ForbiddenRoot

I am truly and deeply saddened to hear this. My condolences to his family.

vim or vim-enhanced is one of the first things I install on any distro that doesn't have it included by default. I have been using it for decades and am so used to seeing Bram's name come up on the screen whenever I start the editor. His work greatly enriched my programming experience over the years and I am sure for countless other people as well. I don't know what to say except a heartfelt "Thank you, Bram".

In my region (India), for a while, there seemed to be plenty of laptops available with Linux installed as an option. Then again in the last few years that seems to have withered down to almost none, sometimes even if the same model is available with Linux in some other regions. I am not sure what changed. Perhaps some deal with Microsoft. The good part is that the fact that they do support Linux elsewhere on the same laptop configuration generally means its easy to get it up and running yourself even if it does not come pre-installed.

In any case, as an old-timer, it's very impressive to me how much hardware Linux supports nowadays without any drama at all. Not to mention all the progress made in software especially in supporting Windows-only games, which is truly magical work by the Wine / Proton teams. As far as I am concerned the "Year of Linux Desktop" is here already since I can use it daily without missing absolutely anything at all from Windows.

This is true. I work in a related field, and my company and almost all of its clients are falling over themselves trying to identify what can be already replaced with AI.

Systematically processes are being broken down to identify activities that are "cognitive" are can be done by AI, with the goal of eventually replacing the human workers with AI almost entirely for those tasks. All these companies, including mine, are super profitable for most part but that is apparently not enough, and everyone fears being left behind and their share price tanking if they don't adopt AI too. So there's a mad rush to get it done everywhere.

Interestingly this may piss off more people than the real issues. Most people didn't seem to care at all about the API / 3rd party app support issues as long as they got their Reddit doom-scroll fix. But I bet whole bunch of these will be upset at having an ugly pixelated icon on their phone, muhawhaw.

So if I understand this correctly they will hard fork RHEL. So it won't be a clone going forward in the way Alma / Rocky currently are. The advantage for RHEL users in moving to this fork are that they get an enterprise distro that's well-supported by another large enterprise Linux company (SUSE) instead of RH. SUSE can probably offer them some cost advantages too to sweeten the deal. For SUSE, this is a great way to get people to move away from RH and use this or eventually one of their other distros.

Is that it? I am all for it and so should RH because this is what they wanted people to do instead of creating clones. I hope this works out for SUSE and they do even better in the future. I am going to be rooting for them.

This is like a mythical distro for me. I hear about it here and there, usually in the context of it being on top of DistroWatch and why that does not mean anything, but never really known anyone who actually uses it or recommends it.

That doesn't make it bad or even obscure of course, because even an outstanding distro like openSuse gets very less screen-time nowadays. But somehow this is one distro I have never installed or even had the urge to find out more about.

so what does Linux have that I need?

That should be the other way around, no? What do you need that Linux has (and Windows doesn't). Otherwise it's a case of "solution in search of a problem". You presently do not seem to have a need as you have mentioned, so ideally you should leave it at that and continue using Windows.

What can motivate me to migrate?

While as I implied above only you can answer that authoritatively for yourself, a few examples of what other people seem to like about Linux might help perhaps -

• "Free as in beer", so not having to spring for another license if you build another rig
• "Free as in Freedom", which matters to many but not necessarily everyone
• Better environment for development
• Less susceptibility to malware (not necessarily because of inherent security, but also because Linux is not targeted as much)
• Heavily customizable, at the kernel, desktop environment, other software-level
• Choice of software update mechanisms as well frequency of updates depending on use-case
• Reviving of old computers where Windows would typically struggle to run
• Community participation, though this can be a hit or a miss depending on where you hang out and who you interact with

... and so on.

What is a good Linux to have for a desktop + steam?

There are many, but I generally recommend Linux Mint or Pop! OS for this use-case.

Is this a smart idea?

For Roblox and Minecraft, a TV should be perfectly fine and in fact excellent. I will go out on a limb here and say that even for most 'real' games a TV is fine. The latency associated with TVs is most noticeable in FPS games. For other genres like strategy, third-person adventure games etc, I do not think it matters as much if at all. Many people, especially those who have not used a low response / gaming monitor, do not even notice a lag at all (Note: You will find many such people in real life but never ever on the internet). It would be nice of course if your TV had a "Game Mode" which lowers latency, but it may not necessarily be there in a 10-year-old TV (though it was not that uncommon even back then, so do look for it in your TV settings).

