Paragone

If it works for you, stick with it.

Works is a feature, not a bug.

_ /\ _

If it's changing, you might want to get a brain-scan, immediately.

No, it isn't normal ( not for me, anyhow ), to the guy who said it is normal.

It's not an ear thing, it is an auditory-processing thing, so it's your brain that's doing it.

The question is why it is doing it.

Perhaps it's just fuzzy wiring, as most such cases likely are.

( synaesthesia is a case of weird wiring, and I've got that, but not in the normal way, not senses blurring into each-other, but rather my non-visual cognition being a kind of "blur" to those senses, so they mesh oddly )

But if it begins changing in either intensity or character, get a scan.

( I'm a braindamage survivor, and it takes decades to adapt to braindamage: prevention/avoidance is better than hating one's life for decades, while being bullied by all who reject that it could still validly be a problem, and hold that one ought either force oneself into being an "acceptable" drugged psychiatric-zombie, and not "pretend" to be getting better, or one ought be able to be acceptable-pretence, just like Valid People(TM) are. )

_ /\ _

SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,

and not just privilege's gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),

then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.

However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered "level" playing-field.

The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.

Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.

Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.

Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.

Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.

Not mitigating it == accommodating it.

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_ /\ _

Fish, arthropods, etc, had eggs millions of years before chickens.

_ /\ _

IF by "security" one means bugs have been prevented from living in it, there is one coded in Haskell, it may be named XMonad or something...

( .. digging .. )

Yep:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmonad

from there:

"Due to the small number of lines of code of the Xmonad application, the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell, and recorded use of a rigorous testing procedure it is sometimes used as a baseline application in other research projects. This has included re-implementation of xmonad using the Coq proof assistant,[31] a determination xmonad is an imperative program,[32] and studies of package management relating to the NixOS linux distribution.[33]"

Dig: 2000-ish lines of code.

https://xmonad.org/

https://xmonad.org/documentation.html

I'm an old guy, whose been in Linux, off'n'on since 1997 or 1996, and not a professional.

Keep that in mind.

I now always recommend a pair of NVMe's,

with swap on both,

with root mdadm mirrored RAID1 on both ( I've read that BTRFS "RAID1", when 1 mirror is missing on boot, simply won't permit you to boot, unless you get jiggy with the damn thing, telling it arbitrary stuff, to get it to allow that )

with /home mdadm mirrored RAID1

and use the extra space for whatever.

Use SATA for your backups.

I recommend using the fastest NVMe's you can get, but biggest is more-important.

Samsung .. what are they, EVO drives? go up to 2TB, iirc, and are reasonably cheap ( for people who can afford such things )...

This gives Linux's mdadm RAID1 speed ( it does RAID0 for reads, RAID1 for writes ), AND it gives greater reliability.

I've been stung by incorrect partition space allocation sooo many times, that now I'd stick everything on as few partitions as is sane, but as OpenBSD recommends, some filesystems on separate partitions breaks some attack-methods ( partly by breaking hardlinks ).

The difference that access-speed & bandwidth do, for your OS, and especially swap, is stunning, so if you've got the funds, consider the Samsung PRO NVMe's, instead of their EVO's, but definitely get quality & quick NVMe's, RAID1 'em up, and enjoy.

PS: I always do a prototype-install, now:

whole-device ( except swap, EFI, boot ), 1 partition, install everything I'm likely to want, of that OS, take a look at the filesystem use, for different parts of the root fs-tree, and then begin deciding what partition-sizes to be considering, using a 1.5x or 2x factor for expansion-space... ( different distros with /usr and /opt, especially ).

Then I repartition into the intended structure, & install in...

And, of course, I now expect to have to re-partition 1/2y later, as the things I've later found, & added, alter the ratios...

Obviously, if this weren't just some random guy at home, LLVM would make much more sense, because then partitions could be resized/redistributed on-the-fly.

But for now, for a machine I only-sometimes use, it's good enough.

Maybe this seems useful information?

I hope so...

( :

Spend a half-month considering, deeply, which path you would most-value having taken at the end of your life.

Due to an unconscious psychological-limitation, imagine your funeral at 1.5x your current age ( we apparently have a kind of "horizon" in our ability to understand our meaning beyond that ),

and imagine each significant variant, or compromise, and see how each makes you, in that future-condition/context feel.

Your answer is within you, same as for everyone.

