I found an article about it: https://www.macsmotorcitygarage.com/a-cool-idea-at-the-time-the-hurst-lightning-rods-shifter

Hurst Lightning Rods, an aftermarket performance shifter marketed in the 1980s

The Lightning Rods system was set up to work like any ordinary automatic gear selector, more or less, with a conventional PRND shift pattern (as shown in the top photo). The difference was in the two additional levers: the far right lever and release button performed the 1-2 upshift, while the middle lever and button performed the 2-3 upshift. Or the driver could simply leave the lever in D for Drive or OD for Overdrive and drive normally. In that regard, the Lightning Rods setup was not unlike the Hurst Dual Gate aka “His ‘n Her” shifters of previous years.

I have to say that I’m having issues understanding what this means in practice. :D

I’m using Windows as my daily driver due to prioritising gaming over everything else. But I also have a 8-year old laptop which is stuck with Win 7, and I’ve been wondering if I should just install Linux on it to try things out. In the past, I’ve only ever tried Linux for short times, never used Linux as my main OS or longer than a week.

With this context, I’ve had the “which distro should I choose?” on my mind a few times. There’s some obvious and some non-obvious issues with this questionnaire. I’ll just go over my thoughts step by step:

• “I want anonymous web browsing” and “distro which is supported by game publishers” can’t be selected at the same time. Is this really true? I’m doubting my understanding of what “anonymous web browsing” actually means.

• “I often need help from others” and “I have already used Linux for some purposes” can’t both be selected. Why? The logic behind this is “You have used Linux at some point, so you can clearly solve some problems without asking anyone”. Makes no sense, and/or the questionnaire’s creator thinks that Linux is impossible for newcomers. I have used Linux in the past and I’m generally good in troubleshooting, but anyway.

• “I want to use the default preset values in the installation assistant” is impossible to answer if I don’t know which values are given as the default. My general answer would be “give me a default value for everything, but also let me change the things which I have an opinion about”. An answer equal to this doesn’t exist.

• Pre-installed programs: this does feel like it lacks the answer of “let me choose what to install during installation of OS”, but I guess I can just skip this question without answering since I don’t care.

• “There are many way to administrate a linux distribution” -> “I want to avoid systemd”. I’ve never heard about systemd, and the explanation give on the page doesn’t really help. For what reasons would I want to avoid it? My actual answer for this is “I really don’t care”, so I just skipped it.

About the result of the questionnaire: I did answer that “I’m fine with paying something”, but it’s not really something I aim for. The suggestions seem to tag “There is a non-free version available” as a plus for the distros, which really isn’t what I answered - there’s a difference between “I’m fine with something” and “I want something”.

I also marked “supported by game publishers” with a star, because gaming is what I’m aiming to do on it. I have no idea if this even matters in practice, but it made sense as an answer when asked about. The smoothness of gaming experience will always be the primary reason for any choice of OS I’ll make.

The first EIGHT answers on the list have either “Programs versions may not be up-to-date enough for gaming” or “May require additional configuration for gaming” as a downside/warning. The game publisher question is the only answer which I marked as important.

The first distro from the suggestions that included “supported by game publishers” is Linux Mint - which does match what I already had in mind, but I really feel like the ordering of the suggested distros feel off.

Short “review” about this: it really didn’t help much. The list of suggestions is practically full of equally good distros, and I’m still stuck with the question “which one of these should I choose?”. I only learned about more distros that I had never heard about before.

As for actually choosing the distro at some point later: I think that I’ll just find out the top 5 most popular distros, and select from those. My reasoning for this is that it’s much easier to find answers if/when I run into issues. Using a niche distro wouldn’t really work for me - Linux isn’t my hobby, I think OS is just a tool to run whatever programs/games I want to.

But this questionnaire doesn’t have any data about popularity, so for my usecase, it lacks some information. I feel like it could use an additional question about “Are you fine with using a niche distro, or do you want to use a popular one?” - this question does have the issue of not being objective though, as there’s no clear answer of what can be counted as “popular”.

TL;DR good idea, but execution could be better.

