I know this is a joke post but… those floors are usually mechanical floors where equipment is mounted and instead of windows they have a steel corrugated mesh covered by louvers to allow air to flow through them to cool the machines.

I’m not personally a fan of immutable distributions myself, and I’m definitely not really a fan of recommending one to a new user. Most of the solutions for problems that someone may search for on the internet are going to assume that you are not using an immutable distribution and will not help that user what-so-ever. I also really don’t want to have to teach someone who is already worried about moving to Linux about things like distrobox, Flatpak sandbox permissions, why they can’t modify certain files, etc. I think it’s counter productive, and will just play into the “Linux nerds need to run 500 commands just to install 1 app in their distrobox container and modify their Flatpak permissions so they can mount their external drive with their games on it in Steam” mindset. I just want to give them something that works, and will work most similarly to what they are used to. Honestly, this is why I’ve strayed away from Linux in general over time and went back to NetBSD, I want my things to just work, I want it to be simple, and I don’t personally have brand new hardware so all the modern amenities that Linux offers to me don’t entice me.

1. Most of your games should just work fine these days. If you’re playing live service shooters (usually competitive ones, think Valorant and such) you may have issues with their anti-cheat not liking Wine/Proton, but everything else is usually fine. You can check if your games work here https://www.protondb.com/ and here https://areweanticheatyet.com/
2. Pretty much every emulator has a Linux native build, or can be built yourself for Linux with minimal effort. I’ve never had issues with things like Dolphin, Xemu, pcsx2, etc.
3. OBS Studio runs natively on Linux and works great.
4. Godot also runs natively on Linux and works great. If you’re using other tools in your workflow like Adobe products, you may have issues, but there are a ton of free and open-source alternatives.

And honestly, for distribution, I’d just use Ubuntu. I know I’m probably going to get a lot of flack for saying that, but Ubuntu is much better than Linux Mint and Co. simply because it is more up-to-date (nerd speak, can ignore: Wayland being the biggest thing, Cinnamon is still pretty far behind in this department, and slapping KDE Plasma or GNOME onto Linux Mint has been known to cause issues) than other distributions. It also has the benefit of having the ability to install proprietary codecs and drivers (think Nvidia graphics drivers) out of the box unlike other distributions people like to recommend such as Fedora. Just know whatever distribution you use, at the end of the day, 98% of the software is the exact same across each distribution and there will be no noticeable difference between them for a new user really. If you can get comfortable with 1 Linux distribution, you will be able to get comfortable with any distribution fairly quickly with minor changes.

awooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

It’s always DNS… or us-east-1. Wait, it was both this time? we should hit the pokies tonight!

There’s all kinds of little easter eggs scattered across the GNOME ecosystem and projects in their orbit, here’s a screenshot from the Flathub quality guidelines last year, sadly it has been changed but, it existed at one point!

And here’s another bit from a program developed by a previous board member (who’s name you may recognize from drama involving them a few months back), the first preview image you see for their program’s page on Flathub

and there was screenshots for the GNOME Podcast app on the apps.gnome.org page some time ago that showed Blowback and TrueAnon, it seems to have been changed also and I’m too lazy to try to scroll through Web Archive to find it, so you’ll just have to take my word!

The lead maintainer is also part of GNOME as well

Never stop GNOME, never stop…

Edit:

The comments on this video are fucking golden too, lol.

They’ll bring in Elon Musk next, don’t worry! He’ll share his extensive insider knowledge about how he personally designed the ᛋᛋyberTruKKK all by himself (what a genius!) to withstand anything you can throw at it! Did you know it can also briefly serve as a boat for a short amount of time? How wonderful!

Another neat thing that works very similarly to Sober is https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest. It allows you to play the Android version of Minecraft (Bedrock Edition) on Linux by patching the game at runtime and “emulating” an Android environment to get it all running essentially natively. Which would also make this probably one of the cheapest ways to get an “official” copy of the game since you can buy the Android version on the Google Play store for like $5.

smolBSD is an independent project built on top of NetBSD

I’m surprised I have not seen this yet, very neat! Already have a couple of ideas for this :)

I still use OpenVPN on my NetBSD machines. NetBSD has WireGuard support, but I’ve had issues with it a couple of times and it’s still technically experimental even though it’s existed for 5 years or so at this point. I’ve been meaning to try it again but I don’t really have the time. They both get the job done for me so I don’t really have a strong preference. If it isn’t broke don’t fix it.

Mullvad is really the only one worth using in my opinion. It’s cheap, it’s been audited by plenty of trustworthy people, history has proven they actually do not keep logs, and they don’t require an e-mail/phone number/username/password to have an account with them.

And some fun facts about some of the others listed here:

• Private Internet Access is owned by Kape Technologies, an Israeli company owned by an Israeli billionaire with ties to Israeli intelligence
• Proton’s CEO Andy Yen publicly talked about his appreciation for the Republican party and how “10 years ago the Republicans were the party of big business, now they stand up for the little guy” on Twitter
• Mozilla has a history of their services shutting down abruptly quite frequently due to internal restructuring and reallocating of funding to different things
• NordVPN and Surfshark are really the same thing, except NordVPN has a cheaper price tag, they’re owned by the same company
• Windscribe’s founder & CEO Yegor Sak is quite a big fan of Elon Musk and posts quite interesting things on his Twitter account (cw: ableist slur, https://xcancel.com/yegor/status/1898491865713791126)