I did the dual boot setup with Win10 and Ubuntu during my initial foray into Linux about 8 years ago and liked it until the boot loader got messed up and prevented me from loading Ubuntu anymore; I eventually just gave up on trying to fix. Apparently this is something that Windows is doing unless you make special provisions to protect against it. In the end, it was the forced obsolescence of Win10 that drove me back to Linux and I am super happy on Fedora after trying and failing to get Mint to work to my satisfaction.

Boring and just working are exactly what I want my OS to do. Open source options are proving to be effective or even superior to what I was using before and I have even switched my kid over to Linux already. My wife wasn’t having any of it though so I painfully migrated her to Win11 and had to purchase or get subs for her daily-use applications that worked fine on Win10.

There was a book which I picked up from my high-school library and it really did a number on the younger me. “Green Rage” was a book written by Chris Manes in the early 90s about radical environmentalism and it gave me a new perspective on things I had not been aware of at the time. While I never actually got directly involved with any environmentalist groups, I did start to better appreciate how our Capitalist system’s need extract value at any cost from natural resources would have disastrous consequences.

Fast forward 35 years and I can’t honestly say if the author’s more dire predictions haven’t come to pass since you simply can’t trust corporate media to give unvarnished truth about anything. But I have seen and experienced things with my own eyes that give them credence. The fact that the title for this book came to mind immediately when I read this post/prompt says something about it’s impact I think.

If you combine that rule with the ability to endlessly stack Draw 2 or Draw 4 cards, you have what I think may be the most evil version of Uno that can be played. We called it Thermo-Nuclear Uno (i.e. Mutually Assured Destruction) since you knew that dropping a Draw 4 would almost certainly lead to someone being buried in cards and it might even be you. Even if you manage to dodge the stack, payback is coming and you won’t get lucky every time. I can remember games that we would finally just quit after an hour since no one would ever be able lay down their last card. Merging two decks can make this even more brutal and cuts down on interplay shuffles too.