It was kinda funny, when I installed fedora a few months ago, the wired ethernet port wasn’t working at first (needed an update, probably because my mobo was pretty new) but the wifi worked right away. Not sure what I would have done if neither of them worked tbh.

Is there a good way to do this when you use a lot of terminal tabs and aren’t sure which tab you used for the command you’re looking for?

Libreoffice does this without forcing you to allow them to store all of your files. Because it’s a feature that doesn’t rely on any kind of cloud bs, MS just added that requirement because they are assholes that have no respect for their users.

Hmm I think now they meant the original “switch to linux” bit sarcastically and are stuck in a mindset thinking that it’s way more complicated than windows and thus anyone claiming to have already switched must be lying…?

Though thinking about it more, it kinda feels like a bad faith response, posting about a vague windows solution that they want people to know exists but doesn’t want to share, while treating Linux as big and scary and requiring more effort than fighting against what your OS really wants you to do.

My approach was spending even more money for the pro version so I could access the OS settings paywalled by group policy and set it to never automatically download updates.

It would tell me about updates, but wouldn’t do shit until I clicked a button on the update page to actually install them (though without the option to pick and choose which ones).

It still nagged me about stupid shit I didn’t want, like edge, bing, one drive, and their office subscription.

So when I built a newer computer, I gave them $0 and installed Fedora and laugh at my former reluctance because it’s actually been easier and I haven’t even had moments where I wished I had just stuck with windows.

Not saying that it’s been perfect without any issues, I just recall that there were also issues on windows to deal with, a lot more dated responses showing up in searches that tell you do go to some setting window that no longer exists because the question was answered 6 months ago. Oh and I haven’t had to fight my fucking OS deciding to change my settings back to the shitty defaults they set (plus Linux just has better defaults, so doesn’t even need as much settings tweaking).

And as an added bonus, switching made me finally pull the plug on xbox game pass, which was a nice idea but I still mostly just spent my time playing games on steam and forgetting to check game pass when buying games on sale, so it was kinda a waste of money. But each time I considered getting rid of it before, I’d instead convince myself it was good to have and end up playing some games on there for a few days before forgetting about it again.

Back in the day, DRM was handled like this. I had an indy 500 game where the manual contained a bunch of hiatory of the sport and in order to launch the game, you had to answer indy 500 history trivia questions.

Other games had a symbol alphabet (or some other mapping between images and information it could put on the screen) where the key was only contained in the manual (or on a piece of paper that came with the game).

King’s Quest VI had riddles that needed to be answered in a symbol alphabet. You could play the game without doing this but you couldn’t beat it.

A mickey mouse game had a paper that was dark brown with black ink (so photocopiers would fail to copy it) with Mickey in various poses and you had to find the number for the one shown on screen to play.

I don’t get why it’s not common for people to cut out the middleman with these services that just connect a provider with a seeker. Then the seekers can stick with a reliable provider when they find one and the provider can take the full amount rather than giving away a cut (or, more accurately, accepting whatever the middleman thinks is the least they can give without driving the provider away). By the time they come in contact, the middleman has already added all of the value they can to that interaction.

It’s generally not as heavy because the layer is just reinterpreting API calls while the user code still runs natively. On a browser running JavaScript, it’s using an interpreter for every line of code. Depending on the specifics, it could be doing string processing for each operation, though it probably only does the string processing once and converts the code into something it can work with faster.

Like if you want to add two variables, a compiled program would do it in about 4 cpu instructions, assuming it needed to be loaded from memory and saved back to memory. Or maybe 7 if everything had a layer of indirection (eg pointers).

A scripting language needs to parse the statement (which alone will take on the order of dozens of cpu instructions, if not hundreds), then look up the variables in a map, which can be fast but not as fast as a memory load or two, then do the add, and store the result with another map lookup. Not to mention all of the type stuff being handled at run time, like figuring out what the variables are and what an add of those types even means, plus any necessary conversions. I understand that JavaScript can be compiled and that TypeScript is a thing, but the compiled code still needs to reproduce all of the same behaviour the scripting language does, so generic functions can still be more complex to handle calling and return conventions and making sure they work on all possible types that can be provided. And if they are using eval statements (or whatever it is to process dynamically generated code), then it’s back to string processing.

Plus the UI itself is all html and css, and the JavaScript interacts with it as such, limiting optimizations that would convert it into another format for faster processing. The GPU doesn’t render HTML and CSS directly; it all needs to be processed for each update.

For D3D to Vulkan, the GPU handles the repetitive work while any data that needs to be converted only needs to happen once per pass through the API (eg at load time).

