I can ask. I think she has presented them at a symposium this month. I think they might be in print next month.

Oh my. My one daughter just published 2 research papers on household thermostats. And according to her long term testing, Nest is one to definitely avoid.

No 20 year old belt. But I do have a set of 20 year old suspenders or galluses if you prefer. I wear suspenders because I have a very large surgical scar from a ruptured appendix years ago. Belt are very irritating to wear.

That’s the refusal to learn. People really hate learning anything new these days. And that includes many here.

Still, there is hope. With the common idea of “App Stores” really taking hold with users, thanks to the ubiquity of cell phone ownership and Chromebooks, users are comfortable with a software manager that gets referred to as App Store. And distros are starting to act upon that by simply rename their software management software and adding a colorful friendly UI to it. It’s marketing.

There are 1000’s of programs available that can meet almost every “regular user’s” daily needs. What is lacking is a universal packaging format that is easy to use. Ubuntu has their “we dropped the ball” Snaps and Fedora pushes Flatpaks. AppImages also exist, but not to the extent as Flatpaks and are a bit more of a hassle to use than a Flatpak. And it appears that Flatpaks are currently leading as the universal software management race. If all distros were to agree to one package format, that would remove one of the biggest hurdles and kills the .exe argument. And that seems unlikely at this point in time. Even die hard Linux users will argue against it. But until at least the most common distros hop on that bus, Windows users will resist your KDE laptop.

That’s the link you need to break. Until then, Linux is stuck as an also ran.

His attitude about teaching me the language was strange. He refused to teach even my mother. He was all “Your 'Murican, so you speak 'Murican.” And not Norwegian.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s that I discovered that the Norge my grandfather spoke was essentially a dead language from the early 1800s. Soon after my family showed up here, the Norwegian language changed. It changed a couple of times. Not that he knew that.

But on the German side, my Great Grandmother was all about teaching me German as a little kid. She always kept a bowl of the cheap cheap pressed pastel sugar mints that little old ladies are fond of. It was a decorative milk glass hen and nest covered bowl. I could have a candy anytime I wanted as long as I asked in German. And it had better be in Low German! Or I got a light whack with a little bamboo cane every time I mispronounced a word. I learned quickly!

Until people can buy a computer CHEAPLY and easily at Walmart with a distro preinstalled, Linux isn’t going to make a lot of headway very fast. They are too lazy to be bothered to download a distro, make a bootable iso, wipe and do a fresh install.

And yes, they are that lazy unless really pushed to do it.

Not simpler, just a lot more concerned about family dirty laundry. There were a general attitude about the “old country” that they didn’t talk about. It was strong enough that my one Grandfather refused to teach me to speak Norwegian even though he and all the older community spoke it everyday. And you would go to church on Christmas or Easter day and the service was done all in Norwegian and you sang Norwegian hymns.

My family immigrants went farther west. The western prairies and northern forests of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Canada. We bounced around a lot before the 1900s.

My ancestors were criminals. One was a horse thief in Norway and the other was a counterfeiter in Germany in the early 1800s. Both skipping their homelands around the 1850s, just ahead of the law. At least that’s what the family histories say that we can actually trace with reasonable accuracy.

I suppose we brought the lutefisk and lefsa from the Norwegian side and beer and sausages on the German side.

Perhaps they grew tired of the Brits starving and killing them?