Atomic systems or rpm-ostree is an interesting concept and may well be the future of distributing linux, but it has a lot of compromises. It may not be the first place to start when leaving windows.

The problem is all the apps and things you may wish to do with your OS. Flatpak is the preferred method of installing apps as it doesn't interfere with the OS, but that is a compromise that means more overhead for running apps including memory and disk space, and less integration with the host OS than traditional apps.

You can overlay native apps but the more you overlay onto the immutable os, the more complex upgrading gets and the risks of breaking stuff.

I'm not sure I would be starting with an immutable OS when switching away from windows. While it has a lot of theoretical benefits, its a work in progress and with significant compromises at the moment. Your VPN may just be the first of many programmes you find you need to overlay.

I personally would look at a more traditional install, get it working how you like and if you find Linux works as a permanent home then think about how you might recreate that with an immutable OS base. If your needs a re very simple then maybe it'll be easy, but if you're using lots of software and tools (particularly if its not available Flatpak) or custom OS config you may find atomic desktops are not yet quite ready for you.

It could be frustrating and off putting if you try linux immutable, find loads of problems and attribute that to linux when its actually the immutable OS that's the cause.

Interesting headline - its disconnected from the content of the article. Most of it is about how broken the US electoral system is.

The important point is that an electoral and political system that was designed to protect from the "tyranny of the majority" has instead created a system perpetuating the tyranny of the minority.

Americans are indoctrinated to think theirs in the greatest country on earth from a very young age. But the political system is an absolute mess - the electoral college, the senate (which is totally skewed in favour of small states), the supreme court and politicised legal system, and the embedded 2 party system.

Trump isn't a threat to democracy. Democracy in the US has been dead for a long while now. It vaguely worked when there was a post war consensus but now it's completely log jammed. And nobody has a plan to fix it because they can't.

And there is the problem laid bare - there are too many people associated with the campaign who have a vested interest in it continuing, and are unable or unwilling to step back and listen.

Its been blindingly obvious for the last 18 months that Biden is a very bad choice for the democratic nomination. But the entire discourse has been dominated by an attitude that if you don't support biden, you're basically support trump.

It is the Biden supporters who are going to hand the presidency on a silver platter to Trump.

They need to step back and look at the bigger picture. This is not just some Republican talking point to reflexively ignore and fight against. Biden IS too old, and he DOES come across as confused. And he is making trump look better by comparison - he is lowering the bar of expectation and scrutiny of trump because the focus is on Bidens age and mental capacity.

The democrats have to ditch biden right now and begin the urgebt search for a better, younger candidate to unite behind. Its already very late in the day but every day they continue with Biden is another wasted.

Well they said themselves why there is not a focus on desktop apps: web apps work well. I use proton calendar for my personal calendar. For work I use outlook. For both I access via phone apps or web browser on my desktop.

The big problem with calendar desktop apps is not the apps, it's how they sync and share. You have either ICS or caldav.

The biggest problem is Microsoft Office. It partially supports ICS and is a nightmare to work with Exchange calendars. Most Microsoft clients (84% apparently) are hosted in Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft is removing EWS support in 2026 (which Thunderbird is working to support). Microsoft's own Graph api for cloud access is limited preventing some basic desktop features.

So existing calendar software is fine if you use good services that support standards. Its bad if you're locked into the proprietary Microsoft ecosystem. Mac calendar tools will hit the same problems in 2026 when EWS support is dropped.

There is basically no incentive to work on these tools with Exchange because its a deliberately walled garden. But Thunderbird and other desktop calendar apps are decent, they just don't support Outlook/Exchange.

Its on businesses to challenge why Microsoft keeps their data walled within a proprietary system. Security may be an argument but that's a little flimsy when you see how very senior outlook accounts have been accessed by hackers and Microsoft has been keeping it quiet. Theyve only started contacting people now to tell them their emails maybhave been accessed after a major hack last year. And were talking CEO level account access.

This is great, Locomotion was a good game in its own right. Hopefully this will be an opportunity to change and fix the game a little going forward - its a game that never quite reached its full potential although already a good game.

Thanks for sharing! I'm going to download it and try it with my gog version. Its 80% off now on fog now BTW.

I disagree - Outlook is a walled garden of closed standards, and it makes users vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft or dependent entirely on their office ecosystem.

The recent outlook hack with senior accounts hacked and only being informed by Microsoft of the hack 1 year later is a good example.

Outlook is superficially good but essentially big businesses and organisations are locked in to a proprietary system for email and calendars and entirely reliant on Microsoft to keep their data secure.

