I’m going to go out on a limb and say fedora silverblue or bazzite

Basic user? Use flat packs and enjoy easy graphics support, as well as all of the windows compatibility for gaming

Advanced user? Learn to do things in pods/containers or distrobox, it’s easy even if the quick start docs aren’t great (I can find my cheat sheets if anyone is going down that road)

Pro: most stuff just works, and it’s harder to config yourself into a corner you have to research your way out of

Cons: normal Linux install guides need to be modified a bit, it’s not hard but you do have to learn how to do it

2024 was kind of a break. It wasn’t that bad (comparatively), a few things happened that brought us hope, a lot of things happened that suggest things are going to get much worse

Might be the best year of the decade, honestly

Ah, I was very confused where that was coming from

What are you talking about? This is about CO² to produce the hydrogen from methanol and H² as a greenhouse gas through extending the life of methane in the atmosphere

Would you give a few hundred dollars and couple dozen hours of learning? Because this is a very achievable goal

Holy shit… When I got my wisdom teeth out, I literally broke down in tears after being awake for 20 minutes without Percocet

Friend, it’s ok to take opiates sometimes…

Kratom could be an option. You make it into tea, the first cup is a weak stimulant, the second (on an empty stomach) will start to work as a weak opiate. The third or fourth might give you stronger relief. The red strains are supposedly better for pain relief

You can’t OD on it, it’s commonly available in head shops or online. The addiction potential is very low, you’ll make yourself nauseous before getting what you’d get out of normal opiates. It’s most closely related to the coffee plant - the toxicity concerns are all about contamination, the plant itself is pretty innocuous

I can give brewing instructions if anyone wants to go down that path, I drink it for anxiety but others say it helps with pain management

Fuck the webcam, what about the mic?

It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron

We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then

It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support

Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently

You guys are circling around the answer

Aero looks, better menus (I refuse to believe nested drop downs are peak layout, but ribbon stuff looks pretty, at the cost of useful organization)

And finally, make it look good in dark mode. We aren’t a print-first culture anymore, and I prefer my retinas intact

Embracing lack of meaning is nihilism talk!

Take in existence as it comes and laugh at the absurdity of it all

Just to put this in context:

There’s only so many ways to turn a bunch of files into one - mainly, you stick them back to back. Easy.

Then, there’s an infinite ways to compress that file… You could come up with you own method, but what good is that? It’s better and smarter to use a format already supported by your users

So of course most bundles are the same archive type under the hood. Everything from backups to installers - you shouldn’t be inventing new formats without a damn good reason

Conflicts of interest. Sometimes illegal, but not nearly as much as they should be (almost always)

Like congress members being allowed to trade stock, which can then be affected by their vote

Or one of the specifically carved out exceptions to the medical kickbacks laws is for the people who negotiate drug prices for pharmacies

You guys have numbers? I have the infinity sign on every new device within days

It’s structural - you can be open or locked down, and it’s hard to decentralize if you’re not open

You can make it easier or harder to work with that data, but ultimately it’s obsfucation - you could make it hard to parse and obscure details, but ultimately if you want decentralized federation you can’t hide too much

I just remember the day, as a software dev with a solid understanding of Blockchain, my older dev neighbor started explaining how NFTs worked

I thought he was confused or stupid or something.

“Wait, so like you have these super rare images, proof you own it on a Blockchain, and a link to the place they’re all publicly hosted?”

Him: “Yep”

“And the only use for these right now is as a profile picture?”

Him: Shrug, “yeah, people use them for discord and stuff”

“But… Couldn’t you just download the image and use it anyways?”

Him: “Yeah, it’s all publicly hosted”

And it was about then my brain locked up. I did multiple hours of research later, sure I had to be missing something

Wait… Y’all regularly leave your shoes in a normal place?

There’s many reasons people pirate - sometimes it’s a matter of means & availability, sometimes it’s a matter of controlling their paid-for content (like people who actually buy switch games but want to run them on their steam deck), and sometimes it’s basically a hobby

Some people would surely buy some games if piracy wasn’t on the table (assuming the terms were unacceptable to them), but I used to rewatch the same things and play the same games endlessly. I think the vast majority would do without

And rejecting a service you don’t consider worth it isn’t moral. That’s just basic capitalism and self-interest.

This seems to be our core difference. I don’t think capitalism is a moral system, and “enlightened self interest” only works with equity of opportunity and fierce competition - that’s not the world we live in. And even then, I don’t think it’s a very ethical moral framework

I see supporting a service hostile to users as immoral - it’s like enabling an abuser, however slight, you’re contributing to behaviors that are a detriment to others

I’m not going to say pirating is some morally superior act, but there is something to be said for refusing to support companies that have user-hostile distribution

And I don’t think that act is cheapened by accessing the content anyways - yes, you are not contributing to the creators while enjoying their content. If you weren’t going to pay into the stream that they get a small part of anyways, then you’re not costing them anything - if you wouldn’t have bought it and didn’t, it’s the same result on their end either way

Ultimately it goes back to piracy being a problem of accessibility, and rejecting an inaccessible service is the moral part, I see the piracy in this context as just neutral

Source?

Steam, case in point. You can find cracked games fairly easily, there’s even games entirely lacking drm that could be passed around effortlessly

But steam is very convenient, the prices are reasonable, and they have good customer support. That’s enough that even people who pirate switch games buy pc games on the same device

Nah, because while it would be very easy to implement something like that, it would require specifically doing it. Programmers have 3 reasons for writing code

It’s cool. It’s necessary. I was told to do it in exchange for money

(And the secret fourth reason, it just kinda happened. I was building this related thing and I realized it’d be stupid easy to toss it in…I was in a fugue state and I have no idea what I wrote, but it’s some of my best code ever)

Devs don’t generally care about this kind of thing, and most of the time neither do the business folk. This kind of unnecessary crackdown only comes up when consultants like McKinney, who I’ve recently learned are the reason everything sucks