I'll tell you why I haven't deleted reddit -- aside from tech-heavy discussion here (Linux, Reddit, tech generally, that sort of thing), there isn't a fediverse equivalent to things like the sports or food subreddits I follow.

I agree iscussions on lemmy are higher-quality and friendlier, for sure. But for a lot of the things I use reddit for they just don't really exist here yet.

SSDs are very cheap these days

Yep, this is it. I volunteered for my school's IT department in high school, this was basically the logic. The laptops are cheap and easy to manage/administrate. Whether or not they were Linux was a non-issue.

Edit: also, since chromeOS is basically just a browser, there wasn't much that could break, and if something did break everything was stored in google drive anyway, so you could just factory reset the device and hand it back to the student without needing to buy any kind of higher-level support contract.

it is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers -- there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn't seem to be working for me

the thing is, this is an awful strategy for getting people onto a platform. The reason for reddit's success was that there were forums for pretty much anything you could think of centralized in one place.

99.9% of people don't care that much about which app, which instance, which server, whatever, they're just there for the content. The fact that so many reddit users are up in arms about it is a legacy from when it was a much more niche platform than it is today. But in general, this confusing mess of federation, moderation philosophies, defederation, it doesn't matter which instance you choose because they federate, but actually it does matter because some of them don't, a wall of text needed to explain what happens when the mods of two different servers have a disagreement and how the federation protocol works, it's just not a good strategy for getting people onto the platform.

The problem isn't that I don't know about RSS, it's more that I don't really have any content sources that use it

if nothing else, you could make a pretty fun digital treasure hunt or geocaching thing with it

Agreed. If verbal agreements and handshake deals can be legally binding contracts, I don't see why emoji wouldn't be.

2023, year of the linux desktop?

the internet in general kind of sucks these days. Reddit has burned down a lot of the things that made its search results so useful in the past. Every forum post more than a few years old is a forest of broken links; the top of basically any internet search whatsoever is an ocean of SEO spam. And that's before you get into the sheer amount of information that isn't searcheable at all because it's on platforms like discord.

but sorting by active results in stale

yep, the default sorting makes it looks like nothing has been posted for 3 days

I've been very happy with Pocket Casts. Their subscription is pretty cheap (not one-time though, unfortunately), and it has automatic sync between the android and desktop apps.

I'll play devil's advocate here -- I hate Meta, but Meta apps supporting activitypub would be a huge benefit for adding users to the platform.

Like other small social platforms, the fediverse has a fundamental choice to make between quantity and quality. The quality of Reddit took a nosedive in the last 5-6 years as the platform grew. I'm not saying it was always great in "the old days", but recently all of the big subs were just page after page of the same memes, stupid arguments ("it's called soccer! It's called football!") that have been had a million times, and the same jokes.

So the question is -- how much does the fediverse want to grow? The thing keeping me from deleting my Reddit account right now is some of the sports communities there, and things like a local urbanism group from my hometown.

Having Meta apps support activitypub could help establish that kind of userbase. At the same time, the influx of users could drastically reduce the quality of the platform. It's a balance that has to be struck by the community.

The cool thing about the fediverse compared to other platforms is that the structure allows this kind of thing to be decided fairly democratically -- each instance can "vote" by deciding whether to federate or not, and if we all agree we don't want them, everyone can defederate. If we're 50/50 they'll federate with half of the community.

I'm starting to think part of the problem was her needed some kind of mental help if this is how she's getting days off. This is not a healthy mind.

Yeah, I think that's what she's complaining about

the biggest thing that I would use it for would be individual blogs, I just only have 3 or 4 of those that I follow.

For the others, it doesn't help me that much to centralize them. Like with the hacker news rss feed, I can't comment or interact from the rss reader, so I might as well use the website. With twitter, all of my twitter follows are already centralized on twitter; same with youtube, reddit, or lemmy -- they already have feeds, and I can't interact from my feedreader.

NixOS is a bad choice for a new user. EndeavourOS is okay, but arch-based distros (even ones with nice graphical installers) can get overwhelming for a beginner if an update breaks something and you have to figure out why and fix it, which isn't an irregular occurence for me. Wouldn't recommend tumbleweed for similar reasons.

I think the best mix of easy customizability, beginner-friendliness, and stability are probably offered by fedora and mint, personally.

specifically battery life for my University classes

try undervolting your CPU/GPU. That was the first thing I did when I got my thinkpad and it improved the thermals and battery life significantly.

I use manjaro, but it isn't what I would call stable.

The motherboard itself is also open-source: https://github.com/system76/virgo/

Because it's a disproportionate amount of effort to natively support an extra OS (particularly one as fragmented as Linux), especially one with such a small userbase that largely isn't interested in using proprietary cloud services in the first place because of data privacy and security concerns.

Obviously not all Linux users are super worried about that stuff (I mean, I use Linux and have a google pixel), but on average the Linux userbase is way way more aware of that stuff than most users who just want their photos backed up without having to worry about it.

The x220 is quite easily the best laptop ever made imo, and I'll never understand why they just don't slap modern hardware into it and re-release it.

