A Rumble channel run by Lunduke recommended this

Coffee break Introduce yourself
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A few days ago, I discovered Lunduke’s channel over on Rumble. After watching a few of his videos about how the New Left is destroying assorted Linux distros with their clown shows, including what I was using, it was time to downshift into 9th, crank up the engine speed, and climb the next hill. So I decided to give OpenMandriva a try.

I started testing Linux shortly after retiring from being an OTR 48 state truck driver back in 2020. Windows 10 was unloaded, and I installed Kubuntu in June 2021, figuring that it would not be full of the wokeness that I got fed up with at my last employer and not full of the spyware, courtesy of Microsoft. Plasma 5 is about as close as I could get to looking and feeling like Windows, so it worked out pretty good once I learned how things work.

I have two old laptops left over from my days when I was living at 6 feet above the pavement. Both are ASUS. One is my testing hardware running assorted different distros. The other is four years newer and is still running Kubuntu, but not for long. This one is running OpenMandriva Rome on hardware from 2012. So far, zero headaches. I just might move it from being my testing computer to being my primary daily driver and forget about the 2016 ASUS that still has Kubuntu. I don’t know. Perhaps I might turn that into the experimental machine.

I am proof that a stupid old truck driver (me) with a high school education can figure out on his own how to use Linux and then move on to using a distro that is guaranteed to be so obscure that everyone who I know has never heard of it. They way I see it, if I can figure it out, anyone else should be able to do the same, if willing to put in the effort. That is the key. Willing to put in the effort.

If anyone is looking for technical support, I am the last person you want to ask. Unless it involves something simple, such as how to perform an air brake check before going down a 15% grade with maximum weight in the trailer or cold starting a diesel engine at -40 degrees. Easy stuff like that.

As for free speech, I fully support the First Amendment. However, I also support the part that the New Left conveniently forgets about. That is the part where while they have the right to jump up and down like clowns in a circus while screaming that everyone must comply with their demands, everyone has the right to not put up with them and just walk away. If this confuses some people, so be it. I don’t want a circus clown show with my operating system. If you do, then you do you and get a clown show that includes an operating system.

If my opinion gets me kicked out, so be it. Not the first time.

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Welcome to OM @DD15 . I came here for the same reason. I found that while saying they are for free speech they insist on an echo chamber and ban anyone that doesn’t fall in line. I used Kubuntu but left it when they forced the snap store on us and distro-hopped for years. Landed on Arch a while back and was very happy with it until a couple months ago when they decided they were okay with death threats on platforms using their name and trademarks.

So far the clowns haven’t been able to invade here. I really hope it stays that way.

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Welcome @DD15 . I am also a Lunduke refugee and a commercial driver by trade as well. I think you’ll find the community here to be exactly what you’re looking for. I hope you enjoy OM, it’s a great distro IMHO. BTW…love a good ol’ Detroit. I used to pull commodities with a 60 series 12.7 :+1:

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Oh, yes. The Snap issue. When did that start? As I remember, I installed Kubuntu 20.04 LTS and there were the Snap applications. Then a funny thing happened. I couldn’t get them to install. I just figured that being new to Linux, it was something that I did, and somehow ended up on the Flathub site, followed the instructions there because I wanted to install a particular app that I was familiar with over on Windows 10, and installed everything needed for Flatpak. To this day, did Kubuntu 20.04 LTS have a bug in it regarding Snap applications? Don’t know. Don’t care.

I noticed that Snap applications did start to install with 22.04 LTS, but they took time to load. Once up and running, yes, they were fast. But for what I am doing, I don’t need superfast running. I would sooner have consistency. But nobody was putting a gun to my head, so I continued to use Flatpak applications. By then, I had figured out how to install Flatpak applications from the terminal, along with .deb packages.

Canonical started to lose it for me when 24.04 LTS came out, and it refused to upgrade. That was when I figured that the time had come to look around for a different distro. I was getting good at installing distros alongside existing distros on the same SSD. Distro hopping wasn’t difficult, so long as I was able to wipe clean the partition in question while not touching the existing partition. It is a testing laptop, so blowing up everything on the drive wasn’t the end of the world.

That was about the time I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed for testing. Nice distro. A bit too green, but whatever. Nothing that can’t be fixed in Plasma 6 with a new theme. Then I find out it is run by clowns. Fedora. Mint. Debian. Who else? Just in time to make me potentially look bad because I just finished installing Debian 12 on a friend’s 2007 vintage laptop that was still running XP because that is what he wanted.

I never tried Arch. I thought about it until I learned about the death threats. In the past, I had enough of that behavior in the past at warehouses in Georgia. At this point, I don’t need that garbage. The Arch developers are not paying me to put up with that, unlike my former employer.

I just try to believe that the clowns with their death threats and mandatory beliefs are a minority. In certain industries, they probably are. I know a few dairy farmers around where I own some property, and not one of them puts up with that sort of behavior.

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A Series 60 with or without a big hole in the elbow below the muffler? I made it as far as California and was given a 15-day fix-it to get the hole fixed. My employer had to deal with their hole. Back at that time, you could still legally bring a Series 60 into the state. Just another instance of “didn’t listen to the driver because he isn’t a mechanic and lacks a university master’s degree in underwater anthropology.”

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I know that feeling all too well. We never seem to know what we’re talking about until the issue we pointed out becomes a problem.

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Welcome! We are happy to see another Lundukian. Many of us are new for the same reason.

Use the Welcome app. It takes mistakes out of the way.

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Welcome @DD15 ! There’s a whole lot of us Lunduke refugees. Myself included. We’re glad you arrived.

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Welcome aboard! I think it’s great to have someone around who can answer questions about air brakes and I completely agree with you about the clowns. I am another one of the Lunduke refugees so you are in good company. You will love it here.

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Run Linux with air brakes? Now there is something to confuse the clown shows. Technically, it is possible.

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@DD15
welcome1

Amen to that.

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Welcome @DD15 , thank you for your feedback on Linux distributions, and in particular on its accessibility and ease of use.

I’m also a lundukee refugee and have installed OM in order, as you put it so well, not to have to put up with the sectarian excesses of the new left, its woke and lgbtq schizophrenia…

The community here is really great, and the developers are very talented and reactive (despite the fact that it’s a small team). I love OM and its great community. Welcome home @DD15

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