According to the best school playground scientists of the time, opening a packet of crisps upside down (i.e. so the branding/writing is upside down, and you open the bottom of the packet, at the top) actually “made you gay”.

It wasn’t just gay if you did it, but it would literally cause a spontaneous eruption of gayness in whoever did it - who would be permanently gay from that point onwards.

In the 1990s in the UK, it was gay to wear a backpack using both shoulder straps (as opposed to using one strap over one shoulder, which was the heterosexual way to carry things to school).

I genuinely didn’t realise that! It looked like they were missing, and just had the little nubs underneath.

Would you perhaps like to imagine they were missing, if only for the sake of my previous comment? :)

How often do you write the word “wads”? I can see a potential problem.

All three of ours play fetch, but only with specific objects. They’re all brothers about 2½ years old.

The tabby cat plays fetch with fluffy toy balls with feathers on them, the grey cat plays fetch with spare cat collars and the little black cat plays fetch with menthol sweet wrappers.

Sorry, I might have misremembered the exact process (this was probably three or four years ago), though no need for the nasty aggressive attitude (though my apologies if I offended you somehow).

Maybe it was version upgrades (e.g 18.04 to 20.04) instead of updates, or clean installs/new installs/reinstalls? I expect it was some of one and some of another.

At the time I used to (casually) maintain a bunch of Ubuntu computers for a few community projects, small organisations and older people who live nearby. I don’t remember the specifics, I just remember the phone calls of “the printer isn’t working” “Linux has broken my USB pen” etc, and the fix being “remove the snap version and install the deb version”. It caused a lot of problems.

If you were running a previous version of Ubuntu, where you had deb packages which worked, over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you), which were unable to see additional hard drives, USB pens, printers, scanners or cameras, couldn’t use plug-ins, couldn’t use 3rd party templates or presets, and didn’t respect any system settings for fonts/text size, icon placement and so on.

Snaps were fine for “aisleriot solitaire” or “calculator” (assuming you didn’t mind a 5 minute loading time) or other things which didn’t need to interact with any file or system or device, but for actual programs for people trying to do work? Bag of shite.

Now, I imagine some years later they must have fixed some of this rubbish, and I read recently they might have finally done something about permissions, but no, they didn’t ask anyone before they swapped working programs for completely broken snaps. They forced it on their existing users, and some of us bear grudges.

I miss lovely, earthy, warm, friendly chocolatey Brownbuntu.

I always felt purplebuntu was a bit vile.

I’m sure it’s not possible for everyone - but I essentially did this some years back - though more with Premiere than Photoshop - and therefore more Cinelerra/Kdenlive than Gimp/Krita.

I ran a dual boot system from about 2008 until about 2015. If it could be done in Linux/FOSS, it was. If it couldn’t, it was done in Windows/Adobe software.

I was self-employed, though I often did subcontracting work for a handful of media/umbrella organisations - so sometimes I had to use Premiere or Sony Vegas to carry on half-done projects I was handed.

Bear in mind this was when you bought Adobe software and didn’t rent it - and you could also keep running an older version for years.

Anyway, over time I used the Windows partition less and less, until I got rid of it entirely when I got a new computer.

I had to work a bit harder one year, and I did miss out on a few projects - but mostly, I could do everything I could do previously, but it took a bit longer for a while until I adjusted to a different workflow.

After that, you’re just saying “That’s a £2000 job”, “That’s a £200 job”, and meeting a deadline. Nobody really cares if it took 7 minutes longer to do, and I saved a lot of time not using Windows any more.

Editing (and other design stuff) is a far smaller part of my overall work these days, but I still do a good chunk of projects over the year, and I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 10 years. No regrets.

To a lot of laptop manufacturers, it certainly seems that way as of late - that’s why I’m ever hopeful that a modular laptop, such as the framework, might give us the option of how we want to control a mouse cursor.

Fingers crossed for a touchpad with physical buttons.

To a degree, yes, but don’t expect magic. Some laptops have a waterproof membrane under the keyboard, so if you’re lucky, and it does, you may be able to just pop the keys off and dry the membrane out, and make sure no liquid creeps round the side into the electronics.

Otherwise you may have better odds if you open up the case and mop up any/all loose liquid you can get to with a microfibre cloth, as soon as possible, then try and let it air dry for a while.

A sealed bag with dried rice and your electronic object may absorb a bit of leftover moisture, but only to the extent that it will equal the moisture level in the sealed bag - the dried rice will gain a little extra moisture, the object will lose that bit of extra moisture.

Try to resist the urge to turn it on to check if it’s working until you’ve got all the moisture out.

It’s a good plan for a more professional setup, but in this distinctly unprofessional setup, if I did it remotely, I wouldn’t get my chat and a cup of tea and biscuit :)

I can’t personally, but I’ve installed/set up Linux systems for quite a lot of older people, and I think only one of them ever uses the terminal for anything. The rest just… use the computer.

On the whole, they’re pretty much just using Libreoffice, Firefox and a few other bits these days. If something needs the terminal to fix, we’re already past the point where they’ve phoned me to pop round and fix it.

These used to be Ubuntu systems, but I switched them all to Mint after having endless Snap permission problems with printers, USB sticks and other peripherals. Once up and running, it’s pretty low maintenance.

I guess they don’t need to use the terminal, because I’ll go and do it if it’s necessary - but we are looking at once every few years. Not a lot of tech support needed.

On my own machine, I probably use the terminal every day.

Awesome. That’s definitely my kind of thing, and I maybe I can nudge a few folks to post some stuff :)

It seems mostly digital/programming/random based stuff from the examples - though by the description above (and wikipaedia’s definition) it sounds like you’d also take more traditional algorithmically generated geometric abstract paintings? i.e. a painting produced following a very strict algorithm/sequence/permutation?

That’s okay, you can still install Linux on Apple computers 👍

In the UK it seems like we only have three channels these days:

1. BBC iPlayer
2. Channel 4 On Demand
3. Piracy

Wigan, North West England. Good at Rugby League and Pies.

Your can conjure them up quite easily.

1. Go to Steam Forums for a game that doesn’t support Linux
2. Post a new thread, politely asking about the possibility of native Linux support
3. A Windows fanboy appears to tell you that you are wrong
4. Warning: Since the introduction of the Steam Deck, it’s a bit harder to conjure up a Windows fanboy on the Steam forums, so you might have to try on a couple of game forums to conjure up your Windows fanboy.