It isn’t just about ungoogling things though. Having a monoculture in the browser space means that if Google makes a push to favor ads, say by removing certain extension support from their browser engine that everyone uses, then the entire internet suffers. It is effectively a monopoly.

Mozilla tries really hard sometimes to be unappealing, but there is value in not just letting Google have full control over the internet.

I get conventional mail marked up like it is from the manufacturer claiming my warranty is expiring.

With the added fun bonus that all the things they claim to cover are engine related, and my car is an EV with no engine.

They’re just trying to keep government small and out of your business… or something

Person woman man camera TV

Wine/proton are great but not perfect. Lots of games don’t work through proton. “Compatible with linux” can mean doing the work to make sure your windows build is proton friendly and will work on Linux. It doesn’t have to mean Linux native.

Because otherwise if you have too many small letters in a row it stops looking like a plural and more like a misspelled word. Because capitalization differences you can make more sense of As but not so much as.

“This hardware works fine and even has compatible software that it works great with. But I’m going to prefer the broken software for other reasons. And that means it’s the hardware’s fault.”

Software that is built to be compatible with a wide variety of hardware should be compatible with a wide variety of hardware.

If software can’t handle a 16.5:16 aspect ratio, then that’s bad software. I don’t care how weird of a niche thing that is… just make your software abstract enough to handle those cases.

It’s 2024, any resolution/aspect ratio/DPI combo should be supportable. There’s enough variety of monitors out there that we should have a solution for handling things on the fly without needing to have a predefined solution.

The archinstall script has a list of “profiles” that you can select from (custom, desktop, minimal, server, tailored, xorg)… And if you select “desktop” it will prompt you which DE or WM you want to install. (awesome, bspwm, budgie, cinnamon, cosmic, cutiefish, deepin, enlightment, gnome, hyprland, i3, lxqt, mate, plasma, qtile, sway, xfce4).

By the time you’re done with the archinstall script, you basically have a fully functioning arch (ive never used the script seriously, so I have no idea what all remains not set up doing this).

The main difference between Arch and Ubuntu in this regard, is that if you want to run KDE Plasma, you download the common Arch ISO, and select Plasma at installation time. Compared to Ubuntu where you would download the “Kubuntu” spin, so you are selecting Plasma when you acquire the ISO in the first place.

There is no “default” arch DE, so when you install Arch, there is a lot of decisions to make (and you may not know how to make those decisions if its your first distro), whereas Ubuntu makes a lot of decisions for you, so you have to answer no questions to get set up (but you may be set up in a way you weren’t expecting). In this regard, Arch really does just feel like building a PC from parts, you just have to pick all the parts. Ubuntu is more like buying a pre-built.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

You’re not wrong, but a lot of time those webpages aren’t overengineered because the developer wanted it to be, but because the client kept making more and more demands.

If we assume “half a day” is 4 hours, and 500 pounds. That’s 125 pounds per hour. Which isn’t the worst rate. Assuming it’s actually capped at 4 hours and we all know that if it’s your dad’s friend, this is not going to be a set and forget kind of thing. So that 4 hours quickly becomes 10. And suddenly you’re down to 50 pounds per hour.

But ultimately, this isn’t even about the rate or how much time this will take. this whole scenario depends heavily on the son here. Is the son unemployed and living in dad’s basement for free? Then yeah. Sorry, he should probably take any work he can get for any rate he can get. His dad gets a lot more say in how things work financially if the son is relying on him financially. But if the son is already working a full time job and living in his own house? Then no, I don’t care what the rate is. Don’t commandeer other people’s time. Don’t make deals that people haven’t agreed to. Come to me with opportunities, not demands.

The “start button” is the kde plasma logo. So this would be Linux of some sort (makes sense given the community and what OP has said) and not windows

The question is just whether OP is using steamOS that comes on the deck (and uses KDE plasma for desktop mode) or if they have installed a different distro that fits the desktop use case a bit better.

I disagree with your definition of “killed Linux gaming.” It killed native Linux development perhaps. But using Linux for gaming is more viable than ever thanks to Valve. They single handedly boosted Linux gaming, if anything.

And they also offer more than the competition. For a while there games on EGS were just telling people to get support on steam forums because epic had nothing for supporting games they sold. Steam has forums, screenshot storage, achievements, remote play, friends lists, a shopping cart (🙄) and is adding new features like clips. I’m not using steam because it’s a monopoly, I’m using it because it’s a better platform.

Not the poster’s fault that Qualcomm has ridiculous chip names these days

Apparently it works retroactively and now you are on Windows.

Should they? Yes. They should also be searching for previous bug reports. I’m sure a lot of people do. But if you have enough users, even if 1% of people don’t use good reporting behaviors, you wind up with a lot of duplicate or bad reports.

There are plenty of blog posts out there that basically can be summarized as talking about how grueling open source work can be because users are often aggressive in their demands.

But this is a prime example of debian “stable” doesn’t mean “no crashes” but instead it means “unchanging, which means any bugs and crashes will remain for the whole release”

Except this isn’t true at all.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2024-6387

Regresshion impacted bookworm and trixie both. Buster was too old.

With the downside of me doing an apt update and seeing that openssh-server was on 1:9.2p1-2+deb12u3 and I had no idea at a glance if this included the fix or not (qualys’s page states version 8.5p1-9.8p1 were vulnerable).

If you are running debian bookworm or trixie, you absolutely should update your openssh-server package.

Because the dev gets a huge number of bug reports for bugs that were resolved 5 versions ago.

They actually asked debian to stop shipping the screensaver, because they were getting tired of saying “this is already fixed, debian is just not going to ship the fix for another year”. Debian didn’t want to stop, so the dev added the nag screen, because it was the only way to stop the flood of bug reports for things that were already fixed.

That didn’t take long.

my rant was not about your meme. But people actually use this argument seriously, and that frustrates me.

And I will admit that learning a new system has a time cost, but once you reach experience parity, the time cost per problem is less, and the number of problems is less. In that way, the “time spent” is an investment rather than wasted.

So A+ meme, it triggered me in all the ways it was supposed to.

Don’t have to spend time troubleshooting if you just never fix the BSOD and just kinda live with it. Point for windows