_ /\ _

The problem is the end of civil-rights: WHEN the only internet left is the internet that IS for-profit propaganda, auto-deleting all non-compliant human thought, discussion, intelligence, objectivity, etc,

THEN humanity is just managed "steers" whose lives are being consumed by corporations which graze on us.

Since another dimension of ratchet is the concentration-of-wealth, you can see that working-destitution is being enforced on more & more of humankind, and real wealth being limited to fewer & fewer...

What happens when the working-poor try fighting for a fair share of the economy?

Rigged legislation, rigged "police" ( I used to believe in the police ), anti-education Florida-style for the public, etc...

AI tilts the playing-field, and it does-so for the monied special-interest-groups.

They don't have humanitarianism at heart.

Neither do the politically motivated.

Neither do for-profit-psychopaths ( corporations are psychopaths ).

Living in a Decorator Prison is all humanity can hope for, now: inmates, .. except for the fewer & fewer oligarchs & the financial-class.

'tisn't looking good.

Without Divine Intervention, which is statistically improbable an event, these are The End Times, but not for the reason that the religious claim.

https://www.funtoo.org/Welcome

instead of Gentoo.

IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.

Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).

As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn't possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.

Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn't a niche distro, either, iirc.

---

Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you're rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.

( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn't sane to continue doing it. )

---

Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don't even consider distros that break your required-set on you.

_ /\ _

and if you consider that "economic barrier to entry" can make any bigger company, who is able to scoop a startup's code & sell the use of it, can extinguish the startup who created the code ...

then, yes, there are definitely situations where protection-against-competitors, some of whom have DEEP pockets, could be an actual requirement, for opensourcing one's code.

"Coopetition" Bill Gates coined, where you "cooperate" with your competitors, but, being Microsoft, you do it so you can snuff them, soon.

I can definitely see why a company would want to be able to allow limited use of their code, globally, but to legally-prohibit using it to destroy them.

Possibly due to each discovery being some bacteria that eat exactly 1 chemistry of plastic.

: )

Decaf green tea, steeped at room-temperature, so NO tannins get into my tea...

possilby rooibos, but haven't had it in awhile, so don't know if that's still valid...

possibly something with cardamom seeds in it?

( :

I've been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female...

: P

The book "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess" by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women's-rights simply don't progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages...

So, Anglo cultures pushed women's-rights, whereas Latin cultures .. won't, don't, drag their heels, etc...

That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

It's still true.

Conditioning an entire population's System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow", the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place...

Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas...

... digging ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

( that isn't a quick read... may come back to it some day... )

Bingo!

"The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic."

from

https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people's System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

What about Hebrew?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

No wonder women can't get equal-validity in Jewish culture...

( I read a Jewess's writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ .. which explains the damage in the stereotypical "Jewish mother", a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature... )

So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is .. baseless, in some/many cultures...

Interesting, but depressing.

: \

They told me, when I complained about it not working properly in the distro I was using at the time, either openSUSE Tumbleweed, or openSUSE LEAP, or Void Linux, that they only support Ubuntu.

That was their statement to me, on the Steam support system.

I'm presuming they know what their policies are.

Sorry if this doesn't fit what people believe.

Decide, 1st, on the point of your installing Linux on it:

IF you want the most-fundamental-understanding,

THEN you want the book "How Linux Works", the most-recent edition of that, and maybe you want a Debian/Ubuntu in order to guarantee that any problem you encounter will already have been encountered by somebody else, while you are getting competent in the fundamentals... There are 2 Linux System Administration books to consider, after you work through that one, 1 is from OReilly, the other .. I can't remember who published it, but it has several authors, & a cartoon on the front cover, and it is huge, and it is the one you want.

Neither of those books are cheap, but try comparing them with a university-year of a course, and the competence you can earn through those 2 books is at least that level.

You also are going to need, around the time you get partway through the 2nd book, a book on Linux Security.

IF you are just a crazy hack-at-things person who likes technical toys, then maybe Void is more likely to be fun for you...

Linux From Scratch is how you get the every-last-step-of-the-way understanding, but I haven't done that one yet, because I want to keep using my computer for things like writing, and LFS might make me avoid my machine ( I spent years burnt-out from geekery, several times, and am leery of getting myself that way, again, but LFS really is the way to get truly-competent as a sysadmin. ).

You will need the same books listed above, though.

Do well!

