Honestly I’m gonna go against what people usually say and say that Arch is better to start with than Ubuntu, as long as you’re not afraid of command line or editing txt files. Whether it’s Arch or Ubuntu, as a noob you’re going to be doing a lot of wiki reading and copying and pasting of commands.

Personally though, a big difference between the two I found is that after a couple of years of copying and pasting commands in Ubuntu, I still didn’t really understand anything about how Linux works behind the scenes. Whereas Arch had me feeling like I too could be a sysadmin, if I felt like it, within a week.

And maybe things are different these days with Ubuntu, it’s been a few years, but I find that Arch has a way more enthusiastic and helpful user base. And the Arch wiki is practically a bible. Whereas searching for problems and solutions in Ubuntu can feel a bit like searching for problems and solutions in Windows, where you’ll probably get copy pasted generic solutions or someone telling you to restart your PC.

No need to apologize, I’ve been getting worse as of late.

Not gonna judge because I’ve probably been somewhere similar before. I am not exactly who I was yesterday either. I hope that you make it through the other side of whatever is hurting you and start to feel pain free again.

I hope I’m reading this wrong and I truly apologize if I am but I’m getting pretty strong ‘asshole’ vibes here, much stronger than I would from anyone using the word “normie”, personally.

But either way, it’s actually good to know when words I previously felt were overall harmless can cause this kind of response. I may not be from the USA, or have come from a background where it’s such a charged word, but I’m on a platform that’s likely mostly American (based on the news and politics that come through ‘All’), so I will refrain from using it unless I find it absolutely necessary.

Which should be fairly easy to do, considering that I barely ever use it anyway and just thought that this would be an amusing conversation.

Yeah honestly it’s not that serious for me. Personally I’ve never even visited the front page of 4chan. It’s a word that’s been around since long before social media too, as far as I know. One other place I’ve seen it used is autism communities when someone is describing their feelings about fitting in, or not.

I feel like 4chan is a US-centric thing. And a niche one at that. So it’s a very niche US-centric thing to assume about random strangers on the world wide web. For a word that a lot of people probably use differently.

What an alpha.

Next step: political adverts that quiz you on what you’ve just heard and repeat each segment if you get the answer wrong.

Just kidding though (or am I). This is truly some dystopian shit. My first reaction was what the actual fuck. And I bet you that their numbers aren’t really going to hurt that much because of this. Mark my words.

Doesn’t have the same vibes though. To me ‘normie’ has always been a little bit of an insult on top of just describing the ‘average person’. “Average person” is for when you’re describing statistics. “Normie” is for when you’re describing people that clutch their pearls and their bible when a goth walks past.

Yeah, I use “normie” occasionally and it kinda makes me feel like le edgy teen. But the problem is that I’m not sure if there’s another word that quite replaces it either. Sometimes it’s the only word that works in a particular context.