I switched from LastPass to Bitwarden, years ago now, and the whole process took roughly 5 minutes. I'm not sure if something has changed since then, or if it's more complicated to switch to something other than Bitwarden, but my experience is that it at least can be simple.

I don't have a fun and entertaining way, but I wanted to put in two cents anyway. My husband DMs frequently, and regularly has players miss sessions. Life gets in the way, whatever, no biggie. He always explains players being gone as a story that is told long after it happened - different people remember things slightly differently, sometimes they remember certain important figures being there and sometimes they don't. They might even argue about it, ten years down the line. To him, every session is just another chapter in a story, told by imperfect people with imperfect memories.

I know people have already said it, but Mint is very possibly what you want. I'm not super tech savvy (although I am surrounded by programmers in my personal life) and my husband recommended Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment for me. It almost felt too much like Windows, at first! I was looking for a big change, and didn't find it there. With that said, I have grown quite attached to it.

Things are largely easy, even for me. For most programs, installing is as simple as downloading a .deb file and running it, much like running a .exe for installation on Windows. I very, very rarely have to touch my terminal, and when I do, it's because I'm doing some unnecessary nonsense, and I have a guide up to tell me exactly what to enter. The GUI has been great for me for navigating files, handling various settings, etc etc.

In terms of gaming, Steam will use Proton by default. It's their own creation, and frankly, it's very good. When it isn't good enough, there are custom versions of Proton, which is a little more complicated but still relatively easy. For games that aren't on Steam, I've used Lutris with largely good results. The only times I run into issues are with anti-cheat, which largely does not work well with Linux. If you want to find out how much of your Steam library would work, you can try protondb.com, which has a handy tool for figuring out how many things from your library will work, and to what degree. Lutris has something similar in their own website, lutris.net, as well.

This comment ended up being a lot longer than I expected, but I hope there's at least something helpful in here! Whether you end up with Mint and/or Cinnamon or not, I hope everything goes well in your search for the right distro and desktop environment!

Someone posted a link to a Mastodon post (edit: found the post) from the admins at lemmy.world which basically stated that they would take a "wait and see" approach. I can't find the post right this moment but I'll keep looking. In any case, it seems lemmy.world will not be defederating, at least until Meta does something bad enough, whatever that may be.

I also saw a post from vlemmy.net about having to defederate from another instance, and the whole post was extremely transparent and well put together. I suspect they will not be defederating from Meta, as it seems that they don't want to defederate from anyone, barring laws being broken. With that said, they seem to be based in Ireland and I'm not sure whether they'll have to defederate from Threads for legal reasons or not.

There was a comment somewhere that had a list of servers that had already taken the stance of federating when possible, had not taken a stance at all, and had preemptively defederated. I'll see if I can find that one for you, as well. I misremembered, it was a list of Mastodon servers, not Lemmy.

I'm not sure if this is helpful, but I hope it at least points you in the right general direction! I'm in kind of the opposite boat from you - I am disappointed that lemmy.world will be federation with Threads, so now I'm poking around to find someplace that suits me better. It can be challenging figuring out where instances stand!

Right, but my assumption - and maybe it's totally wrong - is that people probably follow multiple related communities, whether they're small or not, to get multiple sources of similar info. If that's the case, your bot effectively just spams their feeds. It sounds like your fix in your #1 may change that, which is nice.

Either way, I could see an argument for a ban being too strong a reaction. Especially because it's easy enough to block a bot as a user - I've blocked a few already.

I don't have an answer, but I do have a question: what is the purpose of posting across multiple communities? I've been scrolling through my "all" feed and have seen several posts by your bot, mostly with the same title and link. It's annoying, but I would've personally just blocked your bot in the next half hour or so, I wouldn't have reported or expected to see it banned.

Oh, that definitely makes sense. I switched away as concerns around third-party trackers came up, in 2021. If I'd only been able to export a CSV with a few rows, I'd have been upset about it.

This is so neat, I love it! Thank you for sharing!