(Most) North Americans are the epitome of wasteful consumerism, even more than their economic kin in other global north countries (but sadly not by that much). They succumb like flies to company deals and propaganda that incentivizes throwing away functional stuff and replacing it with new shiny thing XYZ in ever decreasing intervals. Vance Packard's 1960s book still being to the point. If environmental preservation is a concern to you or other reader, don't incentivize an unnecessary tech and use your smartphone (that is a necessity) until it breaks beyond repair or usability (and buy an actually strong protection to increase the interval). I still use an iPhone 6S, and it works perfectly well for smartphone tasks (there is even functioning bank apps. security updates still appear once in a while, and bank apps are protected by the banks anyways. if you feel unsafe using banks in an old smartphone, create a 2nd bank as a ''street bank'' for daily tasks keeping only a low amount of money, and keep the money in a primary bank to be used via internet).

Imagine if we could just flash a functional android ROM on it, that hardware still is great and could last decades (replacing pieces once in a while). Anyway, the mainstream tech industry is definitely an enemy of sustainability, don't 'buy' the green-washing.

Android still has F-droid and FOSS alternatives to mostly everything, while iPhone is walled garden 101.

Console Gaming is a lot less worse than Nintendo, but if you (or someone else) wants to be 'pure', they are also not recommended. Consoles are locked-down PCs controlled by the companies, not you, and they abuse their captive consumers by charging multiplayer online, having less promotions (and getting worse with time at that, by eliminating the physical disks), demanding subscriptions with ever more grades and higher prices, tying games to a digital account they can revoke, and not letting the users use the hardware as they see fit in general. PC gaming avoids most or all these issues, with steam excelling in everything (sans the digital license tied to the account, but even that is mitigated because their DRM is weak, and games frequently are found on the high seas if needed), and GoG (and itch.io, etc) respecting completely its customers (offline instalers, completely at your control).

The code of the last version must be available to find, it probably runs most of the games. Yuzu and Riujinx legacy must be continued, but on other places, not corporate controlled ones (Both countries and platforms).

Germany took ~150 years of Lebensreform movements (which itself had Freikörperkultur as one line of thought and action among many) to get there. As the articles mention, things that contributed a lot included the fact that they still had living traditions of public bathing in sparsely populated areas (add Scandinavia and rural areas to the mix), and that Germany was a very industrial and educated country, that had the infrastructure to generate what were essentially academics in academical circles theorizing and practicing all of these ideas first, and there was still a strong memory of pre-industrial life in general (that these movements saw as better in those lines of way of life, to react to the then novelties of industrial and urban living). How would we translate that german social environment to places and societies a lot different ? example, much poorer with less intelligentsia, no prestige or memory of premodern living, multicultural multiethnic societies with low cohesion, with outright hostility to all these nature-weirdos that want veganism, nakedness, primitivism, etc while the current media landscape is dominated by hollywood idolizing private wealth, luxury and puritanism (like the amount of sex in Marvel films, after Iron Man 1).

In case of zombie apocalypse, your best friends will probably be a bicycle (to get away from the zombies in almost any terrain and road condition, not be without industrial fuel the next day, and be able to do needed repairs with rough tools and scraps that can be found), a hunting knife, and maybe a crossbow if you can find one (weapons that can be sharpened and reused, and crossbow allowing random joes to just make piercing sticks (again with scraps that can be found anywhere) that work like an arrow, again weapons that do not depend on industrial infrastructure that will not be available anymore). Games that need electricity would be extremely hard to use, it's better to buy card decks that have multiple rule sets for different games to play, like french decks and tarot, maybe a tabletop set that also has multiple games.

What kind of task made you use the shell in Linux Mint (and i only know Mint after 2021) ? Was it a common task a regular person would need to do, or was it a geek or pro task that regular people would not even know it exists ? I installed Nvidia drivers with a click-install GUI easier than the windows equivalent, the appstore that is only rivaled by Apple had every debian and flatpak program i searched, and all the configurations i could ever tweak are in the configurations manager (unlike the current Windows mess of control panel and worse control panel).

May i suggest for both of you to try Linux Mint (Regular Edition, XFCE MATE or Cinnamon) ? It is the only linux distro that has never failed me once, after also getting into unfixable messees with majaro, arch, endeavour, and also regular debian and LMDE not even booting up on my PC. It uses the Ubuntu base and several of its programs (like the extensive hardware compatibility and system stuff) but takes away the bad stuff in it (like the SNAPs, that loads of people hate both for not being FOSS and to replace the regular debian and flatpak, and give a worse performance in several cases like Firefox). I also agree every linux distro sans Mint is too rough for now, but Linux Mint is the magnum opus of linux, is already click-click-install, beginner-friendly and stable like rock.