That browser render stuff can all be done pretty quickly on today’s hardware, so it’s generally usable, but native stuff is still orders of magnitude faster and the way proton works is much closer to native than a browser.

Proton proves that you don’t need to run on a web browser for cross platform compatibility. Turing-complete platforms are equivalent in their capabilities, it’s just a matter of adding a translation layer that doesn’t need to be as heavy as a browser DOM (at least for going between windows and Linux on x64).

I’m never buying another Logitech device again because that problem that happened with my G7 back in the 00s still happened with my G900 in the 20s.

With my G7, I’d open it up when it started happening, and open up the switch to re-bend the metal piece to give it some spring back. Kept doing this until one day the plastic button that presses down on that metal part fell on carpet and was gone forever.

With my G900, I said fuck it and just bought some better mouse button switches and replaced the left mouse button. Was actually kinda glad I needed to because the battery had become a danger pillow so I replaced that, too.

But with the button issue existing for so long and being fixed by a part that cost a trivial amount compared to what I paid in the first place, you can’t convince me that Logitech isn’t deliberately using switches that fail quickly to drive up demand for mice.

I like that on Linux I can install the updates and know that the ones that require a restart will just be ready the next time I restart at my leisure. And if I don’t feel like restarting right away, it won’t nag me about it and maybe just restart on its own if it decides I’ve put it off for too long.

And I can’t believe my previous “solution” to that was to give ms even more money for win 10 pro (to get access to the paywalled settings) only to still feel like ms thought it was their computer that they allowed me to use.

All I can say for sure is that the cinnamon desktop I’m using has wayland (experimental) as an option. I haven’t tried it myself so I don’t know how stable it is. Or how well it might work with other desktops.

IP as a concept exists in a superstate where it’s bad in the context of piracy but good in the context of generative AI.

Personally, I’d just try live boot usbs instead of going to the effort of setting up VMs for different distros.

For getting images, my approach would be to search for the distro name to find its website and look for their downloads page. If there’s multiple flavours, just pick one and see how you like it. You can always switch to a different one once you’ve got enough experience to decide what is and isn’t important for you.

If you just want to game, Fedora was pretty easy to get going for me. I just installed that and then steam and was able to play games after that. I’ve got an AMD gpu and it was actually easier than on windows, since you still need to install gpu and chipset drivers on windows. The only time I spent on that in Fedora was the time it took to figure out I didn’t need to do that.

Only parts that took a little digging was mounting my other partitions (I think because I misunderstood some setup during the install, but it ended up being no big deal) and finding the setting that enabled all games to be attempted to run with proton, since by default steam will only show games with official linux support as playable by default.

Also getting sound working the way I wanted it to was a bit of a hassle, though any of the workarounds I tried worked pretty quickly. I wanted to use the optical digital, but it wouldn’t at first, but sound did work from the analog port as well as plugging my soundbar in via USB. And even though I gave up on getting the digital to work at the time because I just wanted to play a game, when I later swung back to it, it just worked, so I’m guessing it was just broken because my motherboard was a new one and the software needed to be updated to properly support it.

I guess it’s possible for the keyboard itself to handle that, but I’ve set that up in the OS on both windows and Linux machines. And when I replaced a shitty keyboard with a better one just a little while ago, it had Dvorak already as the default layout.

Also windows locks files that are in use, so attempting to delete system32 would (probably, I’ve never tried it) give some errors because it’s using a bunch of those files already and would leave those files intact even if you’re very determined to get rid of them. This is why you need to reboot to apply many updates because even the updater can’t get around that restriction.

It’s handled differently on Linux. I’m not 100% on the specifics of the implementation but it either loads files in use entirely into RAM or simply removes the reference to the file when deleted (or makes a new file and points the reference there if you’re replacing the file). That means anything that is currently using the file can continue to do so after a delete/overwrite, so the OS doesn’t prevent it from happening. This is why you can run any updates without restarting on Linux (though you do need to restart to get the system to use some updates, if they update critical components that can’t be restarted independently of the rest of the system, like the kernel).

If you want to nuke your whole os install drive on windows, you need to boot into a different OS instance (which is what the repair partition is, just a barebones windows install that can access files on the main install without the locking). But Linux can do it from within the same instance.

Don’t run Linux, run the OG Unix. Don’t use a desktop, get a mainframe.

And suggest they go over it and optimize it before building.

Is that method different from using the hot keys to swap layouts? Like can I tell it to always use that mapping for that game or do I need to remember to run it each time I play the game and then set it back after I’m done (or automate that)?

Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven’t been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.

Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I’m stronger with dvorak now).

But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I’ll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.

And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you’d expect.

I have no idea why it’s inconsistent between these three options or where the “preserve key location despite the layout” feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?