I'm actually surprised Antitrust laws aren't used to break up the Office 365 monopoly. Only the teams integration is being challenged but the tight integration between Outlook, Office and OneDrive is monopolistic. Other services could integrate in the same way if Microsoft was forced to open up its APIs, which would be good for competition and customers.

At the moment you pretty much have to go all in with Office or forgo major integration benefits if you want to use different cloud or mail services. Why do you need 1 single provider for office software, mail and cloud storage?

The thing about inflation is the food is not expensive, its the value of money that's gone down. Its salaries that are way too low to afford the new prices. The food isn't too expensive - employees are being underpaid.

Oxford University is older than calculus.

DRM-free doesn't mean piracy. GOGs whole business model is built around selling games DRM free. I don't pirate but I do use GOG where possible as I hate DRM - it punishes and inconveniences legitimate users for piracy and doesn't even solve the problem. DRM is just an expensive waste of money for everyone involved.

No one seems to have actually read the article, just the headline. This is the ultimate click bait title - kudos to the headline writer in 1939.

The tl/dr: It's saying Hitler's authoritarian actions were galvanising other countries to step up and protect democracy after the failures after WW1.

In the final paragraph:

It is one of the most interesting phenomena of Hitler's political activity that it has resulted in bringing about so soon such an overwhelming and unprecedented manifestation of defensive solidarity amongst the democratic peoples.

And the final line of the article:

It would be the height of paradox if Hitler, of all persons, were destined by his statesmanship finally "to make the world safe for Democracy."

The article is surprisingly prescient.

Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google's version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.

Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google's hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.

Regardless of the supposed motivations, this is mass surveillance on a scale never seen before. The EU wants to become China 2.0.

This to me sounds like a misuse of DMCA - it's original open source code not stolen code, so the only "infringement" is dubious around whether you can clone a game or if a game belongs to whoever "owns" it. I can see they could have grounds to take the project to court to establish whether their copyright ownership of Wordle prevents anyone making their own version, but using DMCA for independently made code seems like a big overstep. Two corporations (Microsoft and the NYT) making decisions about whether software can be posted, and the poorly thought out DMCA rearing it's head again.

The word "antisemitic" is rapidly losing its meaning and impact as it is used as a dog whistle by right wing Israeli politicians to attack anyone who doesn't agree with them.

This is very much the "boy who cried wolf" and it causes harm to all Jewish people in all countries.

Russia threatened "severe consequences" for sanctions and supporting Ukraine.

Israel is not doing itself any favours threatening other countries.

The actual answer in on Stack exchange in their comments.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/740319/why-is-gnome-fractional-scaling-1-7518248558044434-instead-of-1-75

It is related to a mix of actual display resolution vs conversions to virtual resolutions (the scaled resolution), and use of single precision floating point calculations.

Essentially my understanding is what it is doing is storing the value needed to convert your actual resolutions number of pixels (2160p) to a virtual resolution number of pixels (2160/1.75 horizontally) but that gets you fractions of a virtual pixel. So instead of 1.75 it scaled by 1.75182... to get to a whole number of virtual pixels to work with. Then on top of that the figure is slightly altered from what we'd expect by floating point errors.

If you take the actual horizontal resolution 2190 and divide it by the virtual resolution it's trying to use 1233 pixels, you need a conversion value of 1.75182.... to convert to it so you don't get fractions of a pixel. If you used 1.75 you'd get 1234.2857... pixels. So gnome is storing the fraction that gets you a clean conversion in pixels to about 4 decimal places of a pixel.

Full credit to rakslice at Stack Exchange who also goes into the detail.

Tesla is a massively overvalued stock and has been for a long time. When they announced their recent dire sales, the share price actually rebounded because the clown Mush spouted his usual nonsense about the real value in the company - self drive and robo-taxis - but it's been widely reported for some time that the companies tech is a dud because Musk decided to remove all the expensive components that actually make the technology work. They lost their first-move advantage; their competitors have caught up and surpassed them both on EVs and self-drive tech.

The guy is a joke, the company is a joke.

Trust in AI is falling because the tools are poor - they're half baked and rushed to market in a gold rush. AI makes glaring errors and lies - euphemistically called "hallucinations", they are fundamental flaws which makes the tools largely useless. How do you know if it is telling you a correct answer or hallucinating? Why would you then use such a tool for anything meaningful if you can't rely on its output?

On top of that, AI companies have been stealing data from across the Web to train tools which essentially remix that data to create "new" things. That AI art is based on many hundreds of works of human artists which have "trained" the algorithm.

And then we have the Gemini debacle where the AI is providing information based around opaque (or pretty obvious) biases baked into the system but unknown to the end user.

