Peruvian_Skies

Possibly stupid question: if they found out that people were doing illegal stuff on it, doesn’t that mean that they were monitoring people’s conferences? I thought that the FOSS community was big on privacy.

Good, maybe in two or three more years Windows 11 will be useable. Right on time for Windows 12 to roll out and drag Microsoft users back to the Stone Age again.

Danke schön. I find this a very reasonable way to go about it.

Should cars be required by law not to let you drive to drug deals? Should glasses be required by law not to let you read banned books? Should testicles be required by law not to produce government-unsanctioned sperm?

I like this. Where is “here”?

Stats.FM is another good one. It shows you all sorts of statistics on what you listen to, which you can filter by time period and use to find new music.

What are you talking about? I can still access my files just fine.

Just grip them real tight in your hand until they stop vibrating.

There are so many games out there and my waitlist has already grown so long that I feel no problem in completely ignoring any game that has Denuvo. Odds are it’d be so long before I got around to it that the hype would be gone anyway.

This comment reads like a deconstructionist modern art piece.

My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I dual-booted for over a decade and even went back to just using Windows for a while before finally making the full switch. I think I spent two or three years without using my Windows partition before deciding to give Windows one last chance, which lasted a month, then wiping it and sticking to EndeavourOS for my daily driver/gaming desktop and vanilla Arch Linux on my laptop.

For a desktop environment, I suggest xfce or lxde. They’re very lightweight. As for the distro, all the ones you mentioned are Ubuntu-based. Even though there are some lightweight Ubuntu-based distros, like Zorin and Bodhi, you can do better. I’d suggest going for something lighter, such as the Arch-based EndeavourOS (xcfe is the default DE so it’s very well-supported).

Now, if you want something even more lightweight that’s still Debian-based like Ubuntu, Mint et al., take a look at BunsenLabs Linux. It’s blazing fast, extremely light and very user-friendly. It doesn’t use a traditional desktop environment. Instead, it uses the Openbox window manager, which requires much less resources - especially RAM, which seems like it’ll be the bottleneck on your laptop.

Unless the components of your antenna stick out from inside the case and rust, I’m pretty sure that’s not true.

I’ve had a total of four smartphones starting in 2012. The reasons for my three upgrades were, in chronological order: battery degradation, theft and battery degradation. I’m hoping that the next one is battery degradation too.

Regarding your 1-year justification, I do spend all day on my phone. It just happens that it’s already more than good enough for my needs. The OLED screen is sharp and doesn’t tire the eyes, the size is great for my hands, the storage space is sufficient and the camera is as good as you can expect a camera with a tiny photoreceptor to be.

<rant> I use my phone’s camera a lot, but the marketing gimmick of just upping the megapixel count and barely anything else means that smartphone cameras have effectively been the same for years. Which is why this ugly trend of multi-camera phones came around as well. My 24 megapixel Nikon camera delivers much better images than my 64 megapixel phone. The best way to improve picture quality in phone cameras would be to increase the size of the light-sensitive surface, not just to subdivide it into more and smaller pixels. But that would require a larger distance between the photoreceptor and the lens, which means a thicker phone.

And since by some divine decree phones must continue to become thinner and thinner until they can double as razor blades, that’s never happening. Thicker phones could also mean larger batteries, a more comfortable grip, better impact resistance, the return of the headphone jack, more easily replaceable components (battery especially), better heat dissipation and more, but who cares about making a product that’s actually better when instead you can aim for a paper-thin sheet of overheated components with a transparent battery that lasts twelve minutes and a 128-gigapixel sensor where each pixel is as wide as an anorexic electron and half the processing power is used to reduce noise in the ISO 9000000 setting required for that sensor to actually register a visible amount of light? And then you take your wire-thin phone and put a huge kevlar case on it so that you can actually hold it without cutting your fingers and it doesn’t shatter into dust when you drop it. </rant>

SUSE-Powered Enterprise Linux. Tagline: It spells SPEL.

Doesn’t that result in a lot of wasted space from duplicated dependencies? Don’t get me wrong, this looks great on paper, which is why I desperately need to find fault with it before I start distrohopping again.

Each snap is mounted as its own filesystem, which is messy for several reasons (try making sense of the output of lsblk on your system). Flatpaks don’t do that, though they sandbox in other ways. There really isn’t a “Flatpak hell”, the worst that can happen is packages that depend on different versions of the same library taking up a lot of storage space, which is a problem with snaps too.

I still prefer to rely on official repos but I do use a few Flatpaks here and there. But one of the main reasons why I don’t run Ubuntu is because of Canonical’s aggressive pushing of snaps.

I get your perspective. The halos of predatory shit are everywhere. Extended warranties, maintenance for pretty much any mechanical device - it costs a fortune to tune a piano -, snake oil salesmen and salesmen of legitimate products and services upselling you on a more expensive option that you don’t need because you don’t know better. It’s bad, it’s slimy, and you’re right that if everyone took the time to learn the basic skillset associated with one area, it’d go away.

But there’s just too many areas for that to be feasible. I can do the absolute basics when it comes to my car and bike, I can fend for myself very well where most electronic devices I use are concerned and I happen to have gone to Law school, so there’s an entire industry of parasites that I’m lucky to know my way around. But that still leaves anything to do with home maintenance/improvement, furniture, healthcare, veterinary healthcare, financial services, diet, exercise regimes and Zeus knows what else I’ll have to deal with in my life where I know jack and people who know more than me can still take advantage. It’s too much to expect any one person to know everything.

I’m getting PTSD flashbacks to that stupid “Gen Z can’t use rotary phones” video. Guess what, they can’t start a fire by rubbing sticks together either, and neither can I. We don’t have to. People who want to work with technology will learn to do so or they won’t be able to find or keep a job. This isn’t just a non-problem, it’s a non-problem that has existed since the first Homo Erectus learned to sharpen a rock and immediately started bitching at all the other Homo Erecti for being stupid and using blunt rocks.

I’m not talking about it because I use an OS that treats me as its owner rather than as someone it’s doing a huge favor to just by letting me log in.