itchick2014 [Ohio]

While this is stereotypically true, my grandparents that passed away 14 years ago were avid gamers. They adored their NES and bought a SNES when the NES died. I think it is worth inquiring with local nursing homes to see if they have anyone that has gaming experience. My grandma’s favorite game was Loopz. Grandpa’s was golf. Puzzle games especially are good for that age group as they keep the brain busy but don’t necessarily require adept fine motor speed like other genres.

My first experience with installing Linux on a hard drive involved wiping the wrong hard drive (my dad’s) and installing on it. Then panicking when Windows 95 didn’t boot up. Thank goodness my dad was understanding lol.

To me, brain fog feels like my thoughts are swimming in the subconscious ocean and it takes a lot of energy to dive down and actually comprehend them. It isn’t that the thoughts do not exit, but rather that they are outside of reach of use until significant mental effort is undergone to reach them. Using those thoughts for any purpose then requires even more mental energy…energy that feels like the mental equivalent of walking up the stairs…it seems easy for the first few steps but progressively gets harder until at some point, if you haven’t used the thoughts yet, you just give up out of sheer exhaustion.

Yeah I think it is the EUV that is considered a crossover.

Chevy currently has 8 models of SUV/crossovers in the US. Bolt, Trax, Trailblazer, Equinox, Blazer, Traverse, Tahoe, and Suburban. That is the closest I can think of.

As someone who knows someone who was killed as a pedestrian crossing the road…it is not your fault. Don’t forget that fact. Trauma does weird things to our brains even without head injury. Don’t feel guilty about pursuing a lawsuit either. It was the other person’s responsibility to be watchful and follow traffic laws…and they failed. Repercussions are normal in such circumstances even if it is an honest mistake. Hope that you don’t feel any more pain or have more unseen issues. Sometimes these things take time to surface. If you feel unexplainably sleepy at any point, don’t hesitate to see a doctor. Sometimes head trauma isn’t obvious. Wish you the best and hope you recover quickly and thoroughly.

Why not dual boot? It is possible to have both. That is what I typically do and with Mac this can be helpful because sometimes you may need to access MacOS for drivers and such. This way you can cross-compare and have more opportunity to learn.

I would say this probably varies by person. I learned a lot by using multiple distros. When I put the dots together that yum, apt-get, and (later) pacman do the same thing, that was a huge ah-ha. Sometimes seeing the differences in how they work in command line especially helps you understand larger concepts. If you stick with one distro (like I did for too long) you may have trouble comprehending these concepts for longer. Some beginners may find choice overwhelming, yes, but I do think it can be useful having exposure to two or three distros out the gate…even if just on live USB.

I haven’t seen Arch recommended to new folks outside of the Arch community circles and even most of them express caution. I always recommend Ubuntu or one of its variants for a person starting out, but it does help for the person to try a bunch of distros to see what they prefer. When I was starting out everyone was recommending Debian or Fedora. The more user-friendly distros didn’t come out until much later. Since then even the mainstream distros have improved a ton concerning usability, though I will say documentation always leans a bit too technical for my taste…for Arch especially. Too many holes for people that have no experience.

I recently bought a used LG Gram to install Arch on after a few years of not having Linux…so recently did similar research, albeit with more Linux knowledge. I do NOT recommend Arch as a first distro unless you are willing to put in time for troubleshooting. That said, looking up a model of laptop you are considering + Linux in a search engine can be valuable in determining how much ease you will have getting basic (trackpad, Bluetooth, webcam, WiFi) items working. I dabbled with a CD distro as a gateway to Linux and the “live disk” option is still the best way to experiment. Nowadays it is on a USB stick. This method allows you to play around without actually installing. Others here have already given good advice. If you go the USB stick route, do be careful with anything related to disk partitioning and formatting. I accidentally wiped my dad’s hard drive once when I was not being careful!

Glad I am not alone, though I follow unixporn and other communities so was very familiar with the overall sentiments about Arch before diving in. I look forward to when I know a bit more about it. I put it on a laptop I specifically bought to install Linux alongside the existing windows install (LG Gram) so I knew I had nothing to lose and my whole intention was to learn. I would have never installed Arch on a machine I actually need to use at this point. I am lucky that I got as far as I did so quickly. lol.

I agree that Arch is a pro distro. I do IT tech support, have background with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Knoppix, and Fedora and installing Arch was hard mode for me. Would I do it again? Hell yeah. Would I recommend it as a second or third install experience? Nope. Too many distros that are beginner to intermediate friendly. That said, I will forever have a fondness for pacman just because I like the name. I am still working out device drivers and a few smaller details a month later. Also, the wiki is written by someone who doesn’t do good technical writing. It assumes too much back end knowledge. I kept having to follow blog or article posts and still had to sandwich those snippets I got together hoping something worked…and again, I have some background knowledge of Linux already. An absolute beginner would be totally lost.