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1: Probably any non-basic text editor has all these features. Except the tabs, which are not available by default on vim and emacs, but I think KDE's kate (?) and Gnome's gedit might have tabs by default, maybe. All the cool kids use vim or emacs though.

4: Haven't tried but arch wiki says XBox One controllers work by default over USB. I will say that I have seen games not recognizing my (not XBox One) controllers sometimes when not running through steam, but in general the controller situation seems good on Linux.

5: mpv is perfect as it is

7: I know you said GUI but that's a shell one-liner if I've ever seen one.

8: Yes there are Windows-key shortcuts (often called "Super" key on Linux) available for window management. The exact shortcuts depend on the window managers / desktop environment and are usually configurable.

9: Yes most anything works on any distro. For best results though, stick to mainstream distros and don't be fooled by "trendy" distros. Those are not necessarily mainstream, even if you think they are based on what teenagers spam on reddit. If it doesn't have at least a 10 year track record, it's probably a fluke and won't be supported in two years.

Nvidia: Just google whatever your distro + Nvidia, look for the official wiki or whatever, and follow the instructions. It shouldn't be that hard on any distro. Never install the nvidia driver through nvidia's website, that won't work out well. The nvidia driver is system/kernel level software, you cannot install it in a way that isn't specific to your distro without breaking something.

I personally do not like KDE, but you seem like someone who should go with KDE, which has lots GUI knobs and twists, which should suit your tastes. Windows power users tend to love that shit.

Also, for god's sake, try to learn some shell commands, I swear it'll make your switch easier.

Personally, my favoritism distribution is Debian, I would recommend it. RTFM though.

trustworthy AI

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral

What

The CTO of Mozilla and some other employee are posting on r/firefox defending this shit.

They say it is their job to help the adtech industry, by finding a compromise between my interests and Facebook & co's interest. Only they get 90% of their revenue from adtech, so their actual job is to sell me out.

This "plan" involves collecting additional data on behalf of adtech right now, and then there's a hypothetical second step, in which they will lobby to force this new system on everyone. Only (a) this second step is not going to happen, and (b) instead of being tracked by adtech companies, I'd now be tracked by "trusted third parties" or some shit which then sell my data, in aggregated form, to adtech companies. Wow. Great improvement this, we now have middlemen that are, uh, by semantic re-definition, not adtech companies.

So the actual second step is "???" and the third step is presumably "profit".

Are you talking about the claim that he endangered CIA agents? That was just some bullshit they cooked up to get him on, and I don't think anybody even claimed that somebody actually died.

Imagine thinking exposing the CIA should be a crime, because the poor small beans CIA agents need protection. Who wouldn't want to protect imperial blackmailers, hit men, weapons smugglers and death squad commanders?

You are the traitor for siding with the oppressor.

This does not prevent regular ad tracking, this provides additional data to advertisers. It also means Mozilla is now tracking me, and then Mozilla does this "anonymizing" on their servers. I do not trust Mozilla with this data, and I don't trust that no way can be found de-anonymize or combine this data with other data ad networks already collect.

This is not in my interest at all. This data should not be collected. The ad networks can suck it, why should I help them?

https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/

extension design and strong content filters make AdBlock for Firefox a solid choice for people who don’t necessarily despise all ads

Do these people exist and if so, have they been checked for brainworms?

The rest is also stupid, ublock origin can and does block trackers, and can be made to block more stuff if you want. It's strictly better in every way than the competition, which lets through more stuff, and/or sells your info. The article would be very short though if they just said that.

Don't listen to the naysayers. This is fun and people like seeing similar-minded dorks out and about. Having said that, I wouldn't put some business logo on my computer. But a community distro, why not? Been there done that.

Read an article some years back about someone installing Linux on a hard drive.

Not on a computer with a hard drive. On the embedded ARM core inside the hard drive. One of them anyways, I think this particular hard drive had three CPUs inside it actually.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/187649/is-it-possible-to-detect-vpn-in-the-network

tl;dr: You can infer that OpenVPN is used from the key exchange somehow.

Kenji Lopez-Alt

https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt/videos

The GoPro format is great, you can see what he does with his hands and you see all of the cooking, with practically zero cuts in the video. All the while he explains why he's doing the things you see.

GUI toolkits like Qt and Gtk. I can't tell you how to do it better, but something is definitely wrong with the standard class hierarchy framework model these things adhere to. Someday someone will figure out a better way to write GUIs (or maybe that already exists and I'm unaware) and that new approach will take over eventually, and all the GUI toolkits will have to be scrapped or rewritten completely.

