The aftermath of a dumpster fire

The one on the bottom right should be the same as the center right but with “Apple” written instead of “Microsoft”. And maybe with the hand of the character representing Apple reaching in the other’s pocket while doing what he’s doing.

Very unhinged.

Clearly you’re more interested in fighting a strawman than the main point. You can do that on your own.

That was completely unhinged.

All I said is that the relatively recent gun ban that the article is talking about did absolutely nothing to prevent the incidence of gun violence in your building. From there you made up a strawman of what you think, through pure prejudice, of what my political positions are and went on a wild rant about them, including on completely unrelated subjects.

If you want a more detailed explanation of my position on the subject, all you have to do is scroll up to my other post where I explained it in full detail. From that you will see that: 1: I never portrayed gun ownership as a right 2: I actually praise the effective gun control measures that were already in place. 3: I criticize the Conservative’s approach to the problem as well.

I am an advocate for pragmatic measures against violence in the cities without the political and ideological nonsense that has been surrounding it for decades. I am sick of politicians continuing to use the same cheap distractions from the problem while it keeps getting worse. We have a cost of living and poverty problem in our cities and social environments in which kids don’t have much future to look to for themselves. This is what promotes crime and gang violence and therefore fuels a demand for illegal guns that end up in the wrong hands.

I explained the reasoning behind it for those who didn’t know about the reality of gun ownership in the country. The Liberal party has been exploiting general ignorance around gun regulations in the country for over two decades. You won’t win without making an attempt to educate people.

The thing is that the vast majority of those who commit gun violence in the cities already own their firearms illegally and got them from a supply chain that is completely independent from the legal and heavily regulated market in the country.

Even though Trudeau’s gun ban isn’t fully implemented yet, the sale of those firearms has been banned for years now so they are already practically banned. And clearly that ban didn’t stop the violence from happening in your building.

The already strict gun laws in Canada are effective at preventing the wrong people from getting access to firearms on the legal and regulated market. There are significant legal hoops that you must jump through to get licensed and further regulations and controls you must comply with to legally own a firearm in this country.

Those who can’t or don’t want to comply with these regulations have to pay a significantly marked up price for a firearm that was smuggled in from the US completely independently from the legal market. The vast majority of the people you hear about getting into shootouts in the major cities got their firearm through that black market. They are not affected by gun bans. They de facto already own their firearms illegally and trying to make firearms more illegal won’t change anything for them.

The authorities have dismantled firearms smuggling networks over and over again and there is no reason to believe it will stop anytime soon because as long as there is a demand on the streets for those guns, someone will make money supplying them. We share the longest undefended border with a country where it is easy for just about anyone to buy a firearm and it in unreasonable to think we will be able to stop the smuggling by border enforcement alone.

The only gun problem Canada has is America’s gun problem. It also has a street gang violence problem that fuels the demand for the influx of illegal firearms. The latter should be the main focus of a government that actually cares about reducing gun violence in the country, and not just virtue signaling for votes, like the liberals have been doing for the last two decades when it come to gun regulation. Mind you, the conservative’s go-to solution of just increasing jail sentences for everything isn’t really that effective either.

I’m hoping that the trend will change by then. I’ve got about 10 more years. If it doesn’t happen? I have no idea what I’ll do.

Not all of us.

I’ll keep my manual transmission sedan that handles well and doesn’t connect to the internet to collect data on me until it collapses into a pile of rust.

As someone who recently switched to Linux and doesn’t like to tinker much and doesn’t have very deep knowledge of Linux, I’ll share my experience. Whether you ultimately try or not is up to you.

Your requirements for accessibility suggests you should look into a distro with KDE Plasma as many said already. It is an extremely flexible and customizable DE.

I personally started with Mint and ended up somewhat wedging KDE in it because I didn’t like how cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. It worked but was a little rough around the edges in that setup, as it should be expected with a distro running a DE it wasn’t meant to. If you don’t mess with the DE however I’ve found Mint to be super easy and approachable. But ultimately it might not be what you need.

After doing a lot of research and comparisons I then switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with native KDE plasma. A few things took a little extra tinkering and learning to get them to work but after that it became the setup I am happy to stick with for a long while.

I have no experience with them but KUbuntu and Fedora Plasma Spin might be also good alternatives to look for.

