Wow, my comment was removed for just a mild hint that Chinese communism isn’t free from corruption?

The Tragedy of the Commons was popularized by a man who was anti-immigrant and pro-eugenics, and it’s not good science. The good science on it was done by Elinor Ostrom who won a Nobel-ish prize for fieldwork showing that various societies around the world had solved the issues of the governance of commons.

The thing is, Ostrom didn’t disprove it as a concept. She just proved that with the right norms and rules in place it doesn’t inevitably lead to collapse. IMO it’s not about capitalism or communism, it’s about population. A small number of people who all know each-other can negotiate an arrangement that everyone can agree to. But, once you have thousands or millions of people, and each user of the commons knows almost none of the other users, it’s different. At that point you need a government to set rules, and law enforcement to enforce those rules. That, of course, fails when the commons is something like the world’s atmosphere and there’s no worldwide government that can set and enforce rules.

Removed by mod

Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.

If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.

Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.

The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.

Is reading comprehension really that bad? The argument is that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons. The justification for attacking them is that they need to be stopped before they cross the line.

I’m not saying I agree with this line of reasoning, but the clear idea is that Iran doesn’t currently have nuclear weapons.

Back when I first started using Linux, it was rare to have more than one PC in a house. Now I personally have 3 computers, a desktop and a couple of laptops, and a tablet, and a phone, and some old barely-working tablets and laptops in a drawer.

It is definitely the case that I’ve had to use one of the other machines when the Linux desktop had issues. OTOH, I’ve also had to use other computers to help me out with a Windows issue (though it wasn’t an OS error, it was a drive that went bad).

It’s funny though. Back in the day when I only had the one computer, I was able to troubleshoot issues with it while still using it. That was probably only possible because tech was less advanced. For example, it was possible to browse the web effectively using a text-only client. Back then websites were simpler and Javascript was pretty much non-existent, so if you were troubleshooting a graphical issue you weren’t so crippled. Similarly, you weren’t so crippled if you couldn’t use GUI programs, because in those days almost every GUI program had a console equivalent that worked as well if not better.

These days, it’s pretty likely that the info you need will be on YouTube – obviously not very useful from a console, or a Discord chat – same problem.

My NAS is one place where I wouldn’t risk anything that isn’t rock solid. Even if you don’t lose data, the NAS is infrastructure that should always be available.

I’m used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there’s nothing you can do about it.

It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn’t move, the clock wasn’t updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).

As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it’s also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn’t addressing them.

Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn’t true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can’t handle and you’re out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.

You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.

Why don’t you like flatpaks? I’ve basically never had any issues with them, but maybe I will in the future.

As for distrobox, what’s the confusion? Were you trying to do something advanced? Or, was there an issue with mapping things between the host and distrobox? I haven’t really pushed the envelope, but the only issue I’ve had is that I wanted my shell history to be different between the distrobox and the host, so I had to tweak my zsh startup files to detect if I was in a distrobox and save history in a different place.

As someone who started with Slackware in the 90s, it took me a while too.

I switched over to Bazzite from Windows 10 on my main PC because I wanted something I could game on. But, even though most of my games work great on it, I haven’t played that many because I ended up just happy to have a Linux system I could use for projects I’d been putting off.

It’s true that if you’re used to a plain Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora system, you have to do some things differently. But, in exchange you basically never have to worry about installing a package because there’s been a vulnerability discovered or something.

The happy medium I found is using distrobox on Bazzite. Inside a distrobox, you can use apt or whatever to manage the software you want. You can even export things from the distrobox to the main OS – like, say you installed a GUI editor in the distrobox, you can have it available as if it were a normal app in the main immutable OS.

Distrobox might help you switch if you’re feeling hesitant. OTOH, if you want to fully grok the system before switching, or want to be able to customize the images you’re installing, that can take a while to figure out.

Also, not tinkering when you don’t want to tinker.

affected

Maybe we’re now at a point where it’s a good choice for more techy people to use, and that adoption will mean more work gets done on it.

I installed it because I wanted to see how well it would run games. But, I haven’t actually played many games on it, not because they don’t work (they work great), but because I’ve found it’s so good at everything else too. It made it easy to get around to some projects I’d been putting off.

