I’ve also made the switch from win10. There are a lot of “small” things that add up. The constant nag messages. Updates. Start menu ads. That was mist of it on Win10. I’ve had some experience in win11 at work, and I can say the new UI is abysmal (honestly I couldn’t care less about the UI as far as look/textures go, but one thing I can’t stand is slow animations for every little thing. If I open the start menu, I want it open as soon as I press the keyboard button, not 0.5s later. When I snap a window, I don’t need 0.5s of my life wasted on watching the “beautiful” animation. I just want it on half the screen instantly. Whenewer I close a window, I don’t want to have it fade out and distract me, I want it either gone or a popup asking me wether to save, discard or cancel show as soon as I tried to close the window. I want the Control panel back. I knew how to use it, and navigating menus wasn’t animated to consume 0.5s for every screen change. The animations were what pushed me away the most. I assume you can turn the off, but I never bothered since I changed computers often and would just rather put up with it rather than spend time tweaking each and every computer I wanted to use. The UI is why I don’t like win11, and the MS requirement is why I won’t let it touch my computer.

I have to say, switching to Linux was very frustrating as I had to google every little thing and most sites are filled with ad garbage even with uBlock on Firefox turned in with most of the lists, so that was frustrating. But now, after just under 2 years of Linux use, I can say the switch has paid great dividends. I can do a lot of menial tasks much faster (highlights are fike conversion with ffmpeg, combining PDFs with pdfunite, navigating folders using cd and tab completion (I’m the type to have a lot of folders in one parent directory to whkch I know the names, so typing the name is faster than looking for it manuakly and clicking on it), not to mention all the programs I used that are on Linux open 3-5 times faster.

Another big quality of life improvement are updates - updating apt packages with one command and Flatpaks with another, not having to reboot while doing it and not having programs prompt for updates individually is all something I never knew was possible before switching over. Linux has really impressed me with how well it works and how much of a laid back attitude it resembles, as opposed to the whiny Windows forcing its will upon you with its updates, ads and bloat.

As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I’d advise to try avoiding a VM.

Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn’t care that much about it).

Even if you use a lot of Office, you’d be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it’s limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.

I didn’t use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i’d say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.

If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don’t have any experience with that so I don’t know how well they behave or how the setup is.

You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it’s a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.

I don’t know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.

I’d look at it in regarda whether or not Google can get your data (or more somply), do you volountarily connect to Google’s servers: if not (Piped/VPN) I’d count that as being degoogled. If yes (Invidious etc.) you’re still getting the video from Google servers (albeit without ads) but Google still gets their grubby hands on some info about you. By ‘volountary’ I mean if you block connections to Google with e.g. Noscript and keep google enabled (be it tag manager, gstatic, fonts or user-facing services like Youtube). If you have to enable gstatic or tag manager on a few sites because they’re broken, I’d say that’s involountary since it’s not your reliance on Google showing as much as it’s the developers’.

Being 100% disconnected from Google servers is outright impossible these days.

The only correct choice.

Gommorrhea

It didn’t create the system, and it doesn’t have the power to replace it.

But it does support the system by being a part of it

What happens if a mistake was made and an NFT is erroneously issued (for example to the wrong person)?

That person has it now. They mjght volountarily be willing to send it back with another transactions or the courts could force them to do so (as in give fines, request keys, send to prison, or just have the government own and ooerate all the wallet keys and simulate transactions eith blockchain just as the technology used in a very janky way)

What happens if the owner dies? How is the NFT transferred then?

Similarily, either the government does all the transactions with ‘your’ keys for you, or you write down the keys in your will and have someone of trust (e.g. a lawyer) do the partitioning/transactions part in your stead.

Who checks that the original NFT was issued correctly?

The seller and buyer beforehand, mostly

What about properties that are split? What happens if the split isn’t represented in the NFT correctly (e.g. due to an error)?

Rebalance by having everone affected send their portions for redistribution to a trusted entity

As you’ve said yourself, NFTs seem wholly unsuited for keeping track of general ownership on a large scale. All the problems do have solutions, but they’re either complicated for the owners or it’s someone else controlling people’s keys, defeating the entire point.