What are you talking about? I used it like 2 days ago last time, no plugins. Not sure if there’s a hotkey for reopening a closed window (ctrl shift T?), but you can find it from the menu in upper right corner of the browser.

The song is also 23 years old at this point. :D

I’m specifically talking about the experience of installing and playing games, not installing the OS. I haven’t had any issues with installing Windows either, but apparently we have a different experience with that part - but even then, installation/configuration of OS happens like once per 5 years so I don’t really care if it takes 15 or 90 minutes. I do agree that Linux is quite easy to set up too, no issues there either.

I have no idea what you’re talking about when you say “constantly having to un-fuck Windows”. I just open my PC and open whatever program/game that I was planning to?

But: if installing a new game requires more than pressing install from the service I bought it from due to the choice of my OS, that is the issue that I’m trying to minimize. If one OS is more likely to give me a smoother purchase-to-gameplay experience, I’ll prefer that one.

Basically if 90% of games work equally well on both platforms but 10% require extra tweaking (or literally don’t work) on Linux, I’ll just stick to Windows. Proton is great, but not a perfect answer for everything - but I’m not sure what you mean by “easier than Windows” since I don’t know what could be easier than pressing install.

I guess I’ve just been lucky with my experience overall.

I obviously do use the PC for other stuff too (video editing, browser, music, the usual), but those would work equally fine on Linux - it’s just the gaming part that’s keeping me on Windows, and it’s also the main thing I do on a daily basis.

I guess I pay for the convenience that I get when I buy a new game, simply press Install and start playing. I spend most of my free time playing games on PC, I have no other reasons to stick to Windows. I’ll happily switch to Linux on the day when every new release works with no extra problems, tinkering, waiting or searching caused by my choice of OS.

This is going to sound selfish, but I don’t have the “energy” of fighting against whatever the current meta is - I just have to appreciate the more invested people that drive Linux forward. I’ll just follow and use the OS where I get the smoothest overall experience for gaming (including thing like mouse/kb driver support). Windows is the current answer for this, one day it’ll be something else - hopefully Linux.

Shit’s been progressing really fast recently - I guess Steam Deck is doing some heavy lifting when it comes to motivating developers to keep Linux in mind. Direct support will always give the best results for everyone.

Browsing Lemmy’s front page has replaced reddit’s r/all for me, usually checking top of 12 hours from all instances.

But I still use reddit for specific forums of certain things, because it’s just the biggest community for the particular subject. I usually try to check if I can find the particular subject from Lemmy and check that out first though.

I’m more of a commenter/lurker and I quite rarely make new posts, but when I do make one:

• If it’s a question about something I need help with, I’ll start with a Lemmy post and then possibly also make one on Reddit - more readers, more answers.
• If it’s just a shitpost/meme/“content”, I only post it on Lemmy.

How do you save stuff without knowing where you’re saving it? Genuinely curious, as I really don’t understand what this meme is referring to. Windows search has also become better over the years, and recently it’s been good enough for my uses. “Everything” is still a handy tool though.

Almost all software that I use, ask about the target location and/or filename when you save it. There’s also some software with default saving location, but it’s usually quite easy to find out from i.e. settings or some other part of the interface.

Also - saving stuff to unknown folders is related to the software not being clear about the target folder, I don’t really know why people would blame Windows for the software being unclear. Unless we’re talking about something specific to Windows which I’m just not familiar with. :D

Genuinely curious, because it’s quite apparently about lifestyle in general: how often do you need a flashlight, especially a good/bright one? I mean, a bright one is nice to have, but it’s not like I’d need one. Basically I can understand why people just pick whatever they happen to find from the first store they walk into, and they’re happy with their purchase.

Currently, I don’t even own a flashlight. I rarely need one and when I do, I’ve just used my phone’s flashlight and it’s been just fine for whatever I needed to do.

1. Googled “Lemmy” to see what it even is
2. “wtf is an instance”
3. Checked some of the most used instances. At this point I wasn’t sure if it matters much, but I just figured it’s best to just pick a popular instance.
4. found lemmy.world, and the description goes “The World’s Internet Frontpage - Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.”
5. “sounds good enough”, created account