Palacegalleryratio [he/him]

I would suggest the support this has from valve that means it works great out the box does indeed make it novel.

It will move the needle far more than like 2 hobbyists flashing niche hardware. Nobody cares about that because it’s so small scale. Nobody will put in the support for that user base. Conversely the valve frame is going to be a mass market product that will be in the hands of loads of people, so issues and problems will get fixed, software will be optimised and if the install base is large enough it will be targeted with new software and features.

That’s the novelty. It’s likely going to change things.

To be fair I wouldn’t buy one of those to run Linux, and it’s not a extremely hard to see why the average consumer wouldn’t want to buy this to run Linux either:

I’m guessing India either doesn’t actually stop, or starts buying a very similar quantity of oil from Kazakhstan that definitely isn’t Russian, no, don’t think too hard about it.

OpenSuse is a left field choice. Nothing wrong with it - just not a typical first distro. Hope you have a great time with it! I recommend using it for a solid month then working on a windows pc for a day - you’ll be blown away by how asinine windows is once you’ve got used to Linux.

A lot of Linux ports are not the best quality to begin with, or even if they were good once, they’re out of date, utilising old fashioned technology that may not be the best at taking advantage of modern hardware. Conversely the windows version was often better built to begin with, and the translation layers have had a huge amount of effort put into them to make them as performant as possible and utilise as much of the hardwares capacity as they can, so much so that sometimes the proton version of windows games running on Linux is actually more performant than the windows native version on running on windows!

Estimate the feature high level but with a 1-hour margin of error

Oh my god so much this. “You said it would take roughly 16hours to implement, it’s now 1 hour into the following morning why isn’t it rolled out to production yet?” Or “You estimated 8 hours, it only took 5” “which you’re pleased with?” “No, now we have 3 hours of un-allocated time on this contract which has upset the client”

Care to elaborate?

Tails is a pretty cool thing to have around.

Sid Meiers Alpha Centuri, it’s the best 4x game of its era and is a perfect example of how well games from the 90s can play, in many ways it feels like a modern game made with severe technical limitations. Today the graphics are outright bad (they weren’t exactly jaw dropping at the time either), and the UI lacks a couple of modern sensibilities and QOL features but everything else is top notch.

I would be delighted if I saw something that whimsical and bad in the wild. It’s less asinine than a lot of other crap I do actually have to use that was designed by professionals.

Type h for “hello” does literally nothing… ok… thought this was a text editor why can’t I even write… mash esc still no response, try typing “hello” but no matter how many time I mash h nothing happens. Right let’s leave and find a guide. Right so closing a terminal program that’s usually Crtl-c nope that’s done nothing, erm, what else works, nano uses Ctrl-x let’s try that, nope. Erm kill nope nothing, fuck this I’m just closing my terminal. - my first vim experience.

The Swiss German layout looks fairly reasonable in a vacuum. The ä key having 5 letter options on it is pretty wild though. The Swiss French layout is maybe better than standard French too - it’s certainly got more sensible punctuation.

They would unironically probably like that. Many of my clients have negative taste. “It’s a bit bland, can you just add in…” - goes on to describe an aesthetic that would have been considered a ‘bit much’ back in 2008 on someone’s MySpace page.

Mandriva Linux, then RHEL, the Debian and fedora.

I can’t speak for Krita - I’ve not used it. But as someone who has designed a lot of software I agree with you fully here. Making software intuitive is the hardest and also most important part of my job. When I test with users the first time it soon becomes clear how stuff that me and my team thought made sense is totally opaque to the end users or just doesn’t fit into the real world workflow. It’s all well and good expecting users to learn the software - there has to be an element of that - but if you force thought, cause confusion or waste time every time you do that you add friction to the product. That friction ruins the users experience of the product and can ruin productivity.

There is a balance to be made, complexity where it allows for power is fine, if you have dedicated frequent users. E.g. my favourite editor is Vim - very complicated and (initially) opaque but also extremely powerful and logical once you know it. But complexity that adds no power or complexity in software where you don’t expect users to be using the software frequently enough to be expert in it is not ok.

Mr Sumlenny said German post-war thinking plays a role too. “They were designed by a generation of German manufacturers that hadn’t seen war, and so tended to overcomplicate the system. “Older systems, designed in the 1960s by those who actually saw war, are far more useful on the battlefield but have weaker armour.”

Yeah but Rheinmetall can’t charge the government megabucks for a simple system can it? They have to justify bumping another 0 on the end of the price somehow, an increase in complexity is the perfect way to do this.

If a fascist man, who nazi salutes at public events and who publicly supports nazi and fascist aligned governments around the world cannot be called a nazi, who can?

I have also heard this line of thinking, it’s very dark and does not paint a hopeful picture for the emancipation of humanity. But I kind of see the logic to it. Europe doesn’t have the martial strength to impose a European empire, especially not in the face of the American war machine. Nor does it have the economy to make one, especially with neoliberalism ripping the copper out the walls of European economies preventing reinvestment and industrialisation (see: the Bank Of England’s policy of quantitative tightening ruining the plans of the uk Labour Party, and all of Europe’s industrial capital looting its own assets).

In this proposed reality Europe must look to the other powers, America being the default choice, but an increasingly unfriendly one, does Europe fancy itself being an extraction zone for an exploitative empire? The boot on the other foot for them. To look the other way, would BRICS even be interested in Europe coming cap in hand? Maybe, but certainly not with terms Europe wouldn’t be too proud to accept. However individual BRICS countries maybe. Russia - a weird one, some countries may be happy to side with them (Germany possibly would consider it in a role as Russias workshop?) but I don’t see other countries like Poland going that way without a fight. China - too remote, too far away and too hated by most of Europe, maybe some nations like Turkey could look to them though. Brazil? Surely too busy with the American empire to its north to have time for Europe. South Africa - who knows? It’s a very different future to the one we grew up in.

If Trump starts an inter nato war or just dissolves nato due to America invading one of the other founding members, that’s going to be the biggest geopolitical win for America’s enemies who won’t have to lift a finger.

My advice would be look up The Missing Semester it’s a free online MIT course on how to use the terminal and it will govern you a better understanding of how to use it and Linux more generally. Really helpful to find your way around and give you an intuitive sense of what you’re trying to achieve.

Then beyond that installing arch is easy with archinstall but it’s probably more helpful to learn about the components of desktop Linux and what they do so that you actually know what you’re doing.