It would be absolutely hilarious if in the very long term Proton or other Win32 compatibility layers just become a generic set of libraries that most games rely on for historical reasons despite every reason for their existence no longer applying

I think at this point Mint is a brilliant option for mom or Dad’s laptop that’s still on Windows 10 and Microsoft deemed “too insecure” for Windows 11, but Bazzite and other newer Distros do so much better at being distros for gamers right out of the box that those are better to recommend to gamers

I mean, as the law is written there’s zero requirement for the entered age to be verified, only to associate an age bracket with the OS user account and to provide that info to programs as they require it. Now, I do wonder if a California-compliant OS would require service accounts to have an entered date of birth and what kind of fun that could potentially lead to of you enter the date of account creation as the birthdate but the full ramifications remain to be seen

there is no such thing as objective media of any kind anymore

All media has bias. Always has. Literally even just in the choice of what to report on, what to investigate, how and what gets written about. Best thing anyone can do is realize this, and reject the billionaires narratives and write their own shit. Make zines and hand them out! Make political shitposts on the internet! Make radical stickers and graphiti. Reject the manufactured narrative and write your own and share it to normalize it!

That’s kinda the limitation with Cinnamon, it’s not as customizable as it could be.

I wonder if maybe it’s a governor problem. Laptops are often super power limited, sometimes even more so thermally limited, so they rely on increasingly bonkers power profiles to try to balance it, but pegging the laptop at 100% utilization such as while transcoding can still cause it to fall over. Have you played with adjusting the power profile at all?

Vorta only supports SSH and local backup repositories while pika allows SFTP through some kind of compatibility layer with gvfs.

That’s kinda wild given SFTP is just SSH.

If you’re flinging files across the network, rsync is usually a really good option. It’ll typically be run over SSH/SFTP and is capable of resuming if interrupted, verifying the copied files match the original, etc. and rsync can be super fast compared straight SFTP in some cases. In a pinch you can always cobble together a pretty robust backup script purely based off rsync

To be fair, I had more trouble with wake from sleep on Windows than I have had since shifting to Linux.

Also at work I get 1-2 tickets a week for what end up being wake from sleep issues on Windows

Most popular games still don’t work.

I’ve been running Bazzite on my main PC since October (I have a bad habit of tinkering with my Linux installs to death so I opted for immutable so I’m less likely to break it) and of all of the weird and obscure windows software I’ve installed, all has worked flawlessly including funky model railroad track planning software and some somewhat obscure simulator games. I also have some games from the 90s that haven’t worked on modern Windows in years run flawlessly. Heck even Sims via EA’s launcher runs flawlessly (if not better because I can minimize it from fullscreen, something it can’t do on Windows since the DX11 update)

Literally the only thing I’ve found that I can’t run is anything requiring Ubisoft’s launcher. The furthest I got is to about 30% through downloading Anno 1800 before it crashed and refused to run the launcher again. I can’t help but suspect they intentionally broke compatibility because that would be very on-brand for them, but you never know. Kinda sad because I wanted to play an Anno game that’s new enough to not have gotten a disc release but whatever I have plenty of other games I can play

its called that because you need 5 guys to finish 1 meal!

Yeah Google flights only shows the base ticket price and doesn’t factor in taxes and fees which easily add an extra 15% or so on most flights. For example, I booked a trip just yesterday where the base price of the tickets was about $900 (and that’s the price that Google Flights showed) but the required taxes and fees pushed it up to $1100

Would requesting a mac with the argument of having access to a Unix shell potentially work? In college my IT instructor used a Mac with a windows VM via VMware Workstation and it pretty seemless. He’d use the Mac for most stuff then jump over to the Windows VM for windows specific stuff, and then diving into the native Bash shell for anything else. Honestly it was a pretty sweet setup

I mean this happens. Traditionally it was companies with lots of digital artists for improved software compatibility, but these days it’s really more done for developers and anyone else just as an employee perk to put them on their preferred platform.

Honestly, for administration purposes having a proper native Unix shell running standard utilities is extremely handy, especially when you need to manipulate files, such as working with disk/VM images for example

Yeah getting paid to sit there while windows wastes 20+ minutes of company time updating is always a treat

Meanwhile I got local admin because the IT guy who’s no longer there couldn’t be bothered to install a couple of utilities for me and most of what I actually do is manage SaaS services in a web browser

So part of the reason for the whole envelope situation is that letter envelopes will go through postal sorting machines which will bend the contents so anything that can’t be bent (for example I once needed to mail a forgotten car key to a family member) can’t be sent in a letter envelope.

Usually the solution is padded envelopes, or for certain things there may even be special postage available like USPS’s Bound Printed Media rate for mailing books (which can I add is such a hilariously federal government-grade obtuse way of saying “books!”) but there’s also “non machine” postage rates available too.

Basically boxes are the easy solution but there’s more efficient solutions available if you’re willing to do a very small amount of research. For people packing it can be as simple as “I can quickly toss this in a box and not worry about it further”

I hate to say it, but I almost appreciate the honesty that comes from multiple different alphabet soup brands selling the exact same item often with the exact same photos. Additionally, unbranded items aren’t always poor quality.

I’ve actually got some unbranded Christmas light strings I bought because I just wanted to put some lights on some columns at my wedding and wanted to spend less than $100 doing so, and those light strings have outlasted every commercial Christmas light string I’ve purchased. Heck I have a couple of those strings which have been on for 3+ years straight.

Most unbranded items are made by factories that do OEM and ODM work for actual brands that we’ve all heard of, so they know how to make quality products and they can get more ongoing orders if they make products that are worth restocking. Sometimes you get burned but far more often than not I end up with something that’s relatively decent quality and fullfills the need I have for the item

I do genuinely wonder if some amount of vaccine skepticism comes from a place of just not wanting to get a shot.

Would a safety deposit box at a bank be an appropriate option for your off-site backups?

So I recently looked at both Girlscouts and Scouts of America for my daughter. Honestly when I tried to compare with Scouts of America the folks from Girlscouts were very sexist and very quick to bash on their competition while Scouts of America was just like “yeah were gonna go hiking and make pinewood derby cars and have a good time” both organizations have their problems but Scouts of America was noticably the less toxic of the two at this point