In the 90s during the first “mild hype”, I had Suse for quite a while, twice. Same problem with unavailable software though, I remember PGP Disc not being available back then. I remember the cool kids talking about Red Hat and Debian, you must have been one of them.

Probably going back now, since my 2011 hardware won’t work with Windows 11.

• One important metric: m³ / (hour*$), so how much it can filter for how much money
• Also the volume on the setting that gives the filtration power needed. Often it is best to get a bigger one, run on middle or low level, especially for office or bedroom.
• How much m³ / hour overall? When it is against dust, allergens, pm2.5 etc., filtering your room volume once per hour is decent. To protect from viral infections, e. g. at a dentist or doctor, 6x the volume of the room is ideal. For private use, it’s nice when it can do once per hour on a lower setting, and for occasional parties 6x of that on a high, loud setting to avoid spread of viruses.

Pretty good for your money is the Corsi-Rosenthal Box mentioned already. As for things that don’t require assembly, Trotec beats all prices in Germany, e. g. the 250E or 350E: https://de.trotec.com/shop/design-luftreiniger-airgoclean-250-e.html That would provide more than you need for typical home use already. For a single room such as your bedroom, you can get something really decent for less than $250.

The ones that are below HEPA standard are not as bad as somebody mentioned, imo. Against many things, such as dust or allergens, they should be fine. I’m buying only HEPA filters myself, though; doesn’t really save much otherwise.

I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.

At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)

I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.

In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.

I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.

IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.

Just my last two orders:

• expensive quality Covid test -> get the cheapest, which stopped working properly at Alpha / Beta
• 3M respirators for $ 4 a piece -> a literal fake, hard to see, but it breaks already when putting on. 1 hour in support chat to convince them that something is wrong, but only got my money back, no investigation into the seller or product

I will stay there for now though, because it’s still a great software, easy to use

Covid has already been proven to be a contributor as well: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.16966