Hey dust, I have been using linux for about 24 years ago and I’m gonna explain it to you straight here.

debian is rock solid. It’s great for servers. It’s also great for laptops: That is laptops where you don’t really care about having anything bleeding edge. I need tmux, a few compilers, vim, and a browser. Debian!

I’ve got a kid and get at best 45 minutes per week to code on side projects. My system can never be broken. I use Debian on my Linux laptop and my droplet server. No surprises.

But if you want to occasionally get a brand new desktop environment hot off the presses, Debian‘s gonna work against you. I think Ubuntu mint is great.

Good luck

I’ll bite.

So one way of reading this is that you’re surrounded by incompetents. Early in my career I thought this. As a corollary to Chesterton’s Fence, it turns out I wasn’t so special and most weren’t so dumb. In a high-density area, being truly surrounded by bozos is just unlikely. So my advice here wouldn’t seem to be folly. If one tries several roles and every one is just full of bozos, it suggests that the one is in error.

Another way of reading this is that you are not in a high density area and perhaps the monopoly-oligopoly players who offer the work to which you are called are so few that the incompetent middle management is entrenched in these few spots and you’d love to leave but burning bridges / no proof the grass is greener suggest stay put. But with so few businesses, theoretically they have their pick of market and would not hire bozos. So, again, moving seems viable and not folly.

Lastly perhaps the factor is life/circumstances/education for you. Like if these desired roles require retraining or expensive certification. I feel for you if this is the case. But since you see those skills’ value, perhaps current-job learning/practice opportunities on-the-job could level you up to be able to hop to greener pastures. Most companies etc of even meager size have some tuition assistance program. Maybe that’s your way.

Regardless, this is your one precious life. I hope you’ll find access to your truest calling. It might be harder than what I said: “move” (such dismissive tone probably resultant from the ignorant perspective of the comic), but I’m confident your creativity and capability can point you in a path toward your flourishing.

During the pandemic nadir I kept thinking about “viewing” and “seeing” and Zoom and Gladia.

Panel 4:

“But you inspire 6 people to work at peak capacity so that the team is as effective as 9 people, and they all say you give a shit about them, their growth, and doing the work that actually matters with guidance and appropriate comp adjustment. Be a manager.”

If you work with incompetent middle management, move. When you work for a great manager in a great team, you feel bulletproof.

Cheese

Here’s the biggest reason: we are evolved from savannah primates for whom the ability to make eye contact and hold it was a signal of “you can trust me, I’m not about to bite you.” Paper and pen don’t signal “I have decided to break this evolutionary/social contract” in the same way a phone or open laptop does.

I help mentor a lot of young people in early career and their generation with a phone is an excuse for an x-er/boomer interviewer to punt them waiting to happen. It’s career and comp limiting, right or no.

Also if one finds a taken note is missing something, contact the original party. A conversation that begins with: “you got me thinking about this more deeply and I think I may have missed something…” is the key to mentorship, advocacy, and growth.

In short from a transcoding of bits perspective, other media may be better. But for those they acknowledge human constraint and opportunity a nice notebook and (a cheap shill from me) a Lamy Safari medium nib fountain pen will do you quite well.

The best way to get Linux in the era was to get a box of floppies from a guy at the 2600 meeting. Got Slackware in 93 and a goofy little video game made by some guys up i45 in mesquite called Wolfenstein. Wonder what happened to them.

Shout out to David leisure as Isuzu pitch man in that era

Great share. I was there.

FidoNet, ANSI art, getting phone numbers on newsprint mags at local computer stores, the modem screeches, AT commands, phrack and cult of the dead cow…friends you’d meet at malls and then go to summer concerts with…online was an adjunct to life, not a closed garden overwrite of life itself.