( :

I agree with your limited-set:

TheRegister & Ars Technica are the 2 that give the highest quality overview,

and yeah, Phoronix is kinda required for Linux news,

and .. how the hell could churning more be somehow increasing one's productivity??

Stephen R. Covey's truth about..

• the bigger one's Circle of Concern..
• the smaller one's Circle of Influence..

one must Focus, or one is just mindlessly dissipating one's finite strength.

Limit one's inputs, to quality overview points, and know which other-sites to hit, for specific digging-down into some specialty,

( Leonard Susskind's lectures, on yt, e.g. for mental exercise: his "Time As A Fractal Flow" one is awesome, when the lightbulb goes on, at the end )

and then you win most.

---

Never let sand into your gears, in other words, eh?

Keeping all the "misc sand" out from one's "gears" makes one more productive.

Oh, also www.SemiAccurate.com for the semiconductor foundry industry news, if Demerjian's still updating that ( he's scooped the industry toooo many times to let that one escape being important! )

_ /\ _

I'm a braindamage survivor.

You need to communicate your values, and why they are your values.

You need to communicate who you are, via the most-significant-moments/events you experienced: the most-significant-for-you meanings, see?

As for you disappearing, the Soul/CellOfGod/ChildOfGod/Continuum ( whatever you want to call it ) that causes the molecules in your body to continue-living ( yes, there is a physics-level cause for the anti-entropy behaviour expressed as living-organisms, and it isn't there, when those same molecules are doing the disintegrating-corpse thing, obviously )

That cause is unkillable.

It keeps getting caught in conceptions/lives, through endless-stream-of-Universes's perpetual recycling/churning of ALL energies ( including meaning! ) contained within it.

It isn't the-individual-life that is the center,

it is the Soul/CellOfGod/ParticleOfBrahman that is.

IT experienced some of ITs growing-up, in/through your-life.

With you, your Soul got a gift, fersure.

My life's been hell, & I'm glad:

nothing like aversion-therapy to force a Soul/CellOfGod to grow-up, eh?

The Soul that had "me"-personality won't ever make that mistake, again.

: )

If you've still got any ability to read, or to have someone read to you, please have someone get Elisabeth Haich's "Initiation" into you:

it is likely that only part of the book will be important for you, but that part will likely be IMPORTANT.

The world her Soul 1st inhabited was something like 10,000y ago ( it hasn't rained much there, since then ).

My Soul's spent most of its time inhabiting insect-lives, or particularly-stupid-fish-with-bad-eyesight.

It's been centuries since it had been in a human-category life ( the Catholicism I was pressed into, by mom, got nuked when I discovered those strange-memories were memories of my Soul's having lived in other kinds of lives.

Not only did it nuke all the Abrahamic religions, but it forced me to accept that ALL lives are lives because they have a Soul underlying them, and there isn't anything "special" about the life of a human, except for our Potential & our Opportunity, which most take for granted, including me, in my younger days ).

Anyways, you can't unexist, from Eternity.

You'll always have-been, see?

The Soul/CellOfGod who had you has YOU in it, indestructibly.

I'm earning removal of me-personality now ( should be days ), so the nervous-system currently having "me" can get that "me" ripped-out & can replace it with a better personality ( it's a Buddhist technique, apparently nobody remembers it, in the modern version of Buddhism, for some reason ), so you can stack multiple personalities/someones into a single incarnation, to get-through multiple-lives of lessons/growing-up crammed into a single incarnation/life.

It works, but it takes work to force one's own identity-death, or removal of the instance-of-ego underlying one's personality...

There are 3 kinds of mind that death-itself has difficulty "gripping" on:

• Wisdom-realizing-that-all-phenomena-are-empty-of-self-inherent-existence

• immeasurable-compassion for all sentiences ( but tempered by wisdom )

• Faithing, which is the simultaneous surrendering-to higher-power, relying-on higher-power, and gratitude-to higher-power.

Faithing on one's own CellOfGod/Soul is perfectly find/workable.

It has BuddhaNature/GodNature, so all you have to do is orient to that aspect of its nature, and then faithing is powerful/valid, see?

Guru-yoga, is faithing.

"a faith", ie noun, .. isn't what the original texts said, btw.

Anyways, I hope something in this helps, gives you leverage.

Either way, our Souls will meet again, after "us", sooner-or-later...

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, Hoomin!