The AI gold rush is a nonsense and inflated share prices will pop. AI tools are definitely here to stay, and they do have a lot of potential, but we're in the early days of a messy rushed launch that has damaged people's trust in these tools.

If you want examples of the coming market bubble collapse look at Nvidia - it's value has exploded and it's making lots of profit. But it's driven by large companies stock piling their chips to "get ahead" in the AI market. Problem is, no one has managed to monetise these new tools yet. Its all built on assumptions that this technology will eventually reap rewards so "we must stake a claim now", and then speculative shareholders are jumping in to said companies to have a stake. But people only need so many unused stockpiled chips - Nvidias sales will drop again and so will it's share price. They already rode out boom and bust with the Bitcoin miners, they will have to do the same with the AI market.

Anyone remember the dotcom bubble? Welcome to the AI bubble. The burst won't destroy AI but will damage a lot of speculators.

Makes sense from a business point of view. Why sell to create a new competitor with the same technology and an impregnable market base in the USA?

Better to force US competition to start from scratch.

PPAs are flawed and limited to the Debian/Ubuntu ecosystem. They're a security issue as you really need to trust to the person or group who has set up the PPA (yet many people just added PPAs for all sorts of random software based on a Google search). They need to be maintained which is variable depending on the size of the project and for developers they're only a route to support part of the entire Linux ecosystem. They can also conflict with the main system provided packages and repost which can break entire systems or break upgrades (happened to me on Mint, and I needed to do a complete system reinstall to remove legacy package conflicts).

They've fallen out of fashion and rightly so.

There are other ways to get software to users. Arch has its AUR which is basically a huge open repo. OpenSuSE has its OBS which is also a huge open repo. These are also not without their risks as it's hard to curate everything on such an expansive repo. However others can take over packages if the original developer stops updating them, and you can see how the package was built rathe than just download binaries which allays some security concerns. They are also centralised and integrated into the system, while PPAs are a bit of a free for all.

Flatpaks are a popular alternative now - essentially you download and run software which runs in a sandbox with its own dependencies. Flatpaks share their sandboxed dependencies but it does lead to some bloat as you'll have system level libraries and separate Flatpak versions of the same libraries both installed and running at the same time. However it does mean software can be run on different systems without breaking the whole system if library dependencies don't match. There are issues around signing though - flathub allows anyone to maintain software rather than insisting on the original devs doing so. That allows software to be in a Flatpak that might otherwise not happen but adds a potential security risk of bad actors packaging software or not keeping up to date. They do now have a verified tick in Flathub to show if a Flatpak is official.

Snap is the Canonical alternative to Flatpak - it's controversial as it's proprietary and arguably more cumbersome. The backend is closed source and in canonical control. Snaps are also different and for more than just desktop apps and can be used to in servers and other software stacks, while Flatpak is focused only on desktop apps. Canonical arr also forcing Ubuntu users to use it - for example Firefox only comes in a snap on Ubuntu now. It has similar fundamental issues around bloat. It has mostly the same benefits and issues as Flatpak, although Flatpaks are faster to startup.

Appimage are another alternative way to distribute software - they are basically an all-in-one image. You are essentially "mounting" the image and running the software inside. It includes all the libraries etc within the image and uses those instead of the local libraries. It does and can use local libraries too; the idea is to include specific libraries that are unlikely to be on most target systems. So again it has a bloat associated with it, and also security risks if the Appimage is running insecure older libraries. Appimage can be in a sandbox but doesn't have to be, unlike Flatpak where sandboxing is mandatory - which is a security concern. Also Appimages are standalone and need to be manually updated individually while Flatpaks and Snaps are usually kept up to date via an update system.

I used to use PPAs when I was still using Ubuntu and Mint. Now I personally use Flatpak, and rarely Appimages, and occasionally apps from the OBS as I'm on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. I don't bother with snaps at all - that's not to say they don't have value but it's not for me.

Edit: in terms of permissions, with Flatpak you can install Flatseal and manage software's permissions and access per app. You can give software access to more locations including system level folders should you need to or all devices etc for example. I assume you can do the same with snap but I don't know how.

Also you can of course build software form source so it runs natively , if you can't find it in a repo. I've done that a few times - can be fiddly but can also be easy.

True but ultimately this is about ownership - we don't own our games. We license them - that is what is lost with Steam and DRM, and moving away from physical media.

GOG is an alternative in that you can download and back up the installers for your games (mostly) but even then do you own your ganes?

It's the Amazon app. I noticed the same after I installed the app too.

Note it is an android system wide context menu, not a Firefox menu. If you long press in text in other apps you'll get the same menu.