It could. It may or may not. I agree decentralization is a good thing, but do governments agree as well? First of all, governments are very resistant to change if that doesn’t play into their interests (real or percieved like this privacy violation). Using a traditional database to keep track of ownership seems cheaper (since they already do it) but most of all simpler. I’m not too familiar with the way blockchain functions so I may be wrong, but say someone wants to sell a car. In the current state of most countries you just draw up a paper or fill out a form, maybe get it notarized and pay taxes. A database seems flexible enough that if your sale didn’t get logged and the buyer got pulled over and questioned, they could provide the contract and clear up any questions about ownership. Or say the ownership was stripped as part of a court order. If it was a database, then changing the records is simple, but with blockchain the court would either have to get you to transfer the ownership volountarily, force you to disclose your keys or have some mechnism of forcing a transaction from the requester account (which as I understand it seems what blockchain is here to stop abd a core part of the specification). Alternatively the government just uses blockchain instead of a database, managing all the keys, wallets and identities (as in they have everyone’s keys and do all the transactions) which is the same level of centralization as a database, but with extra steps.

Ownership was (and is) a social contract, and a flexible one at that. Things get gifted volountarily, sold, taken away lawfully and inherited in a single jurisdiction by the thousands daily, and not all of these are well documented. Blockchain seems very limited in what it can do flexibility-wise which makes it unsuitable for keeping track of ownership, and that’s not taking into account that either everyone would have to actively use the blockchain for their sales and be familiar with the technology (decentralized) or having all the wallet keys operated by the government (defeating any useful feature of the blockchain for citizens). Adding blockchain into the mix will just complicate the transfer process and centralize it (as in we either do all validation on the blockchain or none), and with the fact that all the transfer history is centralised in the blockchain (despite it being decentralised in storage, it’s still explicitly stored and accessible) it would serve as just another venue of privacy violation and opression.

Maybe blockchain could be useful for things like, say carbon credits, or similar government-issued ‘currency’, but I don’t see it applicable to validating general ownership on a large scale for the general population, ever. The ‘digital Euro’ proposal, also being blessed by the buzzword Blockchain seems very distopian to me as well. Here, with currency being used I can see how it would be applicable in the real world (instead of heavily unstandardised land deeds, sales contracts and other proofs of ownership you have strictly defined currency units), but this also seems like a gross privacy violation as the government (and maybe anyone) can see where you got your money and where you’re spending it down to the cent.

I don’t know why a journaling app needs full system access and access to system settings, and the permission Flatseal requests is a dangerous one if you pay attention to these things. Looks like they’re doing their job to me.

Xournal seems pretty trustworthy to me, so I assume it’s for code simplicity (or age) or not being made with Flatpak in mind - just ‘open any file/full filesystem access’’ (for basic functions like opening files) and ‘change system settings’ for probably only a few features that change system settings.

I agree the permissions are dangerous and I commend Flatpak for incentivizing developers to use granular permissions.

As others (and you yourself have said), Flatseal’s entire purpose is to edit Flatpak lermissions, so that one shouldn’t be alarming.

Yeah. Also, it’s the difference between ads (a very obnoxious thing for 99% of users) and something potentially genuinely useful for a good portion of users like the sign in - I assume the popup isn’t there to annoy us Lemmy users, a large percentage of whom I assume use uBlock Origin and find it annoying, but rather for the ~2-5% of users who wouldn’t bother creating an account but don’t mind signing in with Google due to the convenience (and wouldn’t do so on the signin page). And eveb for us who find it annoying, it isn’t like ads where you’re not supposed to be able to get rid of the popup or the popup being a constant PITA

As most others already said, the best solution is immersion, ideally by talking with someone. If you can’t find someone to speak with that would make it quite a bit harder to improve, but not impossible.

For your situation (being able to understand but unable to express yourself in English) I’d reccommend the stereotypical “think in english”. I’d recommend talking with someone (ideally a native speaker, but even a fellow learner is incredibly efficient, followed by writing a diary abd participating in online forums (like you currently already are!).

It’s best to have input from someone else who can correct you if you make a grammatical mistake, give general advice on what sounds ‘more natural’ or ‘better’ in the language and answer any questions you might have, as well as help you if you’re “missing one word” (from personal experience when learning a language it’s rarely a ‘it’s at the tip of my tongue’ situation. It’s more like I just don’t know this one word and I need someone to give it to me).

Another thing I can say about your problem is I also suffer a bit from it. Whenever I try to talk in German I need a few hours to ‘warm up’ - to just get my brain to switch to German and having a speaker on the other side really helps. I can hear the language to jog my memory and the other side can (and often does) give me input on what they think I might be trying to say. (I’m a B1-level speaker so not even close to fluent but more than enough for doing basic interations within an environment open to helping with language issues).