( :

_ /\ _

When I complained to them about Steam being broken on my ( either openSUSE Tumbleweed or LEAP, or Void Linux ) system,

they told me they only support Ubuntu, period.

I'm not talking about rumors, or feelings, or heresay, they put it in text/"writing", through their Steam support system, in a message to me, that they only support Ubuntu.

People downvoting me for stating fact is stupid ( I've no idea if you were one of the people who downvoted my comment, I'm presuming that statistically, 1 of the others who commented against my factual-reporting did. ).

If people have a problem with Steam not being the way they want-to-believe, then ought tell Steam to make a statement contradicting what they told me, and making explicit that they support Arch.

I've seen enough comments on various Lemmy communities, to know that I do not want to try running Steam on Arch: I've had enough obstacle-induced migraines in my life.

IF they tell you something contradictory to what they told me, fine: you get more-recent information that what I got some months ago!

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

( :

A couple of decades ago, iirc, SANS.org ( IF I'm remembering who it was who did it ) put a fresh-install of MS-Windows on a machine, & connected it to the internet.

It took SEVERAL MINUTES for it to be broken-into, & corrupted, botnetted.

The auto-attacks by botnets are continuous: hitting different ports, trying to break-in, automatically.

I've had linux desktops pwned from me.

the internet should be considered something like a mix of toxic & corrosive chemicals: "maybe" your hand will be fine, if you dip it in for a moment & immediately rinse it off ( for 3 hours ), but if you leave you limbs dwelling in the virulent slop, Bad Things(tm) are going to happen, sooner-or-later.

---

I used to de-infest Windows machines for my neighbours...

haven't done it in years: they'll not pay-for good anti-virus, they'll not resist installing malware: therefore there is no point.

Let 'em rot.

I've got a life to work-on uncrippling, & too-little strength/time left.

---

"but I don't need antivirus: i never get infected!!"

then how come I needed to de-infest it for you??

"but I don't need an immune-system: pathogens are a hoax!!"

get AIDS, then, & don't use anti-AIDS drugs, & see how "healthy" you are, 2 years in.

Same argument, different context-mapping.

---

Tarpit was a wonderful-looking invention, for Linux's netfilter/iptables, years ago: don't help botnets scan quickly & efficiently to help them find a way to break-in...

---

Anyways, just random thoughts from an old geek...

---

EDIT: "when do I need to wear a seatbelt?"

is essentially the same category of question.

_ /\ _

You, and everybody interested in this who wants real integrity in their leverage to argue this stuff, need to get Hofstadter's remapping of gender-terms from Mr vs Miss & Mrs to ..

.. IF you are white, THEN there is 1 pronoun for you, ..

.. ELSIF you are black, THEN your pronoun is dependent on whether you're employed or not

written by Douglas Hofstadter ( author of "Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid", the keystone to competent philosophy ), for Scientific American magazine, decades ago.

It may be in the "Metamagical Themas" book.

It was mentioned in the 1990's in the Feminism FAQ as being trailblazing, because it caused what we were unconscious-of to GET in our faces, violating our habits, so we could actually perceive just how prejudiced it is.

searching .. This may be it..

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

I only glanced at it, it's too jarring for me ( I'd rather that I could just live in solitary isolation for the entire rest of my life: humanity's abuse ), but it may help crystalize the ability to articulate just how stilted this all is.

---

I completely agree that "Mr." and "Miss", "Mrs.", "Mz" all are gender-identifying, and as-such ought be considered illegal under their law.

But exactly as the convict/felon/inmate Yehoshua "Jesus" benJoseph identiied, a couple of millenia ago, legalists insist on the letter-of-the-law, while ignoring whatever law's inconvenient to their artifice.

Legalists haven't changed since benJoseph called them "Hypocrites!".

_ /\ _

IF you want Steam, THEN you want one of the Ubuntu family: Steam doesn't support any other kind of Linux distro.

openSUSE gave me compatibility-issues after I had it running properly, both Tumbleweed AND OpenLEAP versions, when they broke my wifi-driver, early in 2023, so I'm kinda leery of recommending them.

If you want the most Unix-like system, Slackware used to be that, haven't used it in years, though...

Funtoo should probably be the go-to distro for compute-oriented machines, like Blender renderers, or such... optimize to use ALL the hardware-advantage you can...

Many enjoy Void Linux.

just some opinions & experiences...

( :