Please consider donating to PostmarketOS to build up a pure mobile Linux alternative that is completely free of Google’s influence. It’s the best option we have.

Unfortunately, Sailfish OS uses a proprietary (closed source) android compatibility layer, as well as a closed source UI.

For the parts they have open-sourced, they implementrd a CLA that contributers must sign. It’s the HA-CLA-I-ANY license, which specifically allows them a perpetual Copyright and Patent license, and permission to relicense your code contributions to a more restrictive license which enables them sell or package it into a closed-source proprietary app.

Personally I’d be more comfortable supporting the development of PostmarketOS instead, since it is completely open-source with no CLA, meaning no chance of any rug-pulling in the future.

Found a rare interview with Horse that occurred between levels 5 and 6.

These are the best I’ve found that also have no trackers in them (most are in f-droid, a couple from aurora/playstore):

• shattered pixel dungeon (roguelike)
• breakout 71
• endless sky (space trader)
• pewpew live (stick shooter)
• vroomies (odd swipe racer)
• Datawing (super fun racer/timetrial drifting game, best out of all of them IMO. Not on f-droid)
• the frostrune (point and click adventure)
• ScummVM (emulator for classic point and click games, many of which are free)
• Arx Libertatis (an engine to run Arx Fatalis, though you need the OG game files, which isn’t free, but… Yarr)

I think Star Wars Kotor and Kotor 2 have android ports. Those are great RPG’s, but not free.

I personally think there’s a law of diminishing returns with things like graphics and resolution, and as technology advances, what used to be good or even amazing becomes our baseline as expectations shift.

Somewhat related to that, I’d also say there’s merit in sometimes analyzing if our chase for ‘better’ is truly bringing us enough value to warrant the downsides it brings. As an example, the market’s desire for the new and novel, for better graphics, for higher resolutions, feeds into a consumer culture that brings with it a tremendous amount of greenhouse emissions to produce and ship all those new consoles and higher resolution monitors/TVs, environmental destruction to mine the raw materials for them, exploitation of third world workers to gather those materials and assemble them into those products, products which as the OP points out, are increasingly user hostile and enshittified alongside those better graphics.

When looked at objectively, a Wii is a comparatively low resolution, but it is also widely available used (so while it did initially contribute to the downsides I mentioned above when new, as a used object on a second-hand market, it does not), and despite that lack of resolution, still brings with it the capability of giving us great fun, which is ultimately the reason we want to experience them, is it not? And due to its age, it has no enshittification whatsoever, the user completely owns the experience.

But that’s just my 2 cents.

but I specifically had in mind chemotherapy where toxic chemicals are used to kill the rapidly-growing cancer cells faster than they kill the not-so-fast growing healthy cells.

Even if we had pristine environments and only healthy food, cancer will still occur quite frequently. I of course support researching more effective cancer treatments than we currently have (and what we do have should be free to anyone who needs it), but until better options are available, chemotherapy, as awful as it can be, can be very effective depending on the specific cancer, and has spared many a horrible death despite it being a poison itself.

We would condemn tens of thousands to a slow death if we were to cast aside toxic chemotherapy without an adequate replacement that has proven itself.

!energy@slrpnk.net might be a better fit for this article.

Me, still playing 480p Wii games on my modded Wii with an old ass 1080p TV, having a blast

I had to buy a printer recently to replace a used one from the 90’s that I’d been happily using for the past decade, and decided to go with a fairly new laser brother printer. I plugged it in and, magically, it really did just work, even on Linux.

Mint and Mint LMDE are using Pipewire by default, how are you using pulseaudio?

Gnome 3, despite being simple by design and relatively easy for us techy folk to adapt to, is likely still quite a radical departure for someone who understands absolutely nothing about computers besides what they had to learn to do their jobs.

Explaining Computers did a good video on Zorin, where he shows it can be more Windows-like. Linux Mint is another good option, but it wouldn’t be too different from the Windows themed KDE you tried, IMO.

I think with people such as you described, where change is feared so much, it probably is best to stick with the most familiar possible layout, and to not share more information about the differences than absolutely needed. Perhaps the initial Gnome 3 shock made them shut down even when KDE was introduced instead? Hard to say. Good on ya for trying, though.

Microsoft has pretty much lost most of their experienced employees, they’re sitting on a mountain of spaghetti code with tech debt that goes back to windows 3.11 to maintain compatibility, they’ve fired their QA team, and their absolutely out-of-touch leadership is trying to force the surviving employees to use AI anywhere they can for developing the OS to pump up the numbers of AI users to prop up their insanely huge AI gamble so shareholders don’t lose faith.

They’re acting confident because they haven’t had to respond to a credible threat to their monopoly for 30 years, and that arrogance combined with everything mentioned above will most likely be their ultimate demise. The corporate system they have created and perpetuated is no longer capable of righting the ship, both technologically and organizationally.

They made a statement years ago now about how they were going to respond to the success of the steamdeck by creating a handheld mode for windows, but they never did, and Valve ate their lunch and allowed Linux to gain a foothold among gamers. They probably couldn’t manage building that handheld mode (it’s been so many years now, but I read a post from a Microsoft employee detailing how it could take something crazy like a week of work just to add a new menu entry to a drop-down without it introducing major breakages elsewhere).

