I have been rekindling my patronage to my county's libraries and archive.org.

Sure, these are DVDs, but they can be upscaled and are easily backed up.

I buy a crap load of books like I have a spending problem, but I get them used from bookstores and thriftstores. Libraries will always have something I can't find, with the added glory of browsing serendipity.

Sure, I like to pirate, but there is more treasure at your ports than you think.

THANK YOU EVERYONE who recommended PHOTOREC! This community is fantastic.

Bizarre. Not even keep a few editors for... the editing??

I wonder how this will affect the Stuff You Should Know podcsst.

Perhaps Solus. Not because it is bad per se, I have not touched it in years, but more as an example of glorifying a distro because of the contribution of a single person, which almost imploded when the main contributor could not continue working on it.

Same wirh Void, where it almost got lost because the dude with the github access disappeared.

Slackware is cool, but it will be a sad day when they guy behind it stops working on it.

Or maybe I am bugging. They are all doing fine. Open source doesn't allow for catestrophic demise on good ideas.

That is is a special kind grieving.

Honestly a thesis is way higher stakes and value. Yeah, imagine thinking there was an emergency only to find out your roommate will need to spend the rest of the semester using their imagination.

One thing I love to collect are tiny CRTs. I actually grew up watching Star Trek on a boom box with a television built in (what the hell happened to it, I dont know).

They are awesome! All the fun of a CRT without the pain of it being heavy and taking up a lot of space.

I have been using AI chat exclusively for searching for at least the past 3 days.

It is so much better in every possible way for simple factual questions, especially ChatGPT and Google Bard. Great for shopping. Microsoft Bing is okay, but you have to choose the right personality.

Sidenote: I KNOW using Google, and the other companies I will mention, is the antithesis of freedom and privacy. Yet, they are incredibly powerful tools that are getting implemented everywhere, so my curiousity has led me down an honestly fun rabbit hole.

The other AI that really surpised me is Opera Aria. Like Bing, it is using ChatGPT-4 and integrating real-time information. It just feels smarter, or perhaps more professional?

The caveat with all these except maybe Bard which, uses its own system, are very good at shutting down questions it does not want to answer. It feels weird and wrong when it happens, like it just saved you from asking something immoral, or at least too many questions about the tech.

Strange experience overall.

TL;DR AI chatbots are great at parsing the internet to get you answers with reasonable accuracy and relevancy when old-fashioned search can be tedious or fruitless.

That is what I am starting to realize. Every paid program that I used to desire is now subscription based.

Also, I am coming to terms with how truly powerful FOSS programs are. People seem to pay for the workflow, the user interface, more than the capabilities. At least I feel that way with DAWs. Ardour does everything. Vital makes every sound. I can be happy with that. I need to focus on making music.

I feel you misread. I mean what I spelled, county, the collection of cities that define the specific region I live in.

My library card gives me access to many libraries in that county, which yes, has works from people across the globe.

I briefly considered getting into Fedora Silverblue, and I still may for this very purpose.

Yes, Syncthing seems like the right solution. I don't need to have files in someone elses computer, I just need certain files in all of my computers.

Somehow I trust Opera and Microsoft over Brave as this point.

What a world.

I guess I can try it, since I did not like, wipe everything.

I will! These programs are amazing.

I am having so much fun reading things. Makes me feel better about my disaster, but my mistake does not touch most of these.

On a real life related note, I surprised everyone around me when I managed to overturn a ski jet, which apparently doesn't really happen. I too can do the improbable. Hah.

Honestly, it is making my like using linux more. Flatpak made not having the app I wanted available and up to date, distrobox allows me to use a distro that has it up to date natively. Nothing is more dope than that. Except nature? But for computing, I adore it.

Please escape this mentality, share your music.

Think about all the music you hear throughout your day and life, in grocery stores, in tv and movies, the radio, blasting from car stereos, podcasts, youtube. You did not choose that, but I doubt you complain about it.

Do not let celebrities be the only people empowered to share music.

Share you music, don't even ask permission.

Oh, great to know!! They are my favorite duo, and I often here them talk about How Stuff Works articles.

Thank you for the link.

Your knowledge of Unix systems is incredibly powerful, and I highly respect that. You are in control of your system, which is the ultimate goal of personal computing. It is even more powerful that your mental models are reflected in your system. That is super cool, I hope to get their some day.

I am also very happy you enjoy trying out new technologies, and don't have the grumpy jadedness of just using what you always use.

For me I thoroughly enjoy learning new skills that unlocks the power of all my many computers, and put them to use. Computing should be fun and empowering, and too often people deprive themselves of fun.

Ah. I was in theater tech. No shame to find anywhere.

That would be so fun I am buzzing with excitement. I am not talking facetiously either. I am out in the cold as I type this, happy and quivering.

I cannot wait to get home and try it out!

Damn, alright. I am starting to get the hate for it. I think I am blinded by the sheer convenience of it. Also, I am probably sleeping on more up to date repositories that gets me what I want without using flatpaks.

Linux Mint has been babying me though. I love the comfort, and cinnamon is everything I need in a DE. I will need to see what I can do.

Hah, I don't think I illustrated how dumb I am. I deleted the partitions already.

I got it running now! I did not have that much to recovery, so everything will fit in home. Mostly word files, PDFs, and pictures. Few movies and music.

