dots on a canvas. You'll need file handling capability almost immediately so figure out a way to (de-)serialise the information to recreate the artwork to read and write it to a file.

That'll keep you going for a few weeks, unless you're vibing it ~~in which case months~~ by which point you might have had other ideas of features to add, assuming you already know how to write GUI applications.

What kind of drawing? Art or technical?

Not for me (4GB Pi5). I watch a lot of full screen video and Firefox just can't handle it at all even if it's the only application running and with only one tab. I tried all the "fixes". In the end I gave up, tried a few, and settled on Brave, which still gets a bit confused coming out of full screen which "F11 F11 restart" fixes.

We must be careful.

I usually drink coffee so the water goes in before the teabag, although to be fair the teabag never goes in.

I use the Logitech K120. It has all the right keys in all the right places and doesn't piss around with useless "media functions" on the F-keys making those the default instead of F1-F12.

Programming is about thinking, not typing, so you really don't need anything fancy. I've tried a couple of gaming keyboards only to find they're flaky af and ended up in the WEEE bin far too quickly for their price.

It doesn't meet your requirements of being wireless and Bluetooth though, but on the other hand it doesn't have stupid lights all over it and doesn't randomly stop working just because I forgot to plug it in so there's that.

Better: I've encountered a pair of booleans that appear to be exact opposites but aren't. To protect the guilty I've changed the words: isOpen and isClosed, when one is true the other is false and vice versa, EXCEPT that while something can't be both open and closed at the same time, it is possible for something to be not open and not closed.

So what's the tipping point?

Not during "Embrace", obviously. This is the phase where their sheep's clothing is pretty intact, they're adding code and investment to the public repos and keeping theirs "mostly" in sync with some minor interop problems but "only because Lemmy isn't Meta and those issues aren't important".

Not during the first part of "Extend", either. "These are features that only Meta users could use anyway".

The second phase of Extend is a lot more insidious. The stitching between the fleece parts is starting to wear. The minor incompatibilities are starting to look a bit less minor. "You wouldn't defederate for those would you? Look at all this other amazing stuff we've given you. We totally promise pinky swear no our fingers aren't crossed behind our backs to fix them" and yet despite their vast dev resources they never somehow quite manage to resolve them "satisfactorily" and "we're still working on them".

Then while we're still being all hopeful and reassured it's all OK, the third E switch is thrown. The fleeces drop off revealing the slavering wolf. The ads now clutter Lemmy and overwhelm the content like they do on Facebook. The previously optional subscriptions now paywall off everything but the most basic features. Zuck phones Slarti and buys a new planet. Now do we defederate? Oh we can't. Everything breaks. Dammit we should have listened to VaxHacker and given them the boot at the start.

The reason we give them the boot now is because we know their plan. Zuck is here because he wants money. He's not interested in fede-wotsit. Lemmy? Isn't he that Motorhead guy? EEE has begun. The sooner we kill it the easier it'll be. "We can give it up at any time" - yeah, like those druggies and alcoholics that somehow never quite manage to. The best way to get off drugs is to not get on them in the first place.

Yes, because we already know exactly how this is going to go. Their need to constantly make more and more money means that we know TODAY what is going to happen: EEE. We know this because of Fark, Digg, now Reddit, and to a lesser extent Slashdot and StackOverflow. The profiteers aren't interested in federating, or having well-run communities; they're interested in money and nothing else. We know for an absolute fact that Meta needs to make money and they're only interested in the Fediverse because they see money in it (quite simply: because if they didn't they wouldn't be).

I completely get "we shouldn't strike pre-emptively" but if you wait until the third E it's too late. But we already know it's not pre-emptive because they've already enshittified their own communities. Ever tried scrolling through Arsebook recently without FBP and uBlock Origin? Article - article - ad. Article - article - ad. One item in fucking THREE is crap you're not interested in. That's what they want to force onto the Fediverse. We know it today. We have seen what they have done to their own stuff. So when they come sniffing round here we are completely justified in slamming the door in their face even if they promise to be nice this time, because we already know what they want.

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it," and you don't have to look far. The influx of people into the Fediverse is directly caused by the profit-motivated enshittification of Reddit. If we don't draw the line here then we have to retreat back from Lemmy and invent something else, which they will then want to enshittify.

Along with LemmX and Millemmials I suppose?