I can't see any options to turn this off in android. Apparently the app doesn't even need permission to interfere with the system wide context menu in that way.

Self discipline is a skill in itself and it is something you can learn.

At it's most basic you restrict things you want and make them a reward for doing a task.

It can be hard to restrict things as you say. When I used to study, I used to go to a "3rd place" to do it. That is somewhere that is not home or work - I used to go to a library. In that environments you don't have TV, or food, and hopefully you won't be masturbating.

Mobiles can be very difficult though - if you can't stop yourself using your phone to watch YouTube then either leave it at home (I know, shocking idea in this day and age!) Or install parental locking/anti distraction software that locks your phone down for certain periods. This can help you learn self discipline with your phone.

Similarly if you study with a laptop, then look at anti distraction tools to keep you focused on your work rather than surfing or on YouTube.

The reward side is very important. You need to be consistent and follow through on your promises to yourself. Don't use unrealistic rewards - like "if I study for 6 hours today I'll have dinner tonight". You're going to have dinner anyway, and you don't want to go down the road of punishing yourself. Make it a favourite meal, or promise to watch next episode in a favourite TV show.

The idea is that you will be still enjoying those things because you will study and work. But be prepared to deny yourself those things if you fail to reach your goals in the beginning.

Self discipline is hard, not least because you can cheat yourself too easily. But it's worth putting in the effort, and the forced physical separation from the distractions and rewards at home makes it easier.

I think others see this but not enough: the slow collapse of Liberal democracy.

A rot has set in and people in politics and government no longer believe in liberal democracy. If you read history you find impassioned fighting for liberty, freedom and equality.

Now we have quasi democracies, with erosions of freedoms, rights and even dumbing down of access to news coverage and knowledge. Countries like the USA and UK that were leading lights in liberal democracy have fallen back into more authoritarian regimes. Countries in continental Europe that were bastions of liberal democracy also seem to losing their way. Big corporations and a wealthy elite are working against the interests of Liberal democracy and we're letting them do it.

Authoritarianism is the scourge of our age - being pushed by China and Russia and taking hold in India, the middle east, Africa and increasingly in the west.

It's depressing to see the rot.

Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he's stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won't bother.

He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.

It seems like Beehaw want to create a closed community they can moderate. That kind of makes sense for their aims but they will need to defederate from more and more services to maintain that over time.

It seems a bit of a kneejerk in reaction to the influx of new users but essentially it means they'll not be part of the fediverse, and they risk creating an echochamber. It's rather the opposite of their stated aim of creating a diverse community, and will probably stymie their growth going forward.

Each electron App is actually a full independent chromium browser install running a website. It's easy to code for and works cross platform as a result, but it's essentially just a website, although they can run offline depending on what's been built in to the local app.

Each electron app running on your system is a separate full chromium app running, with no sharing of resources between each instance. So they take up a lot of space each and duplicate all the resource usage, and potentially the security flaws.

Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.

Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don't even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.

So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.

Nomodeset won't cause battery issues or ajy other significant issuea with your system.

"Mode set" just moves the video mode setting into the kernel so you can access graphic card features really early at boot (and have fancy boot screens for example and have a smoother consistent boot on the optimum graphics mode for your card). Some graphics cards don't work well with that and a flashing black screen is a symptom of that.

"nomodeset" turns the feature off, and the boot menu uses the basic bios graphics mode settings instead. The main graphics drivers will load fully later when the X11 or Wayland call for them.

All of the Linux systems you use should work fine with nomodeset; you'll just have a more basic boot menu. You may notice some changes in screen resolution as the system loads but that'll be about it.

So you can pick whichever Linux spin you like rather than limit yourself.

Nope, a car company with no car design team won't be making new models.

Tesla shows what's wrong with capitalism - companies bloat on speculation driven in this case by a show man. Tesla is a house of cards - it squandered it's first-move advantage, the competition are now building better EVs, and it's self-drive technology is a lemon because Elon decided to remove all the essential sensors in his solution to reduce cost.

Meanwhile his competitors are getting licenses to self drive and Tesla have jackshit. Robo-taxis are coming but they won't have the Tesla logo on them.

I loved Cities 1, I was massively looking forward to 2 but it's been nothing but a shitshow.

I've also had a enough of the gaslighting around this game that somehow it's the angry customers that are the problem.

Because a picture speaks a thousand words. In this case it's a thousand words of gibberish.

There is nothing to the conspiracy theories, she's had abdominal surgery and wants to keep her health problems private. The UK press are intrusive and horrible, and the social media conspiracy theories are just gossiping.