Running games is very easy through stream and still relatively easy with Bottles, which is rather easy and straightforward to lean to use. As long as you have the right video drivers installed. I have an NVidia card which made it a little more complicated but I made it work still. My understanding is that this shouldn’t be any issues with AMD cards right out of the box.

Ultimately it will require you to learn a little here and there whenever you come across something you don’t know. But as someone who only has an extremely shallow understanding of how the OS works and basic common console commands I have found no problem so complicated that I couldn’t handle with a quick web search.

If you look back at the sci-fi movies that came out soon after lasers were invented, you could see that people had all sorts of crazy ideas of what a laser could be used to do and that a lot of them had absolutely no idea of what a laser really did. Ultimately, we’ve found out that most of those imagined uses were pure bullshit or extremely impractical, at least with the current state of the technology. It didn’t mean that the technology was useless. We ended up finding all sorts of useful purposes for it that they had never imagined, like disk players or barcode scanners. It only means that it took time for people to better understand what the real world applications of the new technology was and a lot of the initial assumptions were dead wrong.

AI is going through the same process. It will take time before the technology’s strengths and weaknesses are better understood by the masses so it can be better applied to more realistic uses. And for the commercialization of snake-oil applications for it remains confined to fringe markets.

That’s how insecure people coped back then. Lifted pickup trucks didn’t exist yet.

Microsoft needs to be broken up.

Any company that can be so blatantly anti consumer and still makes boatloads of money is obviously abusing its dominant position on the market.

Big dumb corporation doing big dumb corporation stuff. It’s so big it can’t behave coherently anymore. But it’s also so big that it acts like a black hole that sucks all the money towards itself regardless of how stupid, unproductive and wasteful it is being.

The sad part is that all of this is all self-inflicted in the name of “growth” for the shareholders. They absolutely could take 7, modernize it, call it “12” and release it as a lightweight, fast and more privacy-respecting OS. It would probably be far cheaper to make as well.

But that’s not what the Corporate elements of the company want. They see the OS as a platform to force feed to the users features that they can market as “lucrative” to the shareholders. Nobody else wants that. I predict that Windows 12 will have some sort of baked in “AI” that you can’t get rid of as a bare minimum.

But this is none of my concern. They’ve finally pushed me over the hump and now I’m 100% sold to Linux. It has gotten so much more approachable than it used to be. Especially with Mint.

Microsoft is dead to me.

Maybe if after a disastrous enough reception of Windows 11 they might make a Windows 12 that actually cares about being more palatable to the users, like they did with Windows 7 following the disaster that was Vista.

But I think they’ll most probably only move to meet us halfway like they did with Windows 10 following the other disaster that was 8. Where they replaced a major irritant with another and then slowly stacked more and more irritants with updates thereafter. They are too addicted to the revenue from data harvesting to give it up.

I was hesitant for a long while and ended up installing Linux Mint on an old SSD I had laying around this way there was no commitment.

Now I’m realizing I haven’t booted up my regular windows 10 drive ever since and am considering getting rid of it altogether.

On a side note I created a virtual machine on the Linux side that runs Windows 10 LTSC on it for a few other programs I sometimes need that would be very difficult or impossible to make work on Linux like Inventor, Office and Photoshop. It lives trapped in the box and isn’t allowed to connect to the internet. If I need to download something for it I download it on Linux and drag and drop it into the box. It’s like having a little pet Windows that you keep locked in a pen, so it works for you and only for you and it can’t escape to go into your house to spy on you and shit bloatware all over your carpet.

When the marketing guy tries to do a job meant for the engineering department.

They are right to worry for the safety of their staff but not because of the gun owners turning their firearms in. They should be worried about becoming the target of criminals looking to steal those firearms from their delivery chain.

I have a Lexmark black and white laser printer which I’ve used lightly for years (went through one and a half paper packs so far) and it’s still going strong with the original toner cassette. And when I’ll need to replace it I know there are third party cassettes available on the market for it which are substantially cheaper than OEM. I bought it to replace a Brother inkjet printer which was just an ink/money pit despite being a Brother. Inkjet is absolute crap no matter the brand. HP makes it even worse with a ton of assholeish DRM layered on top.

Ultimately there are two big things to avoid: inkjet and HP. Look up a laser printer and make sure that there is third party cassette support for it before you buy. Brother is apparently good in laser but don’t necessarily limit yourself to that brand.