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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I used Windows growing up, switched to Linux in highschool on my personal machines, and was forced to use Mac for nearly 10 years at work. In my experience, they all have problems, and the worst part is always early on. After you’ve used them for a while and have gotten familiar/comfortable, the problems get easier to deal with, and switching back (or on to something new) becomes more daunting/uncomfortable than dealing with what you have. So in that sense, yes, it will get easier.

    Also, as hardware ages, you often see better support (though laptops can be tricky, as they are not standardized).

    Keep in mind, when you use Windows or Mac, you’re using a machine built for that OS and (presumably) supported by the manufacturer for that OS (especially with custom drivers). If you give Linux the same advantage (buy a machine with Linux pre-installed, or with Linux “officially supported”), you’re much more likely to have a similar, stable experience.

    Also, I’ve had better stability with stock Ubuntu than its derivatives (Pop!_OS and Mint). It might be worth trying an upstream distro, to see if you have better stability.


  • Having daily driven Windows (~6 years growing up), MacOS (8+ years for work), Linux (~18 years on personal and (some) work machines), and ChromeOS (~2 years, on a cheap Chromebook used while I was traveling places I didn’t want to take an expensive machine), if my options were Windows, MacOS, or ChromeOS, I would 100% take ChromeOS. Even on cheap hardware, it was a better user experience than the others… Though I will caveat that with: when I had to do work that required heavy lifting, I remoted into my Linux desktop. But that was a hardware limitation, rather than a software limitation.

    For people who know what they’re doing, I recommend traditional Linux. For those who don’t, I recommend ChromeOS. Mac and Windows are both also run by mega corps, they’re all spying on users… at least ChromeOS is performant and stable.








  • Worth noting is that “good” database design evolved over time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization). If anything was setup pre-1970s, they wouldn’t have even had the conception of the normal forms used to cut down on data duplication. And even after they were defined, it would have been quite a while before the concepts trickled down from acedmemia to the engineers actually setting up the databases in production.

    On top of that, name to SSN is a many-to-many relationship - a single person can legally change their name, and may have to apply for a new SSN (e.g. in the case of identity theft). So even in a well normalized database, when you query the data in a “useful” form (e.g. results include name and SSN), it’s probably going to appear as if there are multiple people using the same SSN, as well as multiple SSNs assigned to the same person.