PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

By Betteridge’s law, the answer is no.

On a serious note, to the people who own these kinds of websites: find a more ethical way to make your money or go the fuck out of business.

deleted by creator

Yeah I know, that’s why I’m telling you now which door was picked (door #1 according to the caption on the Wikipedia page I stole borrowed this image from) 🙂

In search of a new car, the player chooses a door, say 1. The game host then opens one of the other doors, say 3, to reveal a goat and offers to let the player switch from door 1 to door 2.

I’ll show myself the door.

Do you want to pick door No. 2?

o7

To those on the other side, they think we mean “Get rid of all police, zero funding, go away”

It was literally “abolish the police”, but the shitlibs watered it down to nothing as usual.

If that happens then I swear to fucking God I’m done with YouTube forever.

Edit: i.e. if it breaks FreeTube, Invidious, Sponsorblock, etc. (because I’m already done with the main site forever) then I’m out. If the choice is between content vs no ads, I’ll take no ads even if it means no content.

Would be great for me and others who have trouble with body language. I could deepfake a version of myself with neurotypical body language and offload the effort of “acting normal” to the AI for interviews and video calls. Genuinely I’m super pumped for this.

Yeah my position is really to recommend any FOSS OS in the large over proprietary ones. However, since my experience is primarily with Linux distributions, and I do think that Linux makes sense for a lot of use cases, I usually start by talking about “Linux” first.

But, from my experience, if a “solution” to a problem “forces” the user to make a choice, then they’ll stick with what “currently works” over having to make a choice. So when I talk to people about Linux IRL, I typically direct them to Linux Mint directly, even though other distros exist and it actually doesn’t fit my use cases. Once they’re comfortable in the Linux ecosystem, they can switch to a different distro or OS family if they feel the need to do so.

I’m on Debian because the software in the Debian repos is stable. So for mission-critical software, at least for my purposes, I’ll pick the version in the Debian repo, especially if it requires detailed integration with the operating system such as real-time audio. If the software does get updated, it is probably important and nearly guaranteed not to break. A great example has been KDE Plasma: I don’t get the bleeding-edge features, but it’s been a rock-solid, fast, still modern desktop environment on every computer I installed it on, including an old laptop that is so underpowered that Windows 10 is a Power-Point presentation upon a fresh restart. If Debian takes several months or longer to update it’s Plasma packages to Plasma 6 when it comes out next year, that would be fine for me because I don’t desperately need any new features from Plasma.

However, for software that really benefits from being up-to-date and isn’t a showstopper if it breaks, for example FreeTube, I prefer the Flatpak. I primarily use Discover for simple package management and upgrades, and it was trivial to install the Flatpak backend, so now my Flatpaks get updated like anything else. However, Librewolf (a browser, which I prefer to keep up-to-date) is installed from a non-Flatpak external repo because I had problems giving its Flatpak version webcam permissions (even if I enabled them in Flatseal).

AppImages have been great for working on new computers because I can (usually) just download them and go. Except for programs that I expect to be portable, I don’t typically use them in the long haul. Still, they’re super convenient to have around.

I don’t touch Snaps because of the closed-source backend and their role in Canonical’s transparent attempt to lock down Ubuntu, but if they open-source the backend I might consider trying them.

IMO part of why I’ve stuck with Linux is because there is (usually) a choice of how to compute. I.e., there are several ways to solve a problem where Windows or Mac would pigeonhole you into their workflow. Having multiple options is inherently a good thing as far as I’m concerned, even if I don’t use all of them.

See that’s what I thought, and that’s what I got from simulating both systems in the virtual machine, but on my particular hardware LXQT ran a tad bit faster. I tried a few straight-up WM’s but I didn’t like them. On my main PC, which is about five years old, LXQT ran about as fast as KDE and LXDE was predictably wicked fast.

I’m reinstalling Linux onto a legitimate hard drive (it was on a microSD). I’ll install both again and see what happens. Although really, I just need enough to run TeamViewer so I can control my other machines from there.

Tl;Dr: it’s not as hard as you think.

I just jumped over to Linux in June. I booted into the Debian Live USB with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. In general, make sure you have an Ethernet connection available for the first install. I basically tried it out in the live environment for a few days and I fell in love with it, in particular KDE Plasma. I picked Debian because I prefer not to update my PC very often (or at all on my music production computer), plus I had a nice time with the Raspberry Pi, which uses a derivative of Debian. If I really need the absolute newest version of any specific software, I have no problem installing it from a .deb and I can usually compile from source if the project is decently documented, but if you absolutely do not want to do that, you might want to pick a different distro. Whatever distro you pick, you’ll be able to install KDE Plasma later. KDE had all the features I actually liked from Windows 10, but just better and more customizable. You can really make KDE work for almost any workflow.

I ended up installing it onto my music PC in a dual-boot configuration with my existing Windows 7 install. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to migrate my music production projects off Windows 7 because I was sloppy over the course of a decade with project directory structures and multiple drives, so I probably can’t move these projects to any OS until I put in a few weeks of work to actually organize all those files. Oh well; everything else can work with Linux.

I’ve gotten pretty far so far by just installing Wine and Proton and using my existing Windows programs through those compatibility layers.

I also dropped Debian onto my school/work laptop in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 10. Except for the background, which I decided to make different, KDE is almost indistinguishable from Windows 10 until I start to use it, which reminds me how much nicer KDE is to use.

Most distros have live USBs with easy installers that make the whole process really painless. I basically installed Debian in the background while watching TV (Invidious), all inside the live install.

I also put Debian with LXQT on the remains of my old highschool PC, basically just a motherboard with integrated graphics, RAM, CPU, and case; no hard drive, no external graphics. I just put Debian onto a microSD card [1] and told the BIOS to look there for bootable drives. No commitment. As much as I love KDE, it does require non-trivial resources to exist. Since that hardware is over a decade old now, I really can’t afford to give any of it to a desktop environment.

So if you really can’t commit to Linux, you can slap it onto a large microSD and tell your BIOS/UEFI to boot it. It’s a little slower than putting on a drive, but sufficient to give Linux an extended test-drive.

You could also try installing it in a virtual machine. Linux plays very nicely with Virtualbox. I picked LXQT for my old PC by installing a virtual machine with Debian and installing a bunch of desktop environments onto the system. Then, I cut back the number of cores, processor speed, and RAM available to see how they acted.

My point is, I really think it’s a good idea to try Linux now. It really will not take very long to get a great, usablr system, and you can make it yours by making little changes as you go along.

[1] Meaning, I used a live install USB to install to a separate microSD card. A live install loads the entire OS and any programs you install into RAM. In general, the content of the live USB isn’t changed, and it’s difficult to do so. What I did was to treat the microSD card as a hard drive and install a normal system.

The problem there is likely to be funding: you’re going to have a hard time finding an investor to dump money into creating something that already exists, and it’s difficult to spin “open hardware” as a selling point to businessmen.

I think it would be really cool if someone came up with an open source full design. An example where this actually happened is those cheap transistor testers you can find all over eBay and Amazon. I’d be willing to be that “someone” someday, but my current focus is on getting my first job so I can’t do it right now.

Does anyone else think there might be a market for open-hardware, “not-enshittified” printers?