Fuckin hell. I’m Autistic, but I’m not like that. Can’t claim Autism for being a gobshite.

Sounds like you’re lucky enough to not have any sensory problems - you probably don’t get overwhelmed by textures, flavours or smells. Not everyone is like that. You also don’t seem to have any particular cultural or ethical concerns about your food choices. My family is vegan and very neurodivergent; none of us would ever consider steak or shrimp, for ethical reasons, and most of us have texture and flavour sensitivities that mean that certain foods are off limits for some of us. We generally buy within those parameters, but some of us really like things others really hate, so cooking can be a nightmare. In many cases, it’s the texture of food that causes this - often borderline textures going from firm to soft, too granular, “wrong” like soft when should be crunchy etc.

But I bet you have some things you wouldn’t try, based on cultural or texture preferences, which some people love. What about…

• Soft biscuits (cookies) - baked crunchy, but have gone damp and soft?
• Dry, stale bread - baked soft, but just dried out and stale?
• Witchetty grubs - moth larvae from Australia?
• Dog meat, eaten in some Asian countries?
• Fermented shark meat, stinky and rank, eaten in some Nordic states?
• Reindeer poo - traditional Finnish cuisine sometimes uses it?
• Natto - stringy, slimy soya beans fermented by a bacteria, very strong flavour, popular in Asia, especially Japan?
• Tempeh - soya beans colonised by a particular edible mould fungus, eaten widely in Asia?
• Tofu - bean curd in various textures, but very little flavour, eaten widely by vegans and in Asia?
• Furry tofu - tofu colonised by another edible mould fungus, eaten widely in Asia?

Can relate, it’s heart-rending. Had to do the same with my 18 year old mackerel tabby, Macro, about a month ago. It hurts so much, but it’s the kindest thing to do when they aren’t going to recover. Solidarity.

Me. I am typing this without looking at the keyboard. Learnt at college on an old school electric typewriter as part of my computer science course in the mid 1980s.

Not going to happen. :-D

Yes as far as I’ve found so far, the features track quite well, and I’m really aiming to get proficient with the standard interface. I’ve found a few minor differences, but I tried stock Mint (which is Ubuntu 20.04 based) for a while, and I didn’t want to go backwards from Trixie (the current Stable Debian version) so I opted for LMDE which is based on Trixie. I use Debian Stable because of the “2-year cycle” (that’s why it’s called stable); Because stock Mint tracks the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, it’s actually a fair bit more out of date than Debian at this stage, and the next Mint version, based on the new LTE Ubuntu, isn’t slated to come out until December.

So far it’s not been too bad for a hybrid system - I have had a couple of issues, but this is most likely attributable to being a hybrid. I’ve found that I like Cinnamon, which stock Debian does not (as far as I know) support yet - I have used MATE for about 15 years because I don’t get on with Gnome 3 or KDE. You get all the nice things about Mint that I found impressive when I tested it - the printer and scanner support is very good, and the configuration utilities are quite reminiscent of Windows ones (good for new users, but I personally don’t care). Still not sure if I’m going to stick with it long-term, but happy with it for now - I largely stopped distro-hopping when I switched to MATE.

I know right. I had a right game reinstalling Win 10 on a lenovo netbook - I had to put a supported, unmanaged version on it for installing lenovo dock firmware updates. For some reason, the default graphics mode was totally corrupted - almost unreadable, and rotated 90 degrees. Once the installer had finished, I had to manually install the right driver for the graphics hardware, and that fixed it. Took hours - total amateurs. For shits and giggles, after I’d finished with with the firmware updates, I installed Mint on it - and it was flawless, and done in half an hour. This is the way to do it!

No we can’t. I hate football (soccer for you USians) with a passion greater than those that love it, and I can’t avoid it, even though I desperately try.

Favorite: Debian Stable (For my uses, it was the least trouble)

First: Slackware (1995, installed from floppy disks, also a short stretch in 2009)

Current: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) (Using because I need to support users on stock Mint)

Distro you liked the least: Novell SuSE (Used in a corporate setting)

Distro you want to use in the future: Unknown

Distro you used for the longest time: Debian Stable (15 years)

Distro everyone likes but I don’t: Ubuntu

Honorable mention: DietPi (RaspberryPi and SBC focused OS)

Over time, I’ve used quite a lot of different distros: Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise, Scientific, CENTOS, Fedora, Mandrake, Damn Small, Puppy, CrashBang, Raspbian, Bazzite, to name just the ones I can remember off the top of my head now.

Interested to know if this is for international travel, or just within your country’s borders? I would be concerned with this going through airport security, whether in carry-on or checked luggage - x-rays can damage electronics, and the potentially suspicious appearance of electronics to the non-technical could cause problems.

No AI slop, no slack, no jira… just want scritches and treats. A genuine, honest interaction.

Looks like there’s gonna be a lot of devs who quit to be goatherds or whatever low-tech, tranquil, agrarian gig they can pull off.

Can confirm. Do not recommend.

I tend to prefer to be the helper rather than the helped! Feeling part of a good team is important, and I had that for a while a couple of years back, but management spoilt it and destroyed what we had. I’m still in contact with some of those team-mates, but we’ve all left one way or another.

Everyone who uses O365 is pushed to use the web versions by the O365 ecosystem. When you click on Word/Excel/Outlook/whatever from your menu, it opens the web version; to use the locally installed app, you have to go to File/Open in Desktop or similar. The Open and Save dialogs default to using OneDrive - saving to local filesystem requires extra steps. The locally installed ones are becoming increasingly hard to use, by design, and the new features seem to be going into the web versions first and the local versions “eventually”. For example, the new excel “matrix” functions did not work in local excel the last time I tried to use them, though they might now, but there were a few features (special formatting I think) that only worked on the local version. Templates for word do not work on the web version.

Interestingly, the web 365 apps seem to work on Linux Mint, but I’ve not used them extensively, or on another distro. I did a migration from Win10 to LM last autumn, and I was genuinely shocked to find that web Outlook and OneDrive work on Firefox on LM. Confirmed that web Excel and Word worked enough to allow display and editing of documents - not an extensive test, but definitely worth a look. Obviously, there are still differences between the web and desktop versions, but it might even be possible to run them under Wine, but I have not tried that, and woudn’t expect it to go too well tbh.

Can confirm. I used Linux and Unix almost exclusively for about 20 years, and when I more recently had to use Windoze again for work, this is pretty much what happened.

Collaboration can be good too, but on your own terms. Agree that knowing how things tick is a huge part of why I like doing things that way.

I mean there’s more to being autistic that just that kind of thing, but that does sound pretty close to my kinds of routines - arrived at through thoughtful trial and error. Self knowledge is always useful - especially learning what your “failure modes” might be (overstimulation, shutdowns, etc.) which can be really harmful if you don’t know what’s happening, and how to deal with it. I’m still learning a lot of that, but making progress at the moment.

Being allowed to do things my way, even if it makes no sense to others. I do lots of things differently to everyone else, because they work for me, and the people I live with are respectful of that. I’ve had to make lots of changes recently due to being in Autistic burnout, and that has resulted in me doing even more things “my way”. Sometimes, when I’m struggling with speaking, it means saying things very briefly - one or two words, like “tea?” instead of “do you want a cup of tea?” or “out” when I need to leave a shop because it’s overwhelming me. Other times, it’s just being allowed to do my grounding routines, like getting my breakfast in peace, because I get muddled or distracted if someone is hovering round me in the kitchen while I do it.