Regarding programming on the TV, I think the situation is slightly different. Using small text in general doesn't work for me at all on a TV. Most TVs, other than OLEDs or recent non-OLED ones, don't seem to handle text well enough in my experience. There's either ghosting or some other manner of artifacts which makes the text harder to read compared to a monitor (apart from the distance from TV involved). I commonly see this issue even with office televisions used for mirroring laptop output. Maybe playing around with sharpening and other settings might get it to work well enough though and it really depends on the specific TV in question.

Overall, I feel you should be fine, at least for gaming, but probably for programming as well. I have a couple of gaming rigs hooked up to my living room and bedroom TV's and I quite enjoy gaming on them. The much larger screens and ability to lounge about while gaming more than make up for any perceived or actual lag for me.

I hope your kid and you have a great time with your new setup. Have fun! :)

best hope for mainstream adoption

I feel for that the default Linux DE will need to have an UI closer to Windows, due to user familiarity with the traditional desktop metaphor. Maybe Cinnamon or even KDE are more suited in that respect. Neither need hours of configuring either. Personally, Cinnamon with Wayland support would be perfect for me (and I suspect a whole lot of Windows migrants as well).

Gnome is nice of course in it's own minimalist way for many,but the workflow is very different from other OSes and I think many find it too minimalist requiring extensions to improve usability therefore. However, there isn't a stable mechanism for extensions causing breakages between versions, which can be very irritating. I don't know if that's now changed now though, because I have been reading about a major change in the extension mechanism in Gnome 45.

Someday I want to teach myself emacs so that I can get rid of rest of the operating system.

"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people"

Perhaps its an overgeneralization, but I like the concept behind it and at least it keeps me from gossiping / talking about people behind their backs. I am mostly an average mind though, by this definition.

why do you use iPhone?

In my case, because I had a bad experience with Android phones in their early years. Each model I used had one or the other issues, either battery life, camera issues, screen issues or something else. Around the Samsung S3 days I finally moved to iPhone and "everything just worked".

I am sure things are better now in the Android world hardware-wise (and software-wise Android has always been able to do more), but over the years I have become firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem with the Apple Watch, Airpods, Macbooks, Apple TV etc so it doesn't make sense for me to switch again because there isn't a compelling reason for me to do so.

If the partitioning is fine (GPT with EFI System Partition), it should boot up even if you move the disk to a completely new machine. You will need to re-activate Windows though after booting.

You may have had the ESP on a different drive than the one you moved to the new machine, perhaps?

The only thing that bother me is DNF’s speed

If you are on Fedora 38, have you tried dnf5 yet. You can install it with sudo dnf install dn5 dnf5-plugins. I used it only briefly before moving away from Fedora for other reasons, but it was much better than standard dnf. However, I am not sure it speeds up searches as well, though downloads were certainly much faster for me.

I’m gonna be that person…

Well, you are not alone. While I too would prefer not to use proprietary drivers, I have had no problems on any of my Nvidia machines as well. Ironically, despite the open source drivers, getting a 7900XTX card up and running was an issue for me for months till distros caught up (with newer kernels and mesa libs), while my 4090 installation was a breeze even on the day it was released.

A lot of problems people have with Nvidia GPUs seem to be installation related. I think that is because the installation tends to be distro-specific and people do not necessarily follow the correct procedure for their distro or try installing the drivers directly from the Nvidia site as they would on Windows. For example, Fedora requires you to add RPMFusion, Debian needs non-free to be added to sources, Linux Mint lets you install the proprietary drivers but only after the first boot, and so on. Pop OS! probably makes the process the easiest with their Nvidia-specific ISO.

And to update grub it seems the best command is “update-bootloader”

grub2-mkconfig seems to work fine as well. I just installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on a machine yesterday and used that to add some kernel arguments. I was not aware of update-bootloader at all.

Like what’s up with YaST?

Yeah, it's like an all-in-one launchpad for managing the system. I haven't used it much because I prefer using the terminal for most things, but it seems to work fine when I used it a bit (installing some repos and Nvidia drivers).

I installed SUSE after over 20 years and so far it's been quite a good experience. Very similar to the Fedora experience I would say, in the sense that you need to jump through some hoops to get Nvidia / non-free codecs and then after that it's smooth sailing. Let's see how it holds up in the longer term for me.

Rust and C development mainly with a bit of assembly language sometimes:

• Debian Stable with Xfce
• distrobox with podman for containers
• xfce4-terminal with tmux
• vim with plugins (coc.nvim, delimitMate, NERDTree etc)

I personally know a few former colleagues of mine from our Sri Lanka subsidiary who have left the country over the last year or so. Some to Australia and few to the UK. They all were having a harrowing time before they left, especially one who nearly ran out of some life-saving medication for his kid. We managed to get a few months of supply over to him from India. But that near-miss really shook him up and he left Sri Lanka as quickly as he could.