I have never used the Steam beta or Proton-GE or whatever information is spreading out there to noobs about what they should do, and I've been gaming exclusively on Linux for more than 20 years. Only do this beta or bleeding edge stuff if you have a problem, and a good reason to believe that will help (like people reporting your specific issue is fixed in beta). Or I guess if you're bored out of your mind. And expect other issues since it's fucking beta.

"The poor should be prevented from breeding, amiright?" fucking hell who upvotes this shit

Use the net installer. Leave the root password empty if you want sudo installed. There is probably no need for you to read the official installation manual, but maybe do so if you run into any trouble.

There are wiki pages for the most common things you might want to setup, like how to install steam, nvidia driver, enable backports (good way to get (some) newer packages without breakage), and enable flatpak. Just google "debian wiki nvidia" etc.

NAFO is a Nazi propaganda op. Literally. The founder, Kamil Dyszewski (aka Kama Kamelia) is a Holocaust denier who adores Hitler. I call this the SS type genocide denier. That's actually the most common type.

In case anyone thinks the rest of NAFO distanced themselves from this guy: Lol no, he was just on stage at the NAFO summit in Vilnius.

Oh those dang culture warriors, amiright. *shakes fist*

Unlike say you, who would never post an article about how NPR isn't right-wing enough (lol) on a Linux forum.

Because HTTP is simpler, faster, easier, more reliable.

The motivation for a a lot of p2p is to make it harder to shut down, but there is no danger of that for Linux distros. The other would be to save money, but Debian/Arch/etc. get more than enough bandwidth/server donations, so they're not paying for that anyway.

I don't expect anybody is trying to jailbreak phones that have an official way to unlock them, even if it is very annoying.

As others have said, if you quote your variables, they won't get split on spaces. The Unix shell unfortunately has ton of gotchas like this, and the reason this is not changed is backwards-compatibility. Lots of shell scripts depend on this behavior, e.g. there might be something like:

flags="-a -l"
ls $flags

If you quote this (ls "$flags"), ls will see it as one argument, instead of splitting it into two arguments. You could patch the shell to not split arguments by default, and invent some other syntax for when you want this splitting behavior, but that would break a ton of existing shell scripts, and confuse users who are already familiar with the way it works right now. It would also make the shell incompatible with other shells, and violate the POSIX standard.

Yeah it actually says that in the text on that root password screen. But nobody ever reads that, me included. Literally everybody I have told this to was surprised when they hear about it. It's a total UI failure.

I did it during the gcc 3 transition. I used a very new gcc 3 (maybe even pre-release), which wasn't at all recommended. A couple of (most?) C++ packages didn't compile (some change having to do with namespace scope), which meant I had to fix the source of some packages (generally pretty trivial changes, usually having to prepend namespace:: to identifiers). Overall this problem was pretty rare, like it affected less than 1% of C++ files, but with things like Qt or Phoenix (or whatever Firefox was called back then), with thousands of files, I had to fix dozens of things. I guess running into problems made it more interesting and fun actually.

Did I learn anything? The main thing I learned is about all the different basic packages and what sort of binaries and libraries are included in them and why you need them. Also about some important config files in /etc. And a bit of shell experience, but I dare say I knew most of that stuff already. How much you learn depends a lot on how much you already know.

Overall what I learned was not very deep knowledge, nor was it a very time-efficient way to learn. But it was a chill learning experience, goal-oriented and motivating. And it made me more comfortable and confident in my ability to figure out and fix stuff.

Also it's obviously not practical to keep that up to date, so I switched back to a distro after a couple of months of this.

You think being a bigot is a skill issue do you? Like everyone deep down is just a bigot (self-inferred I assume?), and some people just have the social skills to hide that better? Have you tried not being a bigot instead of just hiding it?

My landlord is hurting me financially. What do think would be the appropriate level of violence to make them stop?

Is this actually due to attention span, or are these children basically illiterate?

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

A measuring jug (from oxo) that allows you to see the marks when looking at it from above.

Also I have two timers, and I need and use both.

Ah yes, the hypothetical second step, in which tracking is going to be outlawed (I'm not holding my breath), except, of course, for the third party services that do the aggregating, which will "sell" (literal quote) the aggregate data, so I guess these are by semantic sophistry not adtech companies but something else.

I'm so glad this genius "plan" can be used to justify Mozilla funneling data to adtech firms right now, because in some hypothetical future timeline this somehow can be construed with a bunch of hand-waving and misdirection to be in my interest.