Not true breakage usually, but eventually I got tired of having new surprise bugs in shit that was working fine before.

yep, considering switching to nixos for this reason.

just the readme for throttled

can only speak to Germany, but it definitely is pretty common to tip here. Just less across-the-board and less money than in the US, usually 1 or a couple of Euros.

Who proposed doing that?

honestly, part of the reason I made a lemmy account at all is because it feels a little like reddit when I first started using it -- pretty niche, and less toxic and low-quality because of it.

reddit in the last few years has become very toxic. The smaller communities are still okay, but on all of the main subs it's just page after page of the same snarky jokes and tired memes.

so while more growth would be nice, I'm fine if most of reddit stays on reddit in the short-term. the fediverse can be its own thing.

shotwell can do this I think

This is very cool.

you can do this on debian, too. It's not specific to the OS -- it's the window manager. Specifically, this kind of window manager is called a tiling window manager.

Basically it just organizes your windows slightly differently. Instead of having them floating around like in Windows, Mac, or traditional desktop environments like GNOME, it tiles them -- when you open a new window, it automatically split screens it.

window managers also don't by default have things like a battery display or a wi-fi applet, like your typical desktop environment does -- you have to do that stuff manually by building some sort of status bar (there are various apps that provide status bars).

I kind of wish I had played with ROMs and stuff earlier. I still like the idea, but I don't use it because I use mobile payments so much that it would be a PITA not to have that working.

I would use one of the tools listed in the archwiki; I have an intel chip so I've never used any myself.

Once you find a tool that can undervolt, usually the recommendation is to lower the voltage incrementally until you see unstable behavior and crashes, than raise it back to the last good voltage, then run a stress-test to verify.

it would be the same way expansion cards work now; it would have digital control circuitry that can communicate with the analog circuitry.

We already have expansion cards that can do this. Audio cards are an example of an expansion card that convert between digital and analog signals.

Even things like graphics cards, ASICs, or FPGAs; it's not a different type of signal, but it's an architecture that isn't compatible with the rest of the computer because it's specialized for a certain purpose. So there's control circuitry that allows it to do that and a driver on the computer that tells it how to.

I didn't get it either, but this video does a pretty good job explaining why it's different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQWirkx5EY

My HL2030 is incredibly easy to use from Linux

I can tell you with confidence that DACs can only convert digital sound data into analogue, and that’s due to the audio jack being older than digital audio.

Right. But the principle is the same; hardware that isn't compatible with pre-existing systems has a control circuit, and a digital interface. The digital computer sends instructions to the controller, and the controller carries out the instructions.

An analogue device isn’t compatible with a digital device, much like how digital sound data (songs, audio tracks in videos, system sounds, etc…) and analogue audio don’t technically work.

Correct. That is why there is dedicated control circuitry designed for making analog and digital systems talk to each other -- as there will be for optical analog computers and every other type of non-conventional computing system.

It's true that conventional systems will not, by default, be able to communicate with analog computers like this one. To control them, you will send the question (instructions) to the control circuitry, which does the calculation on the hardware, and returns an answer. That's true for DACs, it's true for FPGAs, it's true for CPUs, it's true for ASICs.

Every temperature sensor, fan controller, camera, microphone, and monitor are also doing some sort of conversion between digital and analog signals. The light being emitted by the monitor to your eyes is a physical phenomenon that can be measured as an analog value (by taking a picture of your computer monitor on film, say). How does your monitor produce this analog signal? It has a control circuit that can take digital commands and convert them into light in specific patterns.

Using an analogue device to accelerate something requires at least some information to be lost on translation, even if the file size is stupidly large.

I don't think you've understood what analog computers are used for (actually, I'm not sure that you've understood what analog computing even really is beyond that it involves analog electrical signals). Analog computers aren't arbitrarily precise like digital computers are in the first place, because they are performing the computation with physical values -- voltage, current, light color, light intensity -- that are subject to interference from physical phenomenona -- resistance, attenuation, redshift, inertia. In other words, you're really worried about losing information that doesn't exist in a reliable/repeatable way in the first place.

A lot of iterative numerical methods need an initial guess and can be iterated to an arbitary degree. Analog computers are usually used to provide the initial guess to save iteration flops. The resolution just is not that important when you're only trying to get into the ballpark in the first place.

In other words, this computer is designed to solve optimization problems. Say you're getting results based on the color and intensity of the light coming out of it, right, like you might get values of tides based on electrical voltage on an old desktop analog computer. It's not that relevant to get the exact values for every millisecond at a sampling rate of a bajillion kilohertz; you're looking for the average value that isn't falsely precise.

So if you were designing an expansion card, you would design a controller that can modulate the color and intensity of the light going in, and modulate the filter weights in the matrix. Then you can send a digital instruction to "do the calculation with these values of light and these filter values". The controller would read those values, set up the light sources and matrix, turn on the light, read the camera sensors at the back, and tell you what the cameras are seeing. Voila, you're digitally controlling an analog computer.

had that subreddit not already moved offsite by that point? or do you mean that they only had enough momentum to carry a substantial userbase off-site because reddit dragged their feet for so long on doing anything about it? if the latter, I agree.

automated/networked backups like people are talking about here are great, but even just an external SSD and the nautilus copy function will give you at least some insurance.