It skips the step where you have to sift through a bunch of results and determine “is this what I was looking for?” and “how does this apply to my specific context?”

Right: it skips the part where human intelligence and critical thinking is applied. Do you not understand how that’s a fucking problem‽

Looking up a list of resources that you then evaluate yourself is very categorically different from getting an “answer” from a bot.

That screenshot looks familiar. I think I may have owned that game (on my Tandy 1000, BTW) but barely ever played it.

Considering the kinds of questions OP was asking, which group does it sound like he falls into?

With computer stuff, you can do even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

TL;DR: your documentation and your shell script (sequence of console commands you run to accomplish the task) can be the same file.

(Dunno what kind of chemistry you do, but you may have already come across this concept in the form of Jupyter notebooks or something like that.)

While I’m at it, I’d also like to mention Ansible and Git, for when you really want to keep good records and have a reproducible setup. Don’t worry about them immediately as it’s probably too overwhelming to learn all at once, but keep 'em in the back of your mind for later.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to get by just trusting any particular guide without developing at least some actual understanding of the concepts underlying what you’re doing. The field is just too wide and rapidly changing for any source of info to be authoritative (and stay authoritative indefinitely after the guide is written), so it’s super important to develop the skill of looking up multiple different and possibly conflicting approaches to the task, thinking critically about them, and then synthesizing your own approach that works for your specific situation.

Considering how few references there were in the post

Why use many words when few words do trick?

The Ukraine war started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea.

That’s one chimp’s kink, not a trend.

Also, I did not expect to write that sentence.

Flash was also cancer that ruined web pages.

The reason Java Web Start wasn’t, was specifically because once you clicked on the link, it downloaded the app and started it as a real desktop application, with its own window and taskbar entry and whatnot. It didn’t rely on being embedded in HTML (I’m specifically not talking about Java applets, BTW – they sucked too) or manipulating the DOM for its UI; it could use Swing and have the same look and feel as a native application.

At this point, Canonical is so desperate that even if you try to use apt on the command line to install certain packages it’ll override it to install the snap version anyway:

$ apt search firefox

firefox/oracular,now 1:1snap1-0ubuntu6 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  Installs Firefox snap and provides some system integration

Shoulda been something more like Java Web Start.

to make pages run faster and better.

Huh, well that’s a funny way of saying “break the model of web page as document and fuck up the entire web!”

You can tell there ought to be substructures because he used comments to label the different groups. That’s a code smell right there.

As a DS9 fan, to me that sounds way meaner than you probably intended.

As far as I know, I’ve only installed Flatpaks using the terminal. The most annoying thing about them for me is having to type out the fully-qualified name of the software (e.g. org.mozilla.firefox instead of just firefox), which is a very terminal-specific issue, LOL!

War with who? I’m posting this from Kubuntu and I’d happily agree with you that Snap should fuck off and die. (In particular, the backend being controlled by Canonical makes it objectively bad compared to Flatpak.) Even among people like me who tolerate Snap (for now…), I really don’t think you’re gonna find anybody who actually likes it, let alone enough to champion it.

Can’t start a war when there’s a consensus!

You can download an stl for the battery cover.

The hackability and first-party endorsement thereof was another big underappreciated feature of the Steam Controller.

I am confused both about why immigrants would want to go to the UK in the first place instead of staying in France, and about why French police wouldn’t be perfectly happy to see them go and let the UK deal with them.

If you think that’s bad, imagine an equivalently-accessorized Game Gear.