There are still some senior folks there who are in denial over the situation. Most of these have generational wealth and are largely insulated from on the ground realities that the middle and lower income people have been facing. They kept reporting back incorrect information on the situation at the peak of the crisis and kept saying that the media is over-hyping the situation, because they were concerned that we might shut down our office there (which we had no plans to and in fact we gave increased allowances to our staff to help them with the crazy inflation).

I’m no huge fan of Windows, but it sounds like you had (No offense) PEBKAC errors.

I think so too and no offense meant to OP as well.

I am an early adopter of all things tech and so I had a Gigabyte Xtreme X670E mobo on pretty much day 1 to go with a 7950X. Everything worked fine on both Windows 11 and Linux despite being a pimped-up mobo and brand new CPU. At this much later date, OP's B650 mobo should be working without a hitch, especially with Windows (and almost certainly with Linux as well).

Over the years I have visited the usual suspects as a tourist and sometimes for work: Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Madrid, Zurich, Berlin etc and some other cities in the same countries.

Mulling over it, I think Paris remains a place I always love to revisit. It's not exactly warm and inviting from a people perspective, but the architecture, food, and general feeling of being there makes up for it. I am a history buff so Rome comes in second for me. People-wise I found Barcelona to be most friendly, though I have not been there in a decade now.

What I love most about European cities is that they are all so walk-able, which is in stark contrast to US cities (which I therefore rarely visit as a tourist, only go for work).

My first experience with the internet was using a Unix shell account that I used to dial into using "Telix for DOS". For browsing I had Lynx, for mail PINE, and for IRC it was some client called "irc" and so on. This was in the early 90s, maybe 1991 or 92.

Everything was text only, dial-up with 9600 baud, and it was glorious because before that all we had was BBSes (which were even more glorious in some ways actually).

Sadly, I don't know if Fedora is "Amazing" for new users anymore. For non-free codecs, Nvidia card support, Steam etc you need to enable RPMFusion and get correct packages / setup some stuff like h/w acceleration, which seems to trip up a lot of new users (based on countless Reddit posts I have seen around this). Secondly, due to the frequent updates, they have had a couple of major issues in recent times (e.g. most recently with Flatpaks and a few months back with Nvidia cards), which were quite difficult for new users to resolve. Probably Pop OS! should be in that category instead, since it pretty much works out of the box.

Lastly, while I probably know why you put Ubuntu in the "Devil" category, I think it could be there in the "Amazing [...]" section as well, because for new users it's probably the easiest distro to setup and troubleshoot simply because of the large amount of information / tutorials centered around Ubuntu that are out there.

when you start xfce, it start with tmux?

No. I use tmux only inside the distrobox / podman dev container (which is also Debian 12 Stable). I like a more conventional DE for non-dev related usage of the computer. If I wanted a totally tmux-like or terminal-based environment I would go with i3, but that is not something I prefer for my desktop usage for non-coding activities.

Maybe it’s problem is that it’s boring.

Personally, I consider that a feature. Most of my machines are on Debian Stable, though I do keep a distro-hopping laptop around which is on the newly released Mint at the moment. I just use Flatpaks for the odd application that I need the very latest version of (e.g., Yuzu emulator). I will give MX a try sometime, at least in a VM.

Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?

I have two laptops of this sort in use currently: One is a more recent AMD (5600H) + Nvidia (3080) and the other is an older Intel (some 10th-gen mobile) + Nvidia (2070). Both combinations work fine without any particular fiddling, apart from installing Nvidia proprietary drivers, on mostly any recent distro.

My use case is general desktop usage, Rust / C development, and occasional Steam-based gaming on these machines. Both laptops run pretty much the same as they did on Windows (GPU-wise). Fedora seems to work the best for me with everything setup nicely out of the box barring non-free stuff required from RPMFusion. On the Intel + Nvidia one, which is my distro-hopping laptop, I have used pretty much all distros without issue as well. Nix is however not included in the list of distros I have tried, but Arch is.

I wear them only if I have a cold or a cough myself now, or if I am traveling on a plane. I still carry a mask with me at all times though.

It'd be even better if all these subreddits indefinitely go dark. As someone who grew up using the "old" internet with Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists for discussions, I am happy that decentralized way doing things might be adopted again.

Am I missing something?

No. I think you are correct and mostly even wifi hardware works fine, at least compared to *BSDs. I use Linux across a wide-range of machines, both desktops and laptops, with mostly very recent components. The only other unsupported hardware I have personally come across is some gaming hardware (e.g. Thrustmaster racing wheels) and an add-on sound card (Soundblaster AE9). And of course, some things like DLSS3 with Nvidia do not work.

