I had Zorin on my own computer for a while and really liked it, but it was crashing every few days and I decided I didn’t want to put up with that. I’ll give it another try one of these days - the issue may have been resolved, or my hardware my be different by then. But I won’t use it on a computer whose user can’t do their own tech support.
98% of the time when they’ve had a problem with Windows, they just needed to restart the computer. (It has been impossible to convince them that computers need a full shutdown periodically, and Windows doesn’t cope with ‘always on’.)
When it’s something more than that, they either have to find someone closer to help or wait until we visit. Doing tech support long-distance for people who can’t adequately describe the problem is a losing game.
There were some broken package dependencies which I had to fix manually (a non-issue on my own device; a major red flag for this device). And after one set of updates, it needed about three tries to boot successfully (requiring hopping into recovery mode to smooth out the wrinkle - again, a non-issue if it were my own device, but…).
As best I can tell at the moment, it’s working fine with Mint installed. My concern is what happens next time something is updated or installed and I’m not there to resolve an issue.
Cats aren’t pack animals, but they do socialise with humans, other cats, and other animals. They don’t all have the same personality and some will tend to be more social than others.
In general, I would say that if a cat normally has human company most of the day (e.g. a human who doesn’t work or works from home), human company can be enough (circumstances vary). But in general, if the human(s) are gone a lot of the time then it can be lonely for a single cat. In that case it’s worth getting them a four-footed companion.
We had a cat who preferred having us to herself rather than sharing us with another cat. But we could see that she got lonely when we had to leave her by herself, so it seemed better that she had a companion cat even if she didn’t want a friend.
At our current house, the yard is open and various neighbourhood cats will come into the space. Our boy accepts two of them. I don’t know if they are “friends”, but they come to visit and he’s chill with them. Any other cat coming into the yard, he tries to fight off. Some fascinating cat politics going on.
So I’m an American expat living in Australia. Australia has had the option to file directly to ATO, electronically, longer than I’ve been here. (Google suggests since 1999? So, more than 20 years.) It’s an easy process if you have a straightforward tax return.
It never ceases to amaze me how far behind the rest of the world USA is in some things that just seem like really obvious solutions. Like… Why wouldn’t the IRS want to get tax returns filed directly from the tax payers, skipping the middleman? At least for simple returns. More simplicity, less confusion all around if they get everyone onto the same system. Less paper to wade through, by significantly reducing paper returns. Etc.
It just seems like such a no-brainer. But I guess that’s why it doesn’t work in the USA. >.<
I’m currently playing around with Debian on an old laptop of mine. If I can get the setup to a place where it feels sufficient for me to take my hands off, it could be the answer for this other computer.
(Thanks for DE recommendations. It does my head in trying to keep straight which ones are suited to which uses.)