xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

You’re thinking of an “educated bed.”

tumeric

*Turmeric. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen someone forget the first R I’d have like three nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but still kinda interesting.

Open, or standards-compliant local-only gear is the way to go for smart home stuff IMHO. Never had a problem with a Zigbee, Matter, or ESPHome device suddenly deciding it would stop working because manufacturer said so.

One of the best things about having an instant pot is the ease of making refried beans from scratch. They’re fairly low effort, and so so much better (not to mention cheaper).

Have you encountered modern shifters? They’re fairly involved.

Electronic shifting, hydraulic brakes, liberal use of sealed cartridge bearings, carbon fiber parts requiring strict torque specs…these are definitely different than 70’s friction shift ten-speed bikes.

Or, they’re about to collect their paycheck from the photoshoot they just participated in.

I know the “attack helicopter” bit is a transphobic trope, but given how hard those fans are probably working, I think this computer might actually identify as one.

(If this comment is offensive I can remove it/mod can obviously remove it — not trying to be a dick!)

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).

Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.

AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.

You mentioned ham radio — definitely fun! It’s a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF (“walkie talkie”-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power (“QRP”) it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup…

There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.

Good luck!

Deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

You can have a lot of smart functionality and remain local-only (e.g., Home Assistant). All my smart devices are on their own VLAN with no Internet access — if something breaks it’s not the cloud’s fault, it’s mine.

Blender has entered he chat (unless things have changed since I used it last).

I prefer the phrase “testicular manifold.”

We had kids — we wanted to make friends in our 30s, so we just made the friends. Problem solved.

(In all seriousness, your friend — or at least, acquaintance — group explodes when you have daycare/kid activities.)

Newer macOS is not Unix certified.

It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.

Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.

To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.