Is there any sort of cognitive dissonance happening on a national level around this? America and it’s media have been touting the “land of the free”, “home of democracy” slogans for decades, is there not an identity crisis happening amongst those who believe it? I understand the left vs right, democrat vs republican arguments most of the time but surely no matter which side you’re on this must be a shock?

I love the argument about c having type safety with the little side-swipe at rust. “AcTuAlLy C does have type safety! You just have to jump through the following 50 hoops to get it!”. I’m an outsider to both C and Rust but it’s still funny.

Most people just want a thing to work though. One member of my family has issues with her iPhone at the moment where the signal is just all over the place. Sometimes not able to receive calls, sometimes not able to make them, sometimes inaudible when the call is made. She’s googled and gone to apple tech support who have given her a list of basic troubleshooting tasks to do, stuff like checking settings. She said to me “I don’t want to go hunting for these things I just want to hand it to someone and they can make it work!”

Linux and computer enthusiasts are happy to assemble things as we need them because the problem solving stuff is satisfying to us, for other people it’s just a slog.

Right, but my point is that that wasn’t explained in the post, and it’s not the only thing in the article that is stated as “you should do this thing” without telling the reader why.

Only heard a couple people talk about it online (that I trust to be reasonable) and they basically said it was fine but didn’t blow them away. And that’s fine but it makes for boring “cOnTeNt”.

I wouldn’t call this “beginner” but some useful stuff nonetheless. Some of the points could use some justification or a reason to do it, eg using 127.1 over 127.0.0.1.

I’m all for supporting low-to-middle incomes but it’s still a huge investment for those not in (or just outside) that bracket. I can’t spend 10k now to see the return in 20 years, assuming the rates stay decent. It’s not practical.

Rock and stone

Ah yes, it’s the immigrants’ fault that education has been underfunded for years and teaching is such a woefully underpaid career. Definitely the immigrants’ fault. No no don’t look at the last 14 years of Tory rule that included austerity!

After spending a bit of time today debugging a systemd issue I can start to sympathise with this. Not come across or really looked for viable alternatives that aren’t just a return to random bash init scripts though.

Ok hear me out. I’m a book author, I write a book and try to sell it for £100 while all my peers are selling books at 60 or 70. I spend the most money imaginable making my book. It’s quite possibly the largest book in existence thanks to the effort of me and 5000 other people. I lie awake at night worrying that we’ll never make back the money we’ve spent on it.

Wait what’s this? Some team of less than 10 people has written a 3-page book and sold it for 2.50? And people are… Buying it?! But why? Look at the size of my book, clearly it must be better because it’s so big, so fancy, so expensive! Every letter cost me millions! I read the 3-page book. It doesn’t have money dropping from each letter like mine. It has a beginning, middle and end but mine has 500 acts each more expensive than the last. Surely it’s not that good… It’s pretty great actually. I have learned nothing from this experience, even though it’s happened a hundred times. I will still make more money than entire countries, somehow.

I’ve never known any of my immediate circle of friends and family to have any interest whatsoever. Windows 11 has been the nail in the coffin for one, the steam deck has piqued the interest of another. Year of the Linux desktop is a pipe dream but any step towards greater adoption is a great thing.

I heard a journalist use similar language to describe skibidi toilet recently like it was just the one video. You’d think journalists would know better.

The thing we should be more concerned about are the parts that Steam haven’t opened up, for example Steam input. However they’ve done everything as openly as possible for the move to Linux and I applaud that. If steam goes away or stops being so open, we still have proton and wine and other projects that mean we’re not locked in to a Steam-specific OS, so we avoid the android problem there too.

By design of the ruling parties, not because universal healthcare is impossible

The ELI5 version is that developers can make a lot of assumptions about what a Windows pc means and what features are available. A while ago if you had videos as part of a game (for example a cutscene) it was actually played through Windows Media Player, which was virtually guaranteed to be present on the user’s computer. Sure you can play that video with other tools like VLC or Quicktime, but you couldn’t guarantee they were installed, so Windows Media Player was a safe bet. Nowadays that’s not how video is handled but the point remains for a few other things. For example if I need to load an image, maybe a background, I would look it up using the windows filesystem, so probably something like C:\Program Files\Steam\common\mygame\images\background.png. That’s not the same in the Linux or another os. Also the piece of software that handles loading images might be different, which means how we execute that load operation is probably different, and so our Windows-focused version of our game just doesn’t work.

Fortunately nowadays that’s a mostly solved problem with Steam investing a lot of time into Proton, what they call a “compatibility layer” that basically translates all of the windows-specific stuff to work in Linux. That’s a very simplified explanation but you get the idea. The games that still won’t run have kernel-level anticheat (Valorant, Helldivers 2) or are so dependent on things only available on Windows that even Proton can’t fix it. Some anti-cheat software doesn’t run properly so then you can’t go online, like Warhammer: Vermintide 2. That’s mostly a commercial decision rather than technical, they could make it work they just choose not to.

The fact Microsoft isn’t mentioned astounds me.

The issue for me as a potential advocate to my immediate circle of friends and family is that I don’t want to become the only source of tech support. Now realistically they’ll probably have fewer issues, but as soon as they want to fix something they’ll have to come to me. No they won’t Google things, and if they do they won’t understand it.

In my case my partner has a Windows 10 surface laptop. It’s perfectly functional and does what she needs it to do, but Windows 10 is dying next year, so I need to find some solution that is user friendly (meaning GUI-based in this case) to maintain her access to her OneDrive, or we throw away a perfectly good laptop to buy a slightly newer one. Besides the e-waste it’s just a waste of money. It makes some business sense, why make it easy to move away from windows? Except it also sucks on anything that isn’t a windows desktop, so they just expect people to put up with a subpar service essentially because their business users don’t have much choice. Dropbox was better 10 years ago than OneDrive is now, in terms of platform availability and usability.

Note: I’m aware we can access OneDrive and office via a browser, however it’s not the same as native and feels clunky. Throwing Linux on it and using a browser is probably going to be our solution if I can’t get rclone to work in a way she’ll be happy with.

We have rules?