Left wing (actual OG) Libertarianism is great. Right wing Libertarianism is basically a bunch of antisocial/intellectually lazy people who think the ideal society is one where everybody has a few acres of land with a little shack that they built themselves where they subsist on potatoes, carrots, and chicken eggs and stockpile gold and silver to trade with another libertarian twice a year.

We are rapidly depleting our healthy soil due mainly to destructive factory farming techniques used across the world.

Just one inch of healthy soil takes centuries to form from the slow breakdown of organic matter by a whole host of micro-ecosystems.

The desertification of massive swaths of our planet continues largely unabated.

Welcome to the club! Make sure to set up automatic Timeshift snapshots, just in case you break something badly, you’ll be glad you have a recent daily or weekly backup instead of a manual one from months ago.

Also, a friendly reminder, Timeshift is not a backup of your data. It snapshots your systems settings, especially critical functions which allows you to restore functionality, but you still should have your actual user data backed up somewhere else.

Another tip: familiarize yourself with Timeshift in the terminal. The GUI works great, but if you break your system badly enough, your desktop environment won’t load. (Don’t ask me how I know.) In that case, Timeshift is awesome because it will still run fine if you only can access it from the terminal. The commands are easy, and you don’t have to memorize. Just type timeshift --help and it will list out all the commands you’ll need to know.

“Yes, I’m sure I typed my password correctly.”

Working in IT, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that and how many times it’s been wrong.

“Hacking” is essentially effective and insightful tinkering. All great hackers in history have been insatiability curious about how things work.

They poke and prod and test and experiment, and every now and then, they find something interesting. Unexpected behavior, hidden code, useful bugs, etc.

Exploiting software vulnerabilities is only a small segment of hacking. Figuring out how to hook up a Raspberry Pi to your thermostat to control it remotely is hacking. Splicing a custom microcontroller into your old keyboard to give it all sorts of extra functions is hacking. Flashing a custom BIOS onto your GPU to unlock special overclocking features is hacking.

If you want to be great at “hacking” including software exploits, you need to understand computers at a deep level. You need to study electronics, logic, low level programming like Assembly and C, networking, circuits, operating systems and kernels, compilers, parsers, abstraction layers, encryption, and more.

The more concepts you learn and understand, the more interesting insights you will get from poking around, and the better you’ll get at using and developing tools to do even more advanced and interesting things.

There is no fast track, you have to take it slow and steady. Know what a computer is. Not the physical object, the abstract concept of a computer, a Von Neumann architecture, a Turing machine, what it means to be Turing complete, what is “code” and how does a static collection of tiny gates run it? The more stuff you skip, the worse you’ll be. But if all you want is the aesthetic of a “hacker” then just install Kali Linux, open the terminal and run tmux with a few panes, start btop, cmatrix, and neofetch in them. Put on a hoodie. Dim your lights and hunch over the keyboard for maximum effect.

Love to see it! I got my parents onto Linux Mint about a year ago and it’s been great for them.

Their home PC is way too old to upgrade to Windows 11, plus I didn’t want them subjected to Microsoft’s trash software and spying, so Linux it was.

Themed it similar to Windows 10, even changed the “Start” menu icon to the Windows 10 logo so my parents felt safe using it lol.

The problem with replacing Discord isn’t the tech or features. Discord doesn’t do anything special that hasn’t existed in other software for 15-20 years.

The key difficulty is overcoming the network effect. All the big streamers use Discord, which means their millions of viewers are going to use Discord also, which means that most of their friends will too, and thus, you have a default app that almost everybody uses.

It took a massive amount of effort for me to just get three of my friends to sign up with Matrix and join a group server for gaming, and two of them stopped using it after just a month or two. I only have a single friend who is still using it, and they only use it when the two of us are gaming.

I’m going to assume worst case scenario, rotting bloated corpse that stinks, is covered in flies, and is floating high and very visibly on the surface of the water.

In that case, I would need the pool to be probably Olympic sized and be on the long end away from the corpse.

My instinct says that would be enough for me to not be too horrified beyond the initial horror of seeing it in the pool.

This will become more and more true in more and more cases as time goes on.

Linux is built on a far more efficient kernel, and the culture of Linux development is very much the same.

Meanwhile Microsoft will continue to enshitify its projects, shove more AI garbage onto its users, and prioritize profits over everything else.

Linux has been the standard OS for decades in the low power computing space, Microsoft can’t compete.

I love how she starts off by saying her legal team recommended she not do that…then proceeds to do it anyways lol.

