felsiq

Just a note on windows “having” this: a significant amount of hardware (wifi adapters, nvme drives, a lot of the shit in a Surface laptop, etc) don’t have native windows support and require command line usage and/or hunting for third party drivers to even get windows installed. A user installing an OS on a machine with that sort of hardware would have a much easier time on Linux - it’s only manufacturers preinstalling windows and the needed drivers that give the impression it’s easier on windows. When the user has to wipe / reinstall their OS it’s a much more apples to apples comparison.

I’m not saying this to imply Linux doesn’t need to get better, because of course that’d be great, but I see this comparison a lot and it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s a bit of an unfair one even if it’s a reasonable standard to hold an OS to.

But my experience with being cisgendered is one of feeling like my spirit would belong wherever it was born to. I identify as a man and would feel out of place in a woman’s body, but if I had been born into a woman’s body I would feel out of place in a man’s. That’s my mental picture of what being cisgendered is.

This is something I struggled with as well, but the more I look into it the more convinced I am that (at least for me personally) feeling this way is simply an indication that I’m agender and just lacking any meaningful dysphoria or reason to act on it.
The way I understand it now is that truly cisgender people actually identify with their assigned gender in a way that I can’t really relate to, but that I see trans people describe as gender euphoria. My own experience is very much what you described, where I identify as male simply because that’s what I was assigned and it doesn’t (really) bother me, and it’s helped me conceptualize dysphoria a lot better to understand that my disconnect isn’t with “wrong gender” but simply with “gender” at all.

I’m not saying the only reason you could struggle to relate the same way I do is not being cis, but maybe you’d benefit the way I did from reading about being agender?

Oh okay I misunderstood then, that’s exactly my experience with written smut as well (to the extent I forget it exists outside of stories with established characters lol). Thanks!

There was something I wanted to say in response to your original question, but I forgot it because I was too impressed with your emotional maturity and self-awareness in your responses

I might edit this or comment again if I remember, but for now I just wanted to say I really admire you for that :)

This is really interesting to hear, because I think I also have some level of aphantasia (I never picture anything while reading or normal thinking, but if I really try I can think simple images) but I like written erotica just as much if not more than visual stuff.

Do you mind if I ask what level of aphantasia you have, and/or if you think that’s related?

I always feel like those are people that would’ve been speedrunners or avid soulslike players if they were born later

Idk if this fully explains the weird taboo you described, but I’m personally reluctant to ask people questions I know they must get all the time. It can get annoying/draining fielding the same questions from every second person even if they’re mostly well-meaning, so especially in cases where people can’t just not reveal the attribute/hobby/whatever I’m curious about I just try to remember the question to look up later.

Not sure how common that is, but if that’s the cause then what you’ve done with this post is the ideal way to bypass this hesitation imo; just being clear (even just from the context) that you’re choosing to talk about this and not just feeling pressured to explain would make the difference at least for me personally.

Anyway idk if this is relevant at all for you, but if it is I hope it helps :)

Listening to that voice clip I think you sound very femme, and not just in your voice itself but your speech patterns. Like if you removed all tone hints from your voice and made me guess guy/girl I’d guess girl with no hesitation even tho I can’t pinpoint exactly why - is that something you taught yourself consciously, or is it just kinda a natural product of being a woman in western culture?

Also you said in the voice clip you wanted impressions, not sure if you still care given that was four months ago but I hear your voice as a woman in her 20s, maybe early 30s? I’m not great at guessing ages even when I’m standing in front of someone tho, so take that with a grain of salt lol

Anyway thank you for doing this Q&A, I always love to see new perspectives on the trans experience!

I think you can definitely survive it as a beginner if you’re both patient and happy to learn about your OS, but most people recommend trying another distro first so you don’t have to learn everything up front all at once and that’s good advice imo. Even if you’re happy to learn everything thru the wiki and want to jump into the deep end, I’d probably recommend checking out other distros on distrosea first just so you have an idea of what’s out there and what you like/dislike.

You’ll have to read about and then make a choice for every component of your system, from the filesystem to the kernel to all your user space programs and DE, so you’ll make better choices if you’ve seen some of the options in action imo.

I should also mention I’ve heard the archinstall script trivializes installing arch so if you want an easy way in you could use that - id probably keep this in mind or better, put your arch iso on ventoy along with a second choice of distro in case you get overwhelmed and just want your computer functional again.

Good luck tho, if you choose to do it I hope you have as much fun as I did! Don’t be afraid to ask questions on whichever of the Linux communities are relevant, but definitely expect a lot of “just use mint” answers if you say you’re installing arch as a new Linux user lol.

Not the same person, but my updates take like 30s (if I don’t go looking at what changed) and happen whenever I want. We’re not talking windows updates here, just sudo pacman -Syu, seeing the list of what’s changing (etc firefox went up a version? Cool), and then saying “sure” if it looks good to me. Don’t even need to restart all the time, although I tend to do updates before turning my pc off anyway so I nearly always do.

Packages tend to use the latest stable version of their software, unless you choose a beta branch instead, so if anything I think I’ve run into less broken software than on Debian-based distros because you don’t get bugs that were fixed a week ago but haven’t made it into the official apt repository version yet. If there is a bug, you can just not upgrade that package if you know about it in advance or just downgrade it until they release a fix (I’ve never had to do this but iirc you can pin a version in pacman).

Not suggesting to jump ship if you’re happy with your current distro, but arch is a great learning experience to set up and once you have a good system running it’s absolutely rock solid. Just don’t expect to install it in fifteen minutes like other distros, if you want a good install you have to do all the reading yourself (arch wiki is priceless) to make informed choices because you’re entirely responsible for piecing together your own OS.

Wow you’re more patient than I am, if you type on your phone here a lot lmao. Thanks for the answers!

You make a good point about systemd being monolithic, and I hate to add to your replies fully ignoring it to only talk about the thorn… but I gotta admit I’m really curious how you type it.

I’m guessing you’re not using text replacement and that you’re typing it instead, but do you have it bound to a key combo, replacing a little-used character, etc? Do you use the same method on mobile, if you also use the thorn there? If you type like this everywhere, are you concerned about your distinct typing patterns making you easy to dox?

Sorry to hit you with a bunch of questions unrelated to your actual comment, I don’t have strong opinions on systemd so don’t have much to contribute there lol

This really feels like it didn’t need an announcement