My modded Nintendo 3DS with emulators. It is a heavenly beast that runs every Nintendo game released before the Wii and Switch.

Ubuntu, because it's the base for my Linux Mint XFCE.

IF between the 2, Ubuntu in Xubuntu or Lubuntu.

It's mostly an aesthetic choice, a choice between desktop environments.

Desktop environment (DE) is just the visual bells and whistles that you use to navigate the PC, like that quick animation when you minimize or maximize a program (Apple loves this), a start menu that has cute icons for each program and turns blue when you pass the mouse over it (or a start menu that is just a raw list of program names), etc.

Mint Cinnamon uses a DE that looks like Windows 7 reborn, Mint XFCE uses a DE that looks like Windows XP reborn, and Mint MATE uses a DE that looks like Windows Vista reborn.

People will tell you that these DEs will have a slight difference in consumption of RAM, where the most 'shiny' DEs will consume more RAM (XFCE<MATE<Cinnamon) by virtue of having more bells and whistles and some different programs that execute the same function, but the difference is irrelevant in practice (unless you are using a 2gb or less PC, where each 50mb of RAM counts). So it's mostly what you fancy to look at. I just like the old-school visual of XFCE.

You are still a beginner, and in that case almost everyone rightfully says to go to regular Mint only, instead of LMDE or any other distro. A beginner will not know how to evaluate the situation in case of troubles or follow any complex instruction (like anything involving the terminal that is not completely copy-paste). Mint is fully click-click-install now, something that no other distro has equaled. Linux Mint, regular edition, is widely compatible with all sorts of hardware, that in other distros give black screens or esoteric deep s**t at install or later, which is a show stopper for beginners just making the transition.

I myself am not a beginner anymore, and every other distro (save Mint) has failed me at some point. Debian, LMDE and Sparky Linux have not even booted in one notebook, Bazzite (Fedora) has after a few weeks given me a black screen in a desktop pc with Nvidia that i could not solve, and Arch - Endeavour OS - Manjaro have simply collapsed after a few months (probably by using AUR, which is supposed to be their main advantage, but i could not even discover the source of the problem, in each). Everything was restored in order after a blanck install of Linux Mint XFCE, which is the only distro i use now.

His-Her complaint seems to be somewhat popular, lots of obligatory hand-holding is present when options that turned it off would be as simple as a few lines of code, and they ruin the slow stages that require thinking or the fast action ones.

just make it easily repairable by third stores with minimally qualified people and cheap tools, like digital watches already were and are. Or, make a full collecting and recycling tax to be paid by those uncaring clients.

Sure, China will certainly collapse, as they have said since the 1990s.

For managing a library of videogames on the desktop, including integration with all available stores and local installs, there is Playnite for Windows and Lutris for Linux.

The Peertube protocol developers should develop a central hub webpage space for newcomers, allow accounts there to follow all channels in every instance (and to only follow and block specific instances too), and then develop apps for smart tvs. It's the only realistic FOSS alternative to Youtube i can think of, and i dont know why the first point is still non existent (having already subscribed to several channels in 3 instances using separate accounts).

It is unintentionally correct: Google Play, and its contents, is corporate malware, people should use F-Droid to get safer and free (as in freedom) apps. Neostore is a nice app to access it.

There are people here not from western europe or north america, we felt all of that and beyond with capitalism too. Do you think Asia and Africa, who received aid and support from the soviet union to free themselves from capitalist Europeans will fall for that ? Where did you arrive at ''multiple famines that killed into the hundreds of millions" ? Even the soviet famines of 1930s and chinese great famine 'only' killed at maximum intervals of estimation 9 and 50 millions each, and this article over-viewing all atrocities maxes at 150 million, with a low 10-20 million estimation, not hundreds of millions in famines alone.

Are you paraphrasing that 'Black Book of Communism' shtick ? It is a propaganda tool not valid in actual academic research, even by liberals that are not fraudsters, because the author twists every single communist countries-adjacent deaths as ''mass killing caused by communism'', including brilliant takes like total number of abortions (ex: France, that practices 250.000 abortions per year must be enraged with a capitalist regime that killed 5 million people only in the 21st century !) and all WW2 eastern front deaths (so both the nazi germans and allies that invaded USSR and USSR soldiers and civilians killed count as 'killed by communism').

Last but not least, the USSR had much higher GDP per capita and living standards than the average third world capitalist country (which is where the demographic majority of capitalist people live), so even if the USSR could not equate Switzerland, they achieved a good quality of life better than the world average.

The first ~30 min was a very explicit meta commentary inside the film about the current film industry...