The allowance of an alternative store is a big sell. There was a moment were I felt the quality on F-Droid was dying, but in the last few months it has felt like an amazing explosion of really useful and clever apps. It also helps to expand the repository with the Guardian project and Izzy on Android.

Alas, I am on the degoogling train, so I feel like I am missing out tremendously on quality apps that only exist on the playstore. Android phones and tablets honestly used to suck compared to the iPhone, but now there are brilliant capable devices that can be had for at least half the price of an iPhone.

I think I should create an google account to use my Android better. It won't have my real info, and it doesn't need to have a name that points to me. I have been using Aurora, but the recent rate limiting can be a pain in the ass. And as much as I hate giving google my money, YouTube is a large part of my education and entertainment, and while the platform is a cesspool the people I truly admire sure as hell won't be moving to fucking PeerTube, or LBRY.

Also, I am only a pirate for things that I no longer can legitimately buy or the money will not reach the original creators.

It certainly has simplified things for me! To get anything so up to date, I would need to use something like Arch or the AUR, which is fine but I find unappealing (using Arch).

Seven Days. It has one of the coolest premises, and the lead is like a combination of James Bond and McGuyver.

I never found it on any tracker, but I literally looked it up before writing this and learned it has a DVD release in 2018, so that is exciting.

Great explanation and rationale for using Flatpaks! I hope others with questions see this.

I understand how people may be annoyed by the redundancy of every app packaging their own lib, but I swear those are measured in kilobytes, and people tend to be so obsessively minimalist it is a non-issue. Then again, minimalist are probably compiling their software.

That is absolutely the best usecase. There are only a handful of apps I need to be the latest version.

I am mostly using native packages.

Neat. I will try that once photorec finishes its search in like a month from now.

Thank you for writing all this! Innovation is absolutely necessary not just in Linux, but all computing. People are comparing this to Window installs, and honestly it is probably more similar to MacOS installs. Yet, the difference is that the packages are audited by a community, and are not proprietary wildcards that might bite you in unexpected ways. Flatpaks are an options, not a replacement.

Dealing with software that does not work first try is a loathsome experience. Many people here are wearing their gray colored classes, opinions influenced by decades of tinkering, and are forgetting about the curse of knowledge.

If we want more people to adopt linux, Flatpaks absolutely help.

Lastly, saying image-based reminds my a lot about Smalltalk, which is nice. I like the idea of having hot-swappable operating systems to switch between that have all the work isolated in that image. Great for experimentation, and perhaps security.

I will definitely be checking out Fedora Silverblue. Going to download and make a VM for that now.

Nah, I have gotten soda in bags before, especially when I was younger and visiting family in Central America.

Sure, it looks awkward, but so it the trash from millions of rigid plastic containers that will be used only one.

If done right you don't spill, and it is easy sipping once you get the staw in.

So it turns out, I cannot use my NVIDIA card using distrobox. I guess it only works with AMD?

Anyways, gaming using Bazzite is a dead end for me. I still find Fedora Silverblue super fun to use, and I think I will just run Steam + Lutris using Flatpaks. I was wondering if distrobox would somehow allow better performance, but I don't understand the technology well enough to even make those presumption. I see that this image is used a lot on Steam Deck, which I also don't understand why (as opposed to having everything native).

Anyways, I can still game well on Silverblue. Baldur's Gate 3 runs okay. So, that means I am fine, hah!

The only gripe I have, which is just my stupidity, is that I have way of using Mozilla VPN. I tried to run it on an Ubuntu container, but I must be doing something wrong because it does not launch. Maybe I need to look into podman more closely, or maybe I am missing some graphical dependencies that is assumed to exist on a DE. I shall keep trying.

I would be mortified. He seems shameless though, hah.

DEs get so wonky if you try to change them. I wish it was easier to compartmentalize an envirionment.

I get that too drom Bard sometimes, but it is for specific queries. I think the key is working on the prompt until it gets it. Sometimes you need to start over with a new chat.

Bing does not work like ChatGPT despite having the same base, even in creative mode. No idea why. However I like creative mode when I don't just dont want to see links embedded. I also love taking advantage of free Dall-E.

Bard is great for anything that can be put into a list or chart, like comparisons. Literally put in a chart.

I am dissapointed in that I have not been able to get a single mathematic equation produced (like famous ones), but I know they can?

If you get the chance and willing to download a full ass browser, Opera has Aria, which is like the cleanest version of ChatGPT I have seen. Just the formatted answers with hyperlinks are worth it. It is good. It is hard to explain, but Aria mostly just works. It is closer to Bard in responses, and does what you want out of Bing without messing with convo styles.

Whatever prompts that Bing put for the convo style may be messing with the results.

All things said, I switch between them often, depending on my needs. It takes some time but I have built my intuition of which one will give the best response for the prompt, but I often just search the prompt in all of them.

Anyways, I hope you find more success using them!

That is because they ARE annoying, pointlessly insulting, and do not actually track with the age group it is referencing.

Terms are not magically legitimized just because they sort of rhyme. It is stupid.

I see your point, and I agree. No need to spend resources just because we have them.

Sandboxing is definitely a benefit, but alas as I am learning I have no control of it's permissions, so that can potentially go wrong.

Also, what is nice about this somewhat failed experiment is that it was easy to just rm the container and everything went with it.

Yeah, I am not going back to regular linux.