Bro doesn’t need DE to watch videos. Bro doesn’t need DE to do anything.

Desktop environment? Who needs a desktop environment?

And then some of them learn that downvoting is obnoxious and toxic, while others never grow out of infancy.

The fact that you’re even saying such things as “time constraints” or “to learn new software” suggests an attitude to computing shared by about 0.01% of the population. It cannot be re-stressed enough to the (sadly shrinking) bubble that frequents this community: the vast majority of people in the world have never touched a laptop let alone a desktop computer. Literally everything now happens on mobile, where FOSS is vanishingly insignificant, and soon AI is going to add a whole new layer of dystopia. But that is slightly offtopic.

It’s a good question IMO. Choosing software freedom - to the small extent that you still can - should not just be about the freedom to tinker, it should also just be easy.

The answer is Ubuntu or Mint or Fedora.

IMO most of the suggestions here are small beer.

If you want to be very scientific about this, and to calculate cumulative sums of harm, with no discount for the future, then just look for some little-known hydrocarbons corp - it will top the list.

If you apply a future discount, but no discount (or a small one) for the suffering of non-human animals, then some meat company will probably top the list.

The correct answer is usually the most boring one.

This map shows how this issue is mainly just a symbolic West-vs-Rest struggle by proxy. Nobody much cares about the actual parties involved.

Once I planned to do just this, converting my Ubuntu into Debian (or maybe it was the other way round). I assumed it would just be a matter of changing the repos and then apt full-upgrade and boom! new distro. Still, I decided to do some research first - you know, just in case. Whatever I learned made me abandon the idea in a hurry. Perhaps I’ll try again but this time skip the boring research step.

I’m late to the party

26 years and 5 days late, to be precise!

But really more like 20 years, which was when it took off as the plumbing of the blogosphere (AKA the last form of social media that was arguably healthy for all concerned).

Or in fact you’re not late at all given that you probably listen to podcasts.

PS: to add a useful tool recommendation to this otherwise ruminative contribution: RSSBox

Contravenes rule #3. Moderation please.

PS. And rule #1 and IMO even rule #4 because it’s a pretty boring observation.

Pretending something doesn’t exist does not make it go away. The fact that you understood it means it exists.

The catastrophic typo has completely undermined your three paragraphs of beautiful typo-free blurb. Re-read your copy before posting, people.

Sure, but my script only gets rid of the second and later parameters, i.e. ones with & not ?. Personally I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single site where an & param is critical. These days there few where the ? matters either, but yes YT is a holdout.

You never define “clean”.

To strip excess URL parameters (i.e. beginning “&”, almost certainly junk) if the clipboard buffer contains a URL and only a URL (Wayland only):

if url=$(printf '%s' "$(wl-paste --no-newline | awk '$1=$1' ORS=' ')" | egrep -o 'https?://[^ ]+') ; then
  wl-copy "${url%%\&*}"
fi

The type of liquid should not make much difference. It’s basically inescapable. At this point there’s not much left to do except cross fingers.

Or drink tap water, which has far less of it and is obviously much better for the environment. To lose excess chlorine, just let the water stand overnight.

Going round in circles here.

It costs less, takes less energy, and therefore creates less climate-heating CO2 pollution, to make plastic out of virgin petroleum than it does to create plastic out of plastic. That should not be surprising: a thermoplastic is just petroleum with the molecules fixed into hard-to-break bonds. Of course it’s going to be more efficient to start with the raw product.

We all agree that we should be using less plastic. But assuming an equal amount of plastic usage, and assuming that waste plastic is kept out of waterways in sealed landfills (plastic does not biodegrade so it will not produce methane), then it makes more sense from an environmental perspective to simply use virgin plastic.

Maybe that’s uncomfortable but it’s true. Plastic recycling is a mirage: it serves mainly to make consumers feel better about themselves. The closed loop just makes no sense due to the energy problem. That is not the case with glass, paper and especially aluminum, all of which are very efficiently recycled.

Read this. I’ve said enough here.

PS: added emphasis

To reduce plastic pollution, of course.

Energy consumption is the important metric because it almost certainly involves pollution. The supply of petroleum is essentially inexhaustible, certainly for the purpose of making plastic.

You’re doing great already. At a macro level, the battle is all but lost. A third of a billion tons of plastic is produced every year. Almost nobody cares outside a smallish fringe of society in very developed countries (i.e. us). And the hydrocarbons industry needs new things to do with the oil it can’t burn. Also, plastic recycling is a red herring: it takes less energy to use virgin petroleum.

The two priorities IMO should be:

• Keep it out of waterways as much as possible. Above all this will mean education and resources in the developing world. In rich countries with waste management, the hard-to-fix issue is microplastics from synthetic clothes
• Minimize the health risks

For the second one, my basic principles are:

• Never eat or drink from plastic receptacles to which heat has been applied
• Avoid the rest where possible but don’t stress about it

Microplastics are going to be a major environmental and health challenge because the problem is just so intractable. But there’s only so much an individual can do. Be a good consumer, be a good citizen and at the very least never forget to vote, and then just relax. It’s bad enough as it is without adding pointless anxiety to it.

Removed by mod