Installing arch is a pain

While Manjaro is perfectly fine, this is no longer true. With the archinstall script you can have even Arch up and running in minutes. It's still not graphical or straightforward as a Manjaro installation, but it's certainly not painful. EndeavourOS may be the closest to Arch with simple installation.

First I’ve heard of that.

It is indeed a new thing. For the reasons you've mentioned this was an option for enterprise customers for earlier versions of Windows as well, but this time they are making the option available to home consumers too. I can't really see too many people paying for this though. Those who care will move on to Windows 11 (or whatever is out there by then) and others will simply keep running an unsupported / not updated OS. In all likelihood, MS will keep providing security updates for the latter for free in the end.

I don’t want to get sucked into an ecosystem where my choice of what product to buy is so limited.

This isn't actually the case in my experience, because non-Apple products work just fine with the iPhone unless it's some Android-specific accessory. No one wants to ignore the iPhone market so they make sure that their product is well-supported on iPhones. For instance, I use a bunch of headphones from various manufacturers, apart from AirPods, and they all work great too.

The actual issue is that if you want to move from iPhone to Android later you may have issues getting some Apple devices you have to work with Android, e.g. I don't think the Apple Watch works at all with Android.

I see. This is good to know, thanks. I am still getting used to openSUSE and quite liking it so far. Barring any drama that happens down the road, I think this is my Fedora-replacement now. I still prefer Debian Stable + Flatpak + Distrobox on most of my machines though.

He plans to make moderators popularly elected to more easily vote them out.

I totally second this idea. The last time we tried to get the internet to seriously decide on something we got Boaty McBoatface.

Hopes the next frontier will be subreddits as businesses.

Even better. All posts in these subs can be advertisements, perfect.

He does not want Reddit employees to take on the work. Moderator hours were valued at 3.2 million last year, 3% of reddit’s revenue.

Yeah, don't even spend 3% of revenues as a cost of doing business. The soon-to-be-community-elected mods will do it for free. Super.

As the others have mentioned, I found out about Lemmy through multiple posts on Reddit. So at least at the time, a few days back, mentions of Lemmy were not being blocked / banned.

About promoting now: I think what would be better is if the supportive sub mods at Reddit made a community (or sublemmy, or whatever it should be correctly called) here first, and then posted a link to it on their blackout page on Reddit.

All that being said I am not sure I want a lot of the existing Reddit horde to invade Lemmy, but I guess I can't have my cake and eat it too.

Yes, it's called "Mail" and I guess it's the successor to "Outlook Express" from the old days. I have never actually used it though, but it's certainly there.

I swear I am not crazy.

No, you are not. At least not based on what you said above, or maybe we both are crazy because I agree with you :)

are no longer the END USERS. [...] The Redditors are now the PRODUCT.

I think this is the core issue I have with the current internet. I am not even rabidly anti-corporate or against reasonable commercialization. But the whole schtick nowadays is so ridiculous: Get users to your site and try to keep them only over there, make THEM generate your content, which primarily means users voluntarily revealing an astounding level of details about their lives and thoughts, and then sell all this information to whoever and / or manipulate your users for whatever nefarious political or commercial purpose.

And people are absolutely fine with all this >_<

Personally, I came here for the ads

What is your experience with lemmy?

Personally I am glad that decentralization is slowly picking up again with things like Lemmy and Mastodon. To me using it does not feel all that different from Reddit actually (UI-wise).

I grew up in the days of the old internet where newgroups and mailing lists were the way to interact with other "netizens" (a term I have not heard being used in years btw). Very little moderation and yet people behaved themselves, though of course the number of non-tech people on the net were far lesser as well so that certainly had something to do with it. Lemmy has that advantage too currently of smaller, ideologically-inclined, and willing-to-jump-a-few-hoops people.

TL;DR: I've no issues with using Lemmy and I like it so far, including smaller size of the community.

I agree. Earlier today I popped in to lurk Reddit to see what's going on, and as a treat I sorted on "Controversial" on the front page. Overwhelmingly, the users who are still on there do not want to go dark again. Like you said, they just do not care at all.

The issue is that not only do they not care, they do not understand what the protest is about and they do not even want to understand. They do not care for the site's legacy, they do not care for what made Reddit attractive to begin with, they do not care for users and mods affected by Reddit's proposed changes, they do not care that a handful of corporates should not have so much control over internet content. Nothing. They want their doom-scroll Reddit fix, that's it and apparently lose their mind if that goes away even for a couple of days.

Most seem to feel that it's mods power-tripping over nothing and if they have an issue with Reddit they should just leave. Problem solved. I hope as many mods there as possible just lock up their subs forever and leave. Nothing stops the remaining people from creating new subs even right now or from Reddit (the company) eventually reopening them and figuring out moderation and content.