There are plenty of operations that would need a couple weeks of hospital recovery and about 6 weeks recovery at hone (Easter is only the end of March). People speculating are ignorant about basic medical matters and can't let someone have their privacy. There is no conspiracy.

I don't think many outside the tech-money bubble thought this would work. Instead people mourned the loss of Oculus as an innovator when it was bought up.

Look at it now - it has slowed the VR market right down by delivering a low price but low quality experience. That has discouraged other manufacturers from the market.

The high end of the market has been held back as a result - the Valve Index and their like give a better experience but content growth is slow as a result of slow growth. The quest is a decent product but their teams are solving the problems constantly constrained by the cheap price point rather than building the solution and iterating it to the price point.

I think the market will converge on a Vision Pro like device at an affordable price but I think Oculus/Meta has slowed that down as people experience their product and think that's what VR is. Although in fairness there is also a tech problem - the vision pro shows how expensive it is at the moment to create something close to the ideal in terms of an untethered device without base stations and hand controllers. The realistic way for quality VR at present remains tethered to a PC.

We'll get there in the end but I think it may have been sooner of Meta hadn't thrown 100s of billions at buying market share with a lower quality version of what VR needs to be. The mobility is right, but the casual-gaming level of experience is way off, and it's damaged expectations.

Personally I think the next step may be streaming content from a PC to an untethered device (untethered in terms of cables at least). That would be technically difficult but offloading as much of the graphics and game/program processing as possible may make a lighter device and an added battery may last longer or be lighter. Essentially a halfway house between an Quest and Index - the quest mobility but the index quality (which is already achieved by offloading to the PC). However it may not be feasible due to lag and it's still a compromise from the ultimate dream. But it'd probably be a good step on from full tethered if its doable.

That or economies of scale do make the Vision Pro or a future version of it affordable over the coming years. Doubt that will be Quest prices though - if people are paying £1k for phones then that seems more realistic for good quality VR imo.

Absolutely, this is a good explanation.

And to add, so many pieces of software share code through shared libraries or systems. Open source means if there is a flaw in one library that is found and fixed, all the software that uses it downstream can benefit.

Closed source, good actors might not even know their software is using flawed older libraries as it's hidden from view.

Plus open source allows audit of code to ensure the software is what it says it is. There are plenty of examples of commercial closed software that does things deliberately that do not benefit it's user, but do benefit the company that makes the software.

People are still using twitter? Why?

This is not shrinkflation.

440ml is a UK variant. No one has a confirmed explanation for its existence alongside 500ml, but it's been around for decades.

However 440ml of water would be 0.44kg which is just under one pound imperial weight (0.45kg). Presumably the fluid plus the aluminium can would weigh about 1lb which may explain the odd volume measure (given transport costs are often by weight and possibly even how customs costs may have used to work?).

Worse, the guy may be demented and delusional; he may actually believe his has the money in cash.

The more I see him talk the more I think he has dementia; worse than biden by far. I'm amazed he gets a free pass on it.

Because generally social interaction is easier and better face to face. You can read people's facial cues better, have true eye contact, better hear the subtitles of voice and mood. People feel more connected with someone if they have met them face to face.

Alternatively, communication via email and video call can be hard and easily misread. People can misread emails as aggressive or be aggressive and not realise the impact. Communication on a video call, especially in big groups, can be difficult and impersonal.

Meeting up occasionally is probably seen as good a way to keep your team coherent and friendly. You're more likely to be aware of the other person's feelings if it's someone you've socialised and spent time with. It's easier to be empathetic and kind if you know that person in the flesh rather than just a name on an email or a random face on a video call. You're more likely to make allowances for other people if you know about them and their circumstances.

When working remotely how many times do you have social calls and chats with your colleagues? It's an important element of being in a long term team.

I work in a hospital in a busy face to face job but some colleagues I barely see as we have different weekly rosters. So I only interact with them via email or video call; despite being in the same building a lot of the time. We make the time once a month to have a team meeting and social catch up as it's good for everyone and the team. It's similar to what you're doing once a year across a country.

You may not see the value in it but it may be worth noting other people may see the value in getting to know you and understand you. For example if that socialisation isn't something that comes natural to you, your team members seeing you and getting to know you will also help them adjust to work better with you. It is very much a 2 way thing.

They should have delayed the game 6 months to a year. It was a huge mistake launching in the state it was launched, and particularly without mod support as that was a key to Cities 1's success and longevity.

Now they're stuck trying to fix performance issues and distracted by the delayed console launch which is also likely to be disastrous.

Why did they do it? Likely so Paradox could bank the sales in the 2023-2024 financial year. This is the problem with companies run to please speculating stockholders who only care about the short term share price moves and it going up all the time.