How about instead we have a browser that only cares about the users, and not give a fuck about adtech? Its number one goal should be to treat adtech as hostile, and fight to ruin that whole industry.

This API instead

Instead of what? As I said, this is in addition to existing tracking, with some vague promise that if current tracking methods were banned or abandoned, this could be used instead. Except it's not getting banned (Mozilla is not going to out-lobby Google) or abandoned (market forces prevent that), and why oh why would I want some alternative way for ad companies to get my data in that situation anyway? Let them die.

Now if another person is going to repeat this nonsense talking point, which you have picked up strait from Mozilla's corporate PR, I'm going to lose my mind. Have some critical thinking skills. They are giving away your data right now and they give you nothing in return except a nonsense promise of a fairytale future.

Please I just want a browser that acts in the user's interest only, does not work with Meta on adtech, and does not think it's their duty to save the ad industry from itself.

Why would aliens come here?

Are you sure it's not a 686? Because apparently the Pentium Pro from 1995 is already a 686, by 2001 the Pentium 4 was already out.

Raymond is a fucking fascist.

::: spoiler CW racism He'd call himself a libertarian, but he's the kind of libertarian that wants to bomb muslims for hating our freedoms and thinks black people are just naturally more criminal because they have the crime gene or something, and no I'm not making this up. :::

Plus he's one of the "open source" rebrand types, so as not to scare the hoes corporations with too much scary "free software" hippie communism.

Move where? Another apartment where another landlord is going to hurt me financially? What does your believe system say should be done when my freedom from harm is being infringed upon?

A lot of distros, I think, are started more due to political/social/psychological reasons, and not fundamental technical reasons, and that's why a lot of them are so similar. Those reasons can be good and legit, but sometimes they are probably wrongheaded (but understandable), like an unwillingness to engage with upstream because that's tedious and frustrating, whereas the technical work of creating another distro with oneself in charge may be more fun.

Also, of course, once a distro is big enough, with a sizable community of developers and users, there's a strong incentive to keep it going, even if it's very similar to another distro. Maybe there used to more of difference in the past, but you're not going to convince a whole community to just shut down and join some other project. And business-run distros will keep going as long as the company is making money there is some business reason to keep doing them.

Not all Thinkpads work equally well. For the best experience, get an all-Intel one, from one of the more expensive business lines, like the T-series. Consumer models are definitely worse, because employees of big Linux-using tech firms are getting the pro models.

Where does it say that? How would this be enforced?

I'll make an appeal to authority (kernel developer working on memory management):

Disabling swap does not prevent disk I/O from becoming a problem under memory contention, it simply shifts the disk I/O thrashing from anonymous pages to file pages. Not only may this be less efficient, as we have a smaller pool of pages to select from for reclaim, but it may also contribute to getting into this high contention state in the first place.

And then he goes on to say what I said, that it can make the OOM killer quicker to react.

https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

I appreciate the stab at the US empire, but if I may be serious for a moment: It makes no sense to come here to steal our shit when there's countless stars and planets in the universe. I don't even think it makes the least bit of sense for humans to ever go to Mars and mine minerals there, given the logistics involved. Any alien smart enough to come here is going to be smart enough to realize that going to the pub is way easier and more fun.

This is a screenshot of window running a VM, so yes it is a window running a whole desktop. The top window decoration, menu bar, and the very bottom panel are not part of the old desktop, but rather from the modern host system.

I agree though, it is confusing. Main problem (and I remember this) is that this is Gnome with Enlightenment as a wm, and Enlightenment had aspirations to be more than a wm. So there's some duplication of effort there, and no integration/communication between the two projects (Gnome in the next version used sawfish/sawmill as wm, which was more coordinated with Gnome).

Enlightenment has/had its own toolkit, which you can see here in the DOX window, which is different from Gtk. Enlightenment also has a bunch of widgets, like the top bar and the stuff in the bottom corners, which are non-Gnome and clash with and are on top of the Gnome panel. The desktop icons are also zero pixels under the Enlightenment top bar, which suggest the people responsible weren't coordinating at all.

Guess who made waffles!!

Copying this package over USB will not work anyway, even if you get all the dependencies, since firmware-b43-installer is just a script that downloads the firmware (probably because it is illegal for Debian/Ubuntu to redistribute this firmware because of the license).

You need internet. You'll need to use a different network device for this, or use a phone as the other person said.

Or you can copy the firmware files over by hand, from a different Ubuntu/Linux computer. They should be under /usr/lib/firmware/b43.