Moreover, people who give Linux a trial, they wish for something different.

Says who? I think most people who give Linux a trial, they wish for Windows, but without the all the bullshit.

What I’m afraid of is newbies who get Gnome as the default without knowing any better, without even knowing what a DE is or that there’s more than one. And when they find it weird and difficult to learn, they’re not going to think, “Gnome is weird and difficult to learn, I should try a different DE.” – they’re going to think, “Linux is weird and difficult to learn, I should go back to Windows.”

It’s just a couple steps away from calling themselves the Democratic Republic of America.

They would NEVER call themselves anything that has the word ‘Democrat’ within it.

Hello, I’m here for my abuse appointment?

Oh, it looks like you’re already busy.

It’s fairly common slang among people in the military. With “going to play in the sandbox” being a euphemism for a deployment in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Very accurate depiction of the attractiveness of most military spouses.

A lot of them joined during the Biden administration.

People at the neck gusher memorial be like, “Hey, man. I was paid to show up and stand around for a few hours. Nobody said anything about cleaning. Cleaning costs extra.”

If you’re looking for LOTR pickup lines, look no further than:

“You will taste man-flesh!”

What would be a better starter DE then?

Literally any other DE. Throw a dart at a bunch of DE logos pasted to the wall, and you’ll hit one that’s better for newbies than Gnome.

(And no, Gnome is not intuitive. You said yourself that using Gnome requires you “just learn to do things differently”. If it was intuitive, you wouldn’t need to learn it, and it wouldn’t feel ‘different’.)

Since all your examples of how intuitive Gnome is involve the same settings menu in the top right corner … is that settings menu in the top right corner labeled at all? Or is intuition the ONLY way to know it’s the settings menu? You know, maybe I’m starting to understand the disconnect here. When I say something is intuitive, I mean it’s where you’d naturally expect it and does what you expect it to do. But when Gnome people call something “intuitive”, I’m starting to suspect they say that because using intuition is the only way to figure out the interface. You just have to guess what that vague icon does…

Not really. Along most major roads, if trees are close enough to even potentially be a problem, they will be trimmed by road crews.

It’s not because they get hit by trucks, it’s because they’re deliberately trimmed back to keep the road clear.

Really hard to build an empire without it.

Because to have an empire, you have to rule over a lot of people. Many of those people would rather not be ruled by you. If you want to force them to accept it anyway, you’re going to need some of that genocide, slavery, and especially bloodshed.

Though, I suppose, maybe 2/3 of those aren’t really necessary.

• Genocide probably isn’t absolutely necessary to empire-building. Definitely still have to kill lots of people, but there’s no particular reason you need to do so on the basis of race or ethnicity. (Though if you count cultural genocide as well, that may very well be necessary to build an empire. Difficult to bring diverse peoples under one banner without suppressing their cultural differences.)

• Slavery is a big probably. It certainly does help – after all, your growing empire will need lots of labor, and it’s unlikely you can afford to pay the going market rate for it. Plus, if you don’t use slavery, you’ll probably be out-competed by other potential empires that are using slavery and/or slavery-adjacent labor practices. But I suppose it’s not technically absolutely necessary. Theoretically, at least, you could build an empire without slavery.

I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too,

You could, and it would be very simple to do so.

1: Take all the food you’d eat for, say, a week. Absolutely everything.

2: Blend it. Maybe add some extra vitamins to make up for the ones that will be lost due to processing.

3: Dehydrate it. (To make it more compact and less likely to spoil.)

4: Compress it into pellets.

Done. You have now created ‘human food’.

Tally ho!

When they hide in a bunker, just bury the bunker. Pour concrete over the entrance.

I should practice building a trebuchet…

but I use it on Windows at work also.

Huh… And here I was, never even considering that somebody may have ported Kate to Windows. I should try it, for the rare instance I’m editing something on Windows!

when I want something I can paste into on the screen right now as Kate loads a little slowly

Fun fact I just learned recently: If you have text in your clipboard, you can paste that directly into the file manager (or the desktop background). It will prompt you for a filename, and then create a file with the pasted text in it.

If all you want to do is paste some text, you can actually do that without using any text editor at all.

Just because it has a different workflow that big players implanted in people, Linux needs to match that?

For newbies? Yes. SO MUCH YES.

I don’t care if you want to use Gnome on a distro for people who want weird and different. But for any mainstream distro targeted toward newbies, Gnome should not be the default DE. Precisely because it requires a lot of additional learning to use the DE, in addition to learning to use Linux.