What I liked to do when I was actively learning German was trying to come up with different ways of saying ‘the same thing’, seing how they differ in their meaning, potential usecases, complexity, grammar, etc. It helps with vocabulary as well as the “thinking in German” part, as languages differ greatly in the ways they package the same message and taking a comparative approach helps greatly with being able to (casually) converse later. Having a fellow learner or a fluent speaker give you multiple variations of the same thing and analyze the differences for/with you would be a godsend for this approach.

I think it’s exactly the same as a Doubleclick ad as in it’s a 3rd-party script that adds obnoxious content (be it ads or a signin popup) to the site. I think Doubleclick is owned by google which ironically makes it even more similar than if it was, say, a Facebook popup.

You’re right. I had a quick look on Wikipedia and it seems that 3G is getting shut down sooner due to frequency overlap with newer generations as you’ve said. 2G seems to not have so much overlap so it’s living longer.

I thought "if 2G is still around and is x years old and still isn’t fully disabled, then 3G which is y years old must have at least y-x years left. But alas, I was wrong, and thank you for correcting me.

Get your head out of your ass, it’s in your laws.

My head just might be in my ass, but none of that is in my laws, as I’m not a US citizen.

From what I’ve read online more than a few months ago, there were criminal charges in certain places for having abortions in certain other places where they weren’t illegal. Maybe it wasn’t for the people having abortions themselves per se (I don’t remeber anymore), but there definately was a doctor sending aborion pills/information that was sued as well as some police sharing data and peoole getting in trouble shenanigans. Or just straight up people looking stuff up on the internet and being investigated for it. Chilling stuff, really, whichever way you look at it.

Also, with the way the US seems increasingly unstable (what with the Supreme Court doing whatever they please, more or less, as well as a potential 2nd Trump presidency), there’s a high chance that the current status quo changes for the worse, i.e. some of the ammendments/clauses you’ve listed get selectively overruled for abortions, as well as more states getting abortion bans (perhaps even as a simple “No More Abortions, Anywhere” Supreme Court ruling).

Most parts of Europe still have 2G service, so 3G isn’t fully dissapearing for at least the next 20 years there.

As if crossing state lines to deal with that isn’t illegal in some places

On a related note, when shops let you “donate” stuff you buy at their store to a food bank.

Honestly, I’m fine with them putting the AI sticker on everything. What I have a problem with is if by AI they mean they scrape any and all data they can get their grubby little hands on.

The only way I can see them weaseling out of this is by keeping the program running the model made in-house and proprietary while releasing the model in a format unusable without the base (proprietary) program. But maybe the GPL forbids such obfuscstion efforts (I don’t know, I haven’t studied it in detail)

On diagrams you’d use + as the “source” of elecricity, i.e. you assume electricity flows from + to - (poaitive to negative). Electricity as far as physics goes is an effect created by electrons, which are defined as negative in charge.

DC is electricity where the literal flow of electrons from point A to point B make the current (so it flows from negative to positive, since it’s the flow of “negative” electrons that carries electricity). Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it’s the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it. So today, whenever you’re dealing with electrical diagrams current/electricity is assumed to flow from + to - while in the physical domain it’s the negatively charged electrons that create what we call electricity.

AC is a bit different - here electrons aren’t flowing directly from point A to point B, but rather wiggling about or “alternating” in place and it’s this alternating movement that carries the (still negative) charge. But even for AC it still holds true that electrical charge is the “negative” charge of electrons and that this movement of electrons alternating in place enables them to move this “negative” charge of theirs from one place to another.

I assume you know about the saying “opposites attract” - for electricity and charge it’s literally true, so you can view power consumption as the “positive” charge of protons (which is immovable because protons are bound to the cores of their atom), while it’s the “negative” charge of electrons which are located in the outer shells of metal atoms that can leave their atoms and move their charge that are viewed as the source/carrier of electricsl energy.

I put negative and positive in quotes because to get back to your question about defining why Franklin was wrong:

As it stands, there are two conventions on electricity. One is used in diagrams and often attributed to Franklin, the one that says that electricity flows from the positive (+) to the negative (-) pole. The other is the physics convention that protons hold positive charge while electrons hold negative charge, and this is where the disparity comes from. I don’t know which convention was chronologically earlier, but I assume it’s the physics one since Franklin is the one cited as “wrong”.

Obligatory I’m not an electrical engineer - this is only what I remember from my physics classes. Please assume it mostly correct but maybe not technically for every minute detail (the only use of “power” is technically very wrong among other things, but that’s the gist of it).