Onision had a pretty spectacular implosion, but he was always a pretty wild and controversial figure. Shane Dawson was another pretty massive one. Miranda Sings was also huge, then all the weird and creepy chats and stage moments came out, sank her whole brand.

Voyager user here, just some general bugginess. It’s not bad, but sometimes weird stuff happens, like when I minimize the app on my phone and then switch back, the main toolbar is misaligned.

True, it still does vary even chipset to chipset. Some Nvidia and Intel cards do just work depending on the distro, others require more work.

It also depends on how “techie” the user is. My parents are 0% techie, so I have to do anything and everything for them if they have questions or issues.

But a Windows power user can handle some terminal use and other basic system modifications. And honestly now days, most of that stuff is super easy. Like Linux mint has a dedicated driver app that allows you to use a simple GUI to install Nvidia drivers, it’s super easy.

Hard to summarize, because it differs so much from person to person.

I installed Linux on my parent’s computer. They don’t need to know anything about Linux, because everything they use is identical to their old Windows PC. They click the icon for Chrome to open the browser. They Click the icon for LibreOffice to type up a “Word” doc and print it by clicking “file > print”

As far as they’re concerned, they are still using Windows.

For a gamer, they will need to know a little about Proton, possibly Lutris and the Hero launcher. They might need to know about installing nVidia drivers or tweaking a few things in the Steam launch options to get games to run better.

It’s tough to know exactly what a new Linux user will “need” to know in order to use Linux.

Typically it refers to leftists who strongly defend/advocate for authoritarian statist approaches to socialism/communism.

I agree, but then why would they not retracted their support? If it really was an honest mistake and they weren’t aware of the situation, I would think they would apologize, explain that they didn’t know, pull their support, and issue a statement about the kinds of values they want to promote in the FOSS world.

But instead, they have doubled down, the CEO himself. It’s very strange and concerning.

The weird thing for me is the financial support coming from Framework to Hyprland. It would be one thing if Framework was working with Hyprland to test compatibility and functionality on their machines and do specialized bug testing. They could kind of justify that from a purely technical stance.

But the fact that they picked a very niche project for no apparent reason to support with a significant monthly financial contribution is so strange. There are numerous other niche distros/projects that aren’t mired in controversy that Framework could have worked with, (Alpine, Void, ElementaryOS, etc.) so why Hyprland/Omarchy?

Very disappointed. I’ve been pushing Framework computers very strongly for friends and family over the last year, plus I’ve been planning on getting one to replace my aging Thinkpad. Now I am going to hold off until the dust settles on this.

Fair point, I thought Proton went back farther than that.

I think my overall point is right still though, Linux gaming (native or otherwise) has become not just viable, but in some cases objectively superior to gaming on Windows in terms of raw performance. Pretty amazing, and in even less time than I originally thought lol.

Linux mobile phones are the fusion power of the FOSS world, always “right around the corner.”

All the pieces are there, but none of them work together smoothly enough to be functional for anybody except the most hardcore FOSS enthusiasts.

When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.

So it’s certainly possible for things to completely change, but we need a big player or consortium of players to unite with a shared goal of getting a Linux Phone to the state where it’s genuinely able to replace a traditional Android or Apple phone.

I’m very cautiously optimistic, I think it would come together much faster than Proton did for Linux gaming, but again, there needs to be a really heavy push into a singular device to start off. Like how the Steam Deck was, it allowed devs to have a singular platform to target for compatibility. Then, as the platform matures, competitors & innovators can enter the market and expand options, like how now there are multiple distros with builds for handhelds, like Bazzite, Nobara, and CachyOS.

Depends on your meta-ethical framework. If you’re a consequentialist, then you should always choose the option that leads to less evil being done. Same if you’re a utilitarian.

If you hold to a Kantian value-based framework, like the action itself holds the primary moral goodness or evil in its own nature, then choose the action that itself is less evil.

There are many other frameworks. It also depends on what you think happens in the case of something like voting. Some people see participation in any sense as a sort of tacit agreement or endorsement of the system as a whole. So by casting any vote, even one of protest, you are legitimizing the system as a whole.

Others see voting as a mere means to an end, and thus, is justified if the outcome is better than not voting would be. Some see it as purely neutral, like a tool that can be used for good or bad.

Still, others see it as an inherently good thing, and view abstaining from the act of voting as a moral wrong, because it is a willing act of self-sabotage of the moral interests of the greater good, or sometimes as a violation of the social contract.

There are many other positions and considerations. Basically…it’s complicated.