Random Dent

Gnome vs KDE, just use whichever one suits your flow. Or not, grab Cinnamon or Hyprland if that floats your boat. Options are good!

I have had exactly one HP laptop in my life, which luckily was a hand-me-down so I didn’t spend any money on it, but it was enough to convince me to never get another HP product ever again.

20-odd years and the boycott is still going strong lol.

I’m also an artist and I can see some use for AI, but I don’t use it to make any actual art. I use it to bolster up my weaker areas, which is basically all the admin stuff - marketing plans, budgets, setting prices, all the paperwork crap essentially. Which then frees me up to spend more time doing actual creative things.

I see AI art as essentially like a commission. As in, before AI if you couldn’t draw something, you’d commission someone who could draw it to make it for you. Then you’d own that piece of art, but you didn’t create it. You described what you wanted to someone else and they created it. Same deal with AI except instead of a person it’s, as I heard someone describe it recently, a magic 8-ball with infinite answers and some math to nudge it in the right direction lol.

You can also pay for Mullvad by generating a random token on their website and then just literally sending them cash in an envelope lol.

The usual tech support search:

• First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.

• Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say “Solved” with no record of what was done.

• Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.

• Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you’re trying to fix break in a different way, but it’s progress at least.

• Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.

So to answer the question, I can usually tell I’m getting close to the solution when I say “Oh for fuck’s sake” as I’m closing tabs lol.

Yeah I was gonna say, I dunno if my distro is the best (Arch BTW) but it’s the best for me. Doesn’t give me any nonsense and lets me tinker as much as I want. Other people just want their OS to get out of their way, which of course is equally valid. Whatever works for you!

Isn’t that just the way things work in general though? If you have a worse computer, everything is going to be slower, broadly speaking.

As a side note, a couple of things that might be handy for you:

Bottles is a GUI for running Wine things that might make it a bit easier to navigate. It’s helped me out a few times.

Also there’s an AppDB on the Wine site where you can search for specific software to find out how well it runs/tweaks that people have used etc.

ALSO yeah games are in a pretty good place on Linux nowadays. I have a Steam Deck and it runs a surprising amount of stuff, even things that aren’t listed as being compatible. I think the main source of trouble is the online AntiCheat stuff, that’s not always compatible with Linux (although sometimes those work too, I think it just depends on the game.) There’s also protondb for checking which games work in Linux.

Hopefully some of that is helpful!

Exactly this. The new game cycle these days is:

• Game is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff.
• Release date is announced.
• Game is delayed.
• Reviewers/early access people get it, turns out it has none of the cool stuff form the announcement video.
• Game is delayed again.
• Game finally comes out, with 3 different tiers that are like $80, $100 and $120 CAD depending on if you want the version of the game that’s 30%, 40% or 50% complete.
• Game doesn’t work.
• After about two years and 10 DLC packs you have about 80% of the functional game, the other 20% being stuff they were supposed to add but just never bothered, what are you gonna do about it? By this point you no longer care about the game anyway.
• Sequel is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff, devs promise they’ve fixed all the broken stuff this time for real.
• Company gets bought by EA or Epic, all devs are replaced.
• Game is delayed.

Like genuinely who wants to bother with that nonsense anymore TBH.

Yeah I live in Canada so -9C is no big deal at all lol. and +9C is basically summer so

Yeah I have the Kobo eBook reader that’s also an e-ink tablet and that’s the same, good as a little sketchbook but it only has like 4 colours on it.

Smashing Pumpkins 1996-05-15 at Brixton Academy, London

It starts off kind of low-energy and then for whatever reason about halfway through they just start blasting it.

Sample

For me, I find it handy because it catches a bunch of stuff I always forget, like updating Docker containers. Also if you have Am installed it’ll even update your Appimages.

I use Topgrade, but I use the alias update to run it lol

I guarantee they’re also adding AI slop trained on other people’s work into their own content, while simultaneously suing anyone who does the same with theirs.

Fuck Disney

Since OP mentioned that they used Plasma in the past and don’t like GNOME, it might be worth mentioning that KDE is developing their own OS which should be immutable.

Might have to wait for a little bit though.

Same here, but I also want to try and figure out how to get one anonymously. I’m not up to anything, I just want to play around with it, but I also don’t want to end up on some list if and when they do get banned.

I had a phone that did that! The feature was called ‘IR Blaster’ IIRC, and there was an app that had all the frequencies for different brands of TV on it. I don’t think they put those in smart phones anymore lol

I have a few personal rules about it, eg. I’ll try not to pirate smaller, independent things where it might conceivably screw over the creator, but other than that it’s all fair game IMO.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to grow up hearing non-stop from the corporate world that piracy is evil and is killing art or whatever, only to watch them do a full 180 in the last couple of years now that they need to pirate the entire internet to train AI.