My machine plays all kinds of fairly recent games extremely well, but Microsoft is ditching Windows 10 support in less than a year, and has decided this machine doesn’t qualify for Windows 11. I bet there are lots of other people in the same boat. Bazzite doesn’t have to be perfect, but if it can be better than throwing away your old machine, there could be a lot of people switching soon.

Yeah, +1 for Bazzite.

It looks like it’s really designed for Linux beginners. They’ve done a solid amount of work sanding off the rough edges.

As someone who has been using Linux for decades, I’m also impressed with it for a development system. I chose Bazzite because I wanted to be able to play games easily, but since I installed it a month or so ago, I’ve barely played any. I’ve installed a few to make sure they work, but I got interested in another project once I installed it, so for me it’s been a machine used to set up and administer a Kubernetes cluster, as well as doing some Go / Javascript development.

In the early 2000s, I was one of those guys who ran Gentoo and liked building all my own software on my own machine so that it was perfectly tweaked for what I wanted to do. But, these days, I really like having an OS that’s stable and gets out of my way, so I can focus on more interesting things.

Bazzite, a gaming-focused Linux distribution, is designed to work really well with Steam. One drawback is that if you have a game installed in Windows on a Windows drive, you can’t use it from Linux steam. But, there is a way to have games accessible to both operating systems. I haven’t done this, yet, but I’m probably going to try it this week.

It involves installing a Windows driver that supports BTRFS partitions.

Here’s the video guide I found.

If OP is a gamer and not too comfortable with Linux, Bazzite is a good choice of distribution.

It’s a so-called “Atomic” distro. Basically what that means is that it works more like Android / iOS than Windows or a traditional Linux distribution.

The base system including drivers and key applications is built as an image by Fedora. Every 2 weeks or so, they release a new one, and Bazzite users get the new one the next time they reboot. Everything in that base image is tested to work together, so you don’t get weird incompatibilities. You can still install all the other software you want, but you tend to do it using Flatpaks rather than rpms/debs. (For someone who doesn’t know what that means, Bazzite is a nice OS because that’s something you don’t need to learn right away.)

Bazzite is meant to be something that you can install on a SteamDeck, or another handheld gaming PC, but it also works great for desktop machines. But, because it’s meant for handheld machines, they’ve worked extra hard to sand away some of the rough edges.

If you’re a more advanced user, Bazzite is still good because you can still do almost everything you’d do on a normal distribution, you’re just discouraged from doing things that affect the base image because it makes updates slower and means they’re not guaranteed to work. I actually really like some of the things you’re encouraged to do in Atomic distros that you wouldn’t do normally. For example, using distrobox as a way to install certain kinds of dev tools. I currently have one project I’m running in an Ubuntu distrobox and another I’m running in a Fedora distrobox. It keeps some of the tools isolated to the “box” where they’re needed. I haven’t used Fedora much lately, so it’s fun to have the more familiar Ubuntu environment in one, and then the other one where I can experiment and learn.

For someone who doesn’t play games, Bazzite probably isn’t ideal, but I’d still recommend an Atomic build. There are downsides, but unless you’re the kind of person who really likes building their own kernel and making sure it’s optimal for their system, it’s so nice to have a stable base image so you can focus on the other stuff.

Nope, it’s maybe a month old.

I’d agree that in the current state it’s pretty useless. But, I don’t think it would take too much to make it usable. If the GRUB menu had some basic information on it like: what version is it, when was it installed, has it booted successfully, etc. then I think that would be enough for most people to figure out. Although, I do think that the current Bazzite timeout is way too short.

BTW, on my system /boot is ext4, /boot/efi is FAT32 and the rest mounted at /sysroot is BTRFS.

Anything’s possible. But, they try to make that hard. The system always keeps 2 versions around, the newest one and the previous one, so if you screw up the newest one you can always boot into the previous one. And Bazzite, at least, uses BTRFS which uses copy-on-write, so it’s much harder to corrupt the filesystem. I think the /boot partition is still ext4 though, so it’s possible that if you time it just right you could theoretically mess up your boot partition. Then you’d need to use a rescue USB drive to fix it.