They haven’t been able to develop a killer app or feature for Windows in over a decade, and I don’t think there’s anything else under their sleeve. I believe we are actively witnessing the downfall of an ossified giant, just as the once great Commodore fell due to incompetence and extreme corporate greed.

They already use Linux for their server division (azure). Eventually, if Linux is able dominate on the desktop in the next decade, they may shift to selling their own Linux distro with a 100% windows compatible container/VM instead, an inversion of their current model of selling Windows with their optional WSL (windows subsystem for Linux).

I think you are confusing terms. Scraping a website means to download copies of its pages. Mirroring means taking those scraped page copies and re-hosting them on your website. Since you said you were doing both of those things, that would mean you would be mass scraping the site to rehost (mirror) on yours.

If you are not doing either of those, then you are not mass scraping or mirroring. It sounds like instead you just scraped a few pages of piefed, and then modified the CSS/HTML of the page itself for your own purposes?

If so, that’s not as bad as I thought.

However, I can guarantee you that no one here is interested in joining an isolated reddit clone that isn’t federated with Piefed or lemmy, and which is explicitly designed to eventually allow you to throw ads on it for passive income. That is precisely what we all were trying to escape when we left reddit for the fediverse.

But you’re scraping piefed.social to fill your site with content so you can monetize it, while increasing hosting costs for piefed for your own gain.

That you don’t see the ethical and moral problems with that plan is highly concerning.

So it’s… A mirror of piefed.social with your own frontend?

Why?

There are some great tutorials for beginners on youtube of how to make a beat.

As for software, your options will be more limited on Linux, but thankfully there’s some good ones available nowadays. Though one thing to note is that If you’re on a Debian based distro, you’ll need to make sure you download the pipewire-jack package and then add pw-jack to the start of your DAW’s executable to access the Pipewire-JACK backend, otherwise it’ll only work with the ALSA backend.

1. Reaper: A really solid and affordable DAW. It doesn’t have the most modern interface (mostly just noticeable in the settings menu), but it’s extremely versatile, stable, and has the biggest community of support out of any DAW out there, with tons of good youtube tutorials or written articles. The free trial is actually endless like WinRAR is, it’ll just nag you when you start it up for 5 seconds, but it’s the full version, and you can produce full songs in it. This is the DAW I would personally suggest trying.

2. Bitwig: This is a really visually polished DAW, and has first class linux support, but it can be a bit expensive, and the new 6.0 version is a little buggy, while the stable 5.x release lacks some of the really nice quality of life improvements in 6.0. It has a lot of features from Ableton Live, such as the ability to work with ‘clips’ of music that you can arrange freely. The company isn’t as chill IMO as Reaper, and they pulled some greedy stuff a while back that got the community angry at them, which I think they walked back, but I can’t trust them after that. It has different tiers ranging from $99, $200, or $400. The $99 version can’t effectively control hardware synths if you have any, since they restrict the use of Midi CC data. If you’re only using virtual synths, then the cheap version should work fine.

3. Renoise: This is a really powerful and polished DAW that uses the Tracker style of composing, much like was done on the Amiga or DOS back in the day. There’s a free trial, and if you end up liking that style of music making, it’s a pretty cheap DAW at $88.

4. Traction Waveform: This DAW recently added Linux support. I haven’t used it yet, but it’s completely free and quite polished looking. Most people report it being pretty nice, though community support will be more limited since not as many people use it.

5. Fender Studio Pro: Another DAW that recently added Linux support. It used to be called Studio One, but was traded around for a while, and now Fender owns it. It’s a bit more focused on guitars and comes with a lot of Guitar effects, but from what I can see is a fairly capable DAW that could be used for any type of music. It costs $199.

For the FLOSS DAWs, there’s:

1. Ardour: Usually available in your distro’s repo. It’s technically well made under the hood and very capable, but I personally found the UX to be… difficult to get used to, and there’s not many up-to-date tutorials for it, unfortunately. If you can jive with it, it’s a solid DAW.

2. Zrythm: A much more user-friendly DAW compared to Ardour, but not really usable at the moment. They’re totally re-writing it for a major 2.0 release, which is something to keep an eye on for the future, as it’s quite promising.

3. LMMS: A pretty decent FL studio clone, but unfortunately it still only supports VST2 instruments, which is highly limiting nowadays, so I’d probably skip it unless you’re okay with that limitation (they are working on VST3 support, but it’s taking a while).

100%. An android device will recieve updates for 7 years in the best case scenario (on average more like 4 years), while a steamdeck is fully supported with mainline Linux, so it’ll continue to recieve support for 20 years at a minimum (support for 486 CPU’s from the early 90’s are only just now being dropped).

This is a good longer overview,, and here’s a straight to the point demo of what it can do.

There’s actually quite a lot we can do about it, and not only does that materially help our situation, it also reduces the feeling of helplessness and despair dramatically, and you’ll likely meet some friends along the way.

Here’s a handy guide on how to get involved in that sort of stuff.

I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).