I wonder if it would help to think back to the first time you littered? When I was 5 or 6, I remember eating a candy and not wanting the wrapper any more. It had to be someone else who saw what I did and pointed out that it isn’t good if we all did this, because then the playground would be all full of trash and we couldn’t play there. I was like, “Oh, I get it.” But if someone hadn’t explained it to me, I think the behavior could have innocently continued for quite some time. I grew up in a very rural place (northern Canada).
“Virus” comes to mind as well as a particularly good showcase of Flash animation. Some of the magic is lost now that Flash is dead and you’re probably going to view the cartoon in a video player, but as originally presented they really pulled off some great interface screws like having Homestar pick apart the links at the bottom.
I really miss the Flash era, it felt so much more creative. Hell just having “cartoon or game” as a sliding scale was cool; Homestar Runner cartoons were all at least slightly interactive in ways no one does anymore for lack of a suitable media.
The former is basically just a screen your phone is casting to. The latter is a lightweight (stripped down) Android fork designed to boot very quickly and do a couple things very well. It probably never really “turns off” since it still has a 12v connection even when the car is off (why your clock doesn’t reset).
Android on your phone is a much more general purpose operating system that runs on a (much more limited) battery. It isn’t designed to be turned on and off frequently.
The people I know in my program (undergrad History) use their computers for little more than Google Chrome (specifically Google’s Office suite), a PDF reader (sometimes also Google Chrome), sometimes Zotero, and sometimes MS Word. We get a lot of Mac’s around here, so one can imagine Microsoft products are not highly relied upon, generally speaking.
Everything’s through the browser nowadays, so I’d say just pick a stable distro, install 2 or three browsers in case something doesn’t work (like Google Docs with Firefox in my experience…), and submit everything as PDF.
Can’t speak much to LibreOffice as I write my papers in Typst (and before that in LaTeX, which got me brownie points with some of the older professors), which I find much faster, easier, and more flexible than WYSIWYG word processors.
I actually switched to Ubuntu full-time way back in 2006 when I went back to school (anthro major), specifically to help me focus when using my computer and not get distracted by playing video games. Of course, nowadays with wine and proton on steam, that might not be as effective. But it worked well for me, never experienced any issues with word docs opening in libre office (or rather open office back then) or vice versa. There was once or twice where I had to use a computer in the lab in the library to run some niche program or another for an assignment, but not a big deal.
I was forced to. I had no money and needed a PC for my studies.
A roommate gifted me his old desktop with OpenSUSE.
For at least 2 days I googled various forms of “how to install programs on Linux” and got more and more frustrated, cause all I found was stuff you had to compile yourself, or things called “packages”. But I didn’t want “packages”, I wanted programs.
On the third day I found the YaST package manager and was immediately blown away by the fact you could search, download and install everything you need without hunting it down on various websites.
That was 20 years ago. Been on Linux ever since.
😄I don’t want packages I want programs. That’s like a Mac user saying I don’t want programs I want applications. Booting up a Mac and saying where’s my god dam exe, why doesn’t anything work.
I had a teacher who was really passionate about Ubuntu and was distributing Ubuntu 5/6 live CDs. I ended up installing it on my laptop. It was a pretty miserable experience. Everything was ugly as hell, configuring the sound card was a pain, Wi-Fi drivers had constant problems, upgrades to the new x.04/x.10 version borked the system 100℅ of the time. Pretty miserable but got the job done.
Nowadays the experience is much, much smoother. Just ensure you don’t need exclusive software.
We installed Slackware. One kid bet me that Linux wouldn’t let him drag his entire drive into the bin to delete. It did, and we all laughed, including the professor - who still gave him the passing grade since he’d seen enough of it working before it went up in flames.
kbin.life
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