Im griechischen Nationalpark Dadia sind die Leichen von 18 Menschen gefunden worden, die offenbar infolge der schweren Waldbrände starben. Auch in anderen Teilen des Landes breiten sich die seit Tagen wütenden Feuer weiter aus.

Never before in my life have I encountered revolving doors so often as in Germany, and every time I have to use one, I wonder what's exactly the point.

Any ideas? The only think I can think of is that they slow down people on purpose, for crowd control.

Likely also for energy efficiency, but then the double doors system that I'm use to seems more efficient and probably cheaper than revolving doors.

Edit: And in the end, it's back to good old Fedora with Xfce. I guess I'm an old man, fixed in my ways. Haiku was interesting, but not nearly as stable as needed. OpenSuSE with Xfce was rough, it requires more polish.

I've been a Fedora Linux user for a million years by now, and I haven't touched any other OS (outside of Windows 10 and 11 at work).

Lately I got a refurbished ThinkCentre from ca 2018 (7th generation Intel i5, 16GB RAM, Intel HD 630). The initial idea was to use it as a media PC but the small form factor ended up not being small enough for my living room.

Now I'm thinking of using it as a desktop PC for a while, to see if it can make my laptop be a portable machine again instead of always plugged, always on. If it doesn't work out, I'll use it as a home server.

Since this is all an experiment, I want to give a new OS a shot before I settle for the familiar Fedora.

OpenSuSE is the first on my list, but even from the LiveUSB I noticed that the software selection is more limited than I'm used to.

I'm thinking of giving HaikuOS a shot as well.

What else has been going on in the world of free OSes since 2007? What's one that you are excited about?

In the more active version of this community, there's a long back and forth of posts between people who need to demonstrate to others that moving to Germany was the best thing they did in their life and anyone who doesn't feel the same is doing something wrong, and of course also the inverse - that moving to Germany was the worst choice they made and that everyone else is deflecting criticism.

I have to admit that I don't get it. To me it feels very obvious that living everywhere require making trade-offs and that the balance is very individual.

I don't see for example why I should gush about Germany at every turn or try to prove that someone is objectively wrong if they find Germany unliveable for themselves. At the same time, I don't understand why someone would find it sensible to tell me "leave if you don't like it" when I express a criticism. A place doesn't have to be perfect for me to want to live there. It just needs to give me a more favourable balance of pros to cons.

So, we are a younger community here, with less historical memes and reflexes. Perhaps that can be some sort of reality check for me. Do you feel strongly that moving here was great or horrible for you?

I have been living with depression since a teenager and after so many years, I recently finally started receiving psychotherapy (CBT). While I'm already seeing some modest changes in my thinking patterns, my therapist noted that in the last few weeks the severity of the condition is worsening and it might be a good time to talk with my primary care provider about antidepressants as a combination therapy.

This got a reaction out of me, specifically that I don't like the idea of chemically altering my mental state and losing access to what "I really feel" (as I perceive it).

I know that the logic behind this sentiment is not very solid, but we can't reason ourselves out of our feelings that easily. For me this is also challenging because I don't take any recreational substances that affect my mental state, so I can't tell to myself that it's like e.g. smoking weed only more targeted and supervised.

I'm curious if this sentiment is familiar to anyone else, and how you dealt with it (whether you decided for or against medication).

In support forums people naturally only share negative experiences because making a post to say "things worked out more or less as I expected them" is weird.

It does seem though that some people do not correct for that negativity bias, so I'll just share today's experience that left me thinking "boy, Deutsche Bahn definitely has a room to improve on this area but even if their processes are inefficient, they did offer us the solution we wanted!!11elf"

Me, a friend and a dog have a trip abroad coming up, and we have booked our two-way tickets through bahn.de but with paper tickets (because dog tickets were not normally available as eTickets when we first booked).

Very recently the situation changed so that we had to return to Germany on different dates and so we wanted to modify the booking so that one of the return Sparpreis fares and reservation are cancelled and refunded.

The bahn.de website would only allow us to cancel the entire journey (all individuals, both directions). That was somewhat inconvenient but taking a trip to the Central Station was also an opportunity to go out of the house a bit anyway.

At the Travel Centre, the worker initially told us that our request is possible, but then she noticed that the system wouldn't let her made the modification to the booking. At that point, after consulting with her more qualified co-workers, she let us know that we cannot modify the booking in such a targeted way because our booking through bahn.de was done through a different DB subsidiary than the subsidiary they work for. That is ridiculous.

The two workers then told us that what they can do for us is cancel the entire return leg of the journey (for all three) and they will post a refund request to the other subsidiary on our behalf. Then, we can on the spot re-book our new return tickets on our new desired dates. That works for us, but we did remark that someone without the financial buffer to wait for the refund while also buying new tickets would be under a lot of stress at that point.

During the rebooking process we did feel a bit left out of the loop because we expected that now we would be paying last-minute Flexpreis fares and there was a financial boundary we didn't want to cross, but at the end of the process we were offered Flexpreis fares at the price of our original Sparpreis tickets, so we did not suffer any financial consequences (although we expect that the refund will be reduced by 10 EUR for the administrative fee as the terms and conditions for Sparpreis tickets clearly mention). It appears that the Travel Centre had access to a contingent of cheaper Flexpreis tickets that aren't available on bahn.de - perhaps exactly for situations like ours.

The two workers were extremely patient with all our questions during the whole process since we wanted to get every detail correct during the destructive operation of cancelling the tickets and above all make sure that the dog doesn't end up "having" to take a different train if we couldn't rebook on the original connection. The main worker helping us even thanked us for our attention to details, because --I think-- she almost did make a mistake at one point during the rebooking but we caught it early (she didn't outright admit it though).

So, what's this pointless non-rant about? I guess it's that DB's corporate structure and processes are unnecessarily complicated and the people who are trying to help you have to jump through a lot of hoops to offer you the solution that they also recognise you should get.

We were lucky to come across two workers that took all the time necessary to get us to where we needed to be at the end and do so without directing their frustration at the utterly broken process towards us for asking them to carry out. Honestly, I don't think we'd have the patience for this if it was our job.

We still think that at every step of this non-ordeal, DB Corporate could have made very simple business decisions that could cut the effort required down.

And I still think that it's just weird to make posts to say how things are "mostly okay, but could be better".

The ever-increasing availability is definitely one of the upsides of Germany for someone like me, who enjoys the taste of beer but has to avoid alcohol for medical reasons

So, I will make no secret that I'm rolling my eyes at all of that marketing stuff that goes up every year. But I've been thinking, it doesn't have to be so superficial and pointless. Maybe there's some rare exception out there that took the opportunity to say or do something meaningful.

Did you come across a company or organisation lately that use the occasion to take some stance beyond feelgood buzzwords or implement a policy internally or in their area of operations that is of at least some importance?