And he also is overwhelmed by needing to do things in life but not knowing where to start.

You’re a human and you need someone to validate you. I can’t do that from a keyboard, but I can offer an internet hug.

There’s a lot of good advice here. I have a son not too different in age than you. Your post made me want to give you a long hug. I’m sure you have many things about you that are assets and you haven’t had anyone in your life to help you find them.

As others have said, you sound smarter than you think you are, and your writing is good!

Small steps, and celebrate the small victories. Make one little thing better about yourself or your life every day. No matter how small. And be proud of yourself when you’ve done so.

Go take the good advice from others, but here’s a Dad Hug™.

Hey you got what you wanted, and you got to post a lengthy manifesto about it. I don’t feel obligated to give you more of my time than I already have.

Only in a two-party system.

So you mean - like the system this election took place within?

For the love of all that is holy, do not assume that they will figure out everything you just typed above from the fact that you didn’t vote for them.

I don’t actually agree with your choice, but I do agree with this:

The Dems can be better, but they choose not to.

So please, if you have convinced yourself that withholding one vote out of tens of millions will somehow send them the message you are trying to send, please also convince yourself that it would be even more effective to drop them a line and let them know how you feel in explicit detail.

https://democrats.org/contact-us/

Same message for everyone else who chose a protest vote on Tuesday. It’s all great to feel like you did the right thing, but maybe now question whether your message will actually be received, and be sure that it does. Otherwise you put Trump in for literally nothing.

It’s OK, your explanation is not required.

And half of it is either not true for me personally, based on some hefty assumptions even if applied generally, etc…

I’m sure all the folks who were quick to ignore or dismiss their clarification of the packaging issue at the time will be just as quick to make comments like these as they were to skewer them then.

You’re getting very different sorts of Democrat mailers than I am then

Yeah but (IME) the Democrat version is essentially: No one will know if you vote Kamala, even your likely abusive maga spouse. (Edit- https://www.salon.com/2024/10/31/it-is-so-disastrous-maga-men-are-freaking-out-that-wives-may-be-secretly-voting-for-kamala-harris/)

The R version is apparently: Those of you who didn’t vote will be up against the wall if Kamala gets in because it will be your fault. Busybody neighbors are important to ensure Trump gets in again, we’re watching you.

Was a Gnome user until Gnome 3.

Since Plasma 5, I use KDE Plasma.

I’m just going to share my unvarnished opinions here, I clearly understand that Gnome users feel differently, and that’s okay.

• Gnome 3 performance was objectively worse on every bit of hardware I tried than Plasma. (Unfortunately I had functional gripes with Plasma 4 so couldn’t use it.)
• The years of faffing about I had trying to be happy with Gnome 3 and trying to use other alternatives until Plasma 5 was ready pretty much convinced me of this:
  • Gnome devs care more about achieving their vision of how a desktop should be used than they do about accommodating users who might feel differently. This is my perception, and it’s a deeply held opinion. No matter how strongly you feel I’m wrong, you aren’t going to change my mind. You can come at me if you want, but it’s going to bear no fruit.
  • KDE devs have a vision, but place nearly equal importance on ensuring their users can make different choices if they choose. If this isn’t true, they do a damn good job of pretending it is, and that’s good enough for me. 🙂
• I’m unhappy with the degree to which it appears the Gnome team has actively worked against the ability for users to easily customize, and with various feature removals that at this point are so far in my past that I probably don’t remember the specific things that pissed me off, but I remember their explanations for feature removals being salt in an open wound every last time I cared enough to investigate their stated reasons.

Plasma 6 does everything I want the way I want. I have loaded it (and Plasma 5) on very low end and very high end hardware and found it performant and functional on both, consistently.

You’ll note I don’t claim it to be the best. There are folks out there for whom the Gnome vision happens to be how they like to work, or who aren’t bothered by whatever hoops you have to jump through currently to customize a Gnome environment, and I’m sincerely happy for those people. For them, Gnome is the best.

There are lots of other DEs and of course tiling WMs exist, but it takes me no time at all to have a fresh plasma install working the way I want my computer to work and looking the way I want it to look, and thus I literally have zero complaints. So for the past few years I haven’t even looked at any alternatives. If there’s ever a time that I don’t find the desktop product itself, and the KDE development team’s approach to desktop development, to be absolutely perfect fits for me, I’ll look elsewhere - but honestly probably not at Gnome.

Edit: Disregard my original reply, updated today and now it works again lol!

It launches for me (and I am in a plasma-wayland session FWIW), and it loads the thumbnails for all videos with no problem. When I click a video as if to play it, it appears to load up the main page for that video complete with play button, but nothing at all happens when I click the play button. Along the way are various api errors from youtube, but I think some of those came in even when things were working for me.

Basically I can get this far for any video:

Thank you! I actually tried setting the invidious options yesterday before making that post, thinking I might need to use that instead of localapi. But as you have predicted, no dice.

Edit - works fine after updating today lol!

Freetube on desktop Linux hasn’t worked for me for a long time - but that doesn’t seem to be the case for most people. Any tips regarding settings? I’d say it’s been at least 3 or 4 months since I could reliably use it.

Overdrive is the one I usually hear about, but in googling Libby it seems they are related.

https://help.libbyapp.com/en-us/6251.htm

https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4477058367895-About-the-Libby-app

https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017677053-Borrow-eBooks-from-the-public-library-using-your-Kobo-eReader

Well that does sound pretty cool, I might have to take a closer look when I’m ready for another purchase.

I’ve looked into those other brands but not recently enough to provide any meaningful comparison. (though I have this feeling that “remarkable is overpriced” is something I’ve heard a lot, but I could be wrong)

I’ve personally owned the Kobo Glo, Glo HD, and Libra 2.

For most of their devices (I can’t speak for current models one way or the other) you can swap out key bits of the software and enhance functionality via various hacks/mods. A lot of that is documented here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=223

You can also open them up and replace a standard SD card to boost storage capacity. (Again, I know this to be true at least through the Libra 2, I do not know about more recent models.)

The thing I got the most use from in the past was being able to swap out the sdcard on my Glo and Glo HD, but some folks really swear by the other various mods. I don’t have any complaint with the default reader software on the Kobo, so haven’t messed with swapping that out.

I have not messed with the SD card on the Libra 2 for two reasons - apparently doing so will mess up the waterproofing, and also because I’ve found 32GB to be sufficient for my purposes.

Kobo, folks. I’ve been there through three generations of devices. No regrets. Fairly hackable, sideload friendly, competitively priced.