Actually that changed quite a long time ago. Even when FM radio was still a thing, most “receivers” stopped including radio and “tuners” became on external component that not everybody bought. I think our “stereo” in the 80’s had a stand-alone tuner even. That is for a real “stereo”. Boom boxes and the like had it all built in.
The other factor of course is that tuners went digital. Most factory car stereos continue to include digital tuners even today.
WiFi is of course radio. We just tune in and listen to it differently.
If you limited your bandwidth to 20 or 30 kHz, you could build a “radio” that you manually tune to a WiFi channel frequency and that produces audible noise. You could then build a 1980’s style modem to convert the audio back into a bitstream that you could run your network connection over.
It would be about many times slower than standard Wifi though modern compression could speed that up a bit.
The laws are entirely stupid (as in written by people that have no clue).
The ones I see do not make using a VPN illegal, they make it illegal for certain websites to receive traffic from VPNs.
As a website, how am I supposed to know if I am receiving traffic from a VPN?
I have to maintain a database of restricted IP addresses? How do I keep that up-to-date? How do I catch small players? Self-hosted stuff?
And even if I do all that, how do I tell where the actual user is? Because that is exactly what VPNs were designed to hide from me. So, I cannot apply it to residents of a state—I have to refuse VPN connections from the entire world.
It is impossible and pointless. Anybody actually doing anything wrong will get around it easily. So all it accomplishes is reducing the security and increasing the hassle for everybody else.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
I agree with you on the “stability” of frequent small changes vs infrequent huge ones (release upgrades on distros like Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora).
However, I have had multiple Arch installs where I have not used the system for multiple years (eg. old laptops, dormant VMs). Other than having to know how to update the keyring to get current GPG keys, Arch has always upgraded flawlessly for me. I have had upgrades that downloaded close to 3 GB all at once with a single pacman command (or maybe yay) that “just worked”.
Wayland is a great example.
Debian user? You may have spent the last two years complaining that Wayland is not ready, that NVIDIA does not work, and that Wayland is too focussed on GNOME. You may move to XFCE if GNOME removes X11 support.
Arch user? Wayland is great and Plasma 6 works flawlessly. There have not been any real NVIDIA problems in a year or two. Maybe you have been enjoying COSMIC, Hyprland, or Niri.
This is me talking out of my ass a but since I do not do it, but you can create your own AUR packages pretty easily. If you have the Deb, you could be rocking it in Arch too.
On Chimera Linux, I do make my own packages. Just so easy.
In the AUR maybe. I certainly have had to trim lots of old electron and other bloat.
My favourite package manager is APK 3. No clean-up required there almost by definition.
Because it is less trouble.
I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.
Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.
Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.
Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.
When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.
After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.
I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.
I agree that the opportunity for Frame is to be “big screen” portable gaming.
Desktop stuff will just come along for the ride.
And yes, the ecosystem is in place. Steam is already the de facto distribution channel for games, proton makes most of them work great on Linux, and FEX should make most of those work on Frame.
I am not sure how well FEX works today but it is obviously going to get a lot more love. And the CPU is not the bottleneck for games anyway as the GPU is doing all the heavy lifting.
Debian has stopped 32 but in Debian 13. He is talking about Debian 12 which is still supported.
The Debian 12 based version of Q4OS has committed to supporting 32 bit through 2028.
I made the same recommendation. Sadly the “latest” version in 64 bit only. Unsurprising as it is Debian based.
The older release is still available and still supported though. It would be a great option though the clock is ticking on it of course.
The most “batteries included” distro that is I can think of that is not Debian based is Adelie.
DSL is just AntiX with a curated list of software in a CD image. Just go with AntiX if you want to go that route.
Another option to consider is Q4OS Trinity. Trinity is essentially the KDE 3 desktop which is still surprisingly good and very light on resources.
All of these, including MX Linux, are Debian based and have access to the full Debian repos.
A potential issue with all these Debian based distros though is that Debian itself has moved away from 32 bit in Debian 13. It is hard to say how long these others will stay the course.
Adelie Linux is another one people forget about and certainly worth giving a spin. It is not Debian based.
Tiny Core will be the “fastest” as it runs out of RAM but of course that leaves you even less RAM for other things (like a browser). So it depends on your use case.
Are you sure CachyOS has 32 bit support?
Yes, it is gorgeous
Agreed. That does not change what I said though.
For me, “baloo” is the worst offender.
Also, great to see another btop fan. I use it a lot.
No argument.
I do not see much chance of a middle-man though and the alternative means much less adoption.
My issue is not with Kent’s strong technical opinions. I like those. Well, except that abusing other people as cover for his inability to follow the rules is not cool.
Linus can be a dick but he is typically making technical arguments at least (and usually quite good ones). Kent likes to play the “engineering” card but the drama is always about process, not technology, and he is the one being called out. So trying to pretend he is defending better engineering just makes the behaviour worse.
NVIDIA were breaking the rules (legally even). They have come around.
More big endiian in the kernel for no reason is a negative.
Not sure about the Intel engineer. Linus can be a jerk though so not assuming he was right if I do not know the situation.
And, while I like old hardware, the first x86-64 chips shipped in 2003. So, this is not exactly a Windows 11 situation.
Hardware older than that is going to struggle with modern browsers. A PC from that era would probably have less than 1 GB of RAM and perhaps a max RAM well under 4 GB (the theoretical limit). Using older software versions is probably best anyway.
Ironically, I think it may be because of Skia. So Google.
The replies here make me so mad at Kent Overstreet.
I love bcachefs and was using it on quite a few systems. When it was in the mainline kernel, interest was building. I feel like we could have been just a few months from experimental coming off and adoption skyrocketing.
Then Kent got it pulled from the kernel (so not interested in the “fighting for users” misdirection). Now, as evidenced by the comments here, most users will not touch it.
I needed it in the kernel so I have been migrating away too but it breaks my heart.
I am sure somebody will use it, maybe even more than the small number that have historically. And Kent will probably tell himself that is ok.
It sucks.
Now, I did not write a COW filesystem. So I guess I am getting what I am owed (nothing). That does not dull the sting much though.
You probably still have an FM radio in your car. You just use it so infrequently that your forget it is there.