I don’t know what the cost for my insurer was, because we never even got a bill in the mail. I even called the financial office or whatever it’s called for Kaiser and made sure we didn’t owe anything and they said that we were covered and owed nothing out of pocket.

My post was a reflection of my own personal anecdote because I see stuff online all the time that insurance is terrible in the US and that we all pay $20k for a birth when that isn’t the case for everyone. I mean if the average is $18k then someone is definitely paying that amount(or more, because average) but some also pay zero. My post wasn’t meant to diminish. I also think all of this should be free for everyone anyway.

I do also think some people pay more than they have to, as in they are having unprotected sex and can switch to a HMO over a PPO, but they stay on the PPO plan because it’s “cheap” and end up paying $20k for a birth when they could’ve switched to a HMO before hand and paid the $50-$500 a month(depending on employer or if your state has a marketplace) and saved the difference. But they don’t think that far ahead.

Reminds me of my workplace (I’m the trolley and others are jumping on the tracks)

I just had two kids back to back. Both born in California and at Kaiser. The only thing we had to pay for was my wife’s post-partum medication, I think $50 total between both kids.

All prenatal appointments/care? Covered. Two separate scares where wife was admitted overnight? Covered. Both births with epidurals and overnight stays and meals(for mom)? Covered. We didn’t even pay for parking.

Idk if it’s because we planned this and intentionally had a HMO plan, but wanted to share my recent experience.

Honestly if you’re running the latest Mint, then you’re on 6.14, which is barely a year old…but it’s still a year old kernel.

Probably fine for mom’s laptop that is 5 years old, but if you bought something that came out in the last 6 months or you’re building a new gaming PC, then you’re really gambling on Mint being “stable” for your system.

This is what I got blindsided by when I tried out Mint a decade ago. OS is up to date and pretty, but kernel/drivers? Old, or “stable”.

And it’s weird seeing all of these recommendations for Mint on YouTube/social media this past year. And then watching the videos everyone is just gawking about Cinnamon…which you can install on any other distro too.

Lots of normies hopping on the Linux train and have no idea what they’re getting into lol

but we’re all running essentially the same Linux Kernel

Uh, yes and no. If you’re on Linux Mint 22.2+ you’re on 6.14. If you’re on Linux Mint 22.1 you’re on 6.8.

If you’re running Arch or equivalent, you’re either on 6.17 or 6.18 at the moment.

Now that doesn’t seem like a huge gap, but 6.8 came out March 2024. 6.14 is from March 2025. Debian 13.3 I think is on 6.12 which is November 2024.

These all seem recent, but Linux moves at such a fast pace that if you’re gaming you really should be on the latest kernel for the best possible performance for gaming, especially if you have newer hardware.

Of course use whatever you like, but I would tell people to evaluate what would be the best option for their environment. For me I run my own websites and game servers. They’re all on Debian containers.

If my mom came up to me and said she wanted to try “Linux” on her laptop, I’d just throw Ubuntu 24.04(or 26.04 for the next LTS) on it because I know she just needs something to surf the web.

And for me I recently went all in on CachyOS for my laptop and gaming desktop. I’m not running the latest and greatest hardware(Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series, Nvidia 3000 series), but this is my first attempt at a Arch based distro(well except my Steam Deck) and it’s been pretty rock solid.

Pretty much how AMP by CubeCoders works. It’s all docker containers

Same, my wife quickly figured out that my Old Spice lasted longer than anything she’s ever bought before.

She’d have to apply her old deodorant 2-3 times throughout the day(working an office job). But the old spice? Once in the morning and she didn’t have to worry about it again unless she worked out after work.

Now her sister and her mom use old spice for the same reasons.

Gnome is good if you want a Mac-lite interface and have zero plans on customizing it. Install more than 2 or 3 extensions and your DE breaks.

Or just install any other DE and have a working distro again.

Kubuntu is fine. I’ve been running that without issues for months now.

Bazzite is good too. But do push for the KDE version.

All of these are pretty good, but my favorite is life savers.

We’re a Linux shop at my work. We do have a windows PC due to corporate policies…but everything we do on our windows PCs we could do from Linux.

Outlook? Website. Excel? Website. Jira? Website. Teams? Website. Nearly everything we do front end wise is all web based. Which, I know electron sucks, but from a “Linux as a main desktop environment”…I’m pretty damn happy with everything being web based nowadays. It’s all OS agnostic.

There are a lot of great commands in here, so here are my favorites that I haven’t seen yet:

• crontab -e
• && and || operators
• “>” and >> chevrons and input/output redirection
• for loops, while/if/then/else
• Basic scripts
• Stdin vs stdout vs /dev/null

Need to push a file out to a couple dozen workstations and then install it?

for i in $(cat /tmp/wks.txt); do echo $i; rsync -azvP /tmp/file $i:/opt/dir/; ssh -qo Connect timeout=5 $i “touch /dev/pee/pee”; done

Or script it using if else statements where you pull info from remote machines to see if an update is needed and then push the update if it’s out of date. And if it’s in a script file then you don’t have search through days of old history commands to find that one function.

Or just throw that script into crontab and automate it entirely.

You can do “ss -aepni” and that will dump literally everything ss can get its hands on.

Also, ss can’t find everything, it does have some limitations. I believe ss can only see what the kernel can see(host connections), but tcpdump can see the actual network flow on the network layer side. So incoming, outgoing, hex(?) data in transit, etc.

I usually try to use ss first for everything since I don’t think it requires sudo access for the majority of its functionality, and if it can’t find something then I bring out sudo tcpdump.

And I believe shift+r will let you go forward in history if you’re spamming ctrl+r too fast and miss whatever you’re looking for