chaosCruiser

Back in the X11 days, I actively avoided GNOME, because Cinnamon, KDE and XFCE were so much better. I had so many issues with the design philosophy, that using GNOME felt impossible.

However, when Wayland started having some support in GNOME, I got very curious and gave it a try. Then, I also bought my first touch screen laptop, and simply had to try GNOME with it. Turns out, GNOME wasn’t that bad, as long as you’re not trying to tweak every little thing about it. If you’re a tweaker, KDE is definitely the way to go. If not, GNOME might be tolerable or even good.

I’ve done so much tweaking already, that I don’t really have that itch any more. Sure, some things like custom keyboard shortcuts have to be just right, but that’s why you have GNOME Tweaks and the dconf Editor.

I used to have a Sony phone. It was so big and thin, that I was constantly worried about bending it accidentally.It had like some super cinematic 21:9 ratio or whatever. Looks good in a movie theater, but feels really awkward in your pocket. Actually, my jacket had pockets big enough for that phone, but It was really difficult to keep it anywhere else. In the bad old days, people used to keep the phone in dedicated belt mounted phone pouch/holster/thingy. I wish I had one of those leather pouches, because that phone really needed one.

Reading, browsing and gaming on it was great though. Having a bigger screen is something I really did appreciate when sitting in the metro every day.

If you need more screen realestate, consider getting a phablet (aka plus sized phone these days). If you can carry a tablet with you, that would probably be even better.

Yeah, that sounds like you’re worried about paradoxes. You might want to check out the Many-Worlds Interpretation to fix that. In the MWI, every decision and event branches into its own timeline. Instead of running into your past self, you would be visiting an alternate you.

If you don’t remember being visited by a time traveler, then your timeline didn’t have that event. That’s ok though, because there are infinitely many timelines. However, you can’t visit all of them. You’ll only have access to the ones where a future you visited an alternate past you. Instead of changing your own past, you’re creating a new timeline where an alternate you got visited by a time traveler.

Who needs a fence when you have land mines.

See also: Finland and the Ottawa Convention

The “unless you know what you’re doing” part tells me it’s totally worth it in some highly exceptional situations. You just need to be able to justify spending a few hours to figure out exactly how to do it safely.

Best thing about Linux is that you can do literally anything you want. If it works, it’s awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.

I’m utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventually™ or soon™. Haven’t learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess it’s ok. Or maybe I just know what I’m doing…

True, but I still think there are some significant ethical questions here.

I can’t be bothered to update every day, or even every week. LOL. More like once a month or so, which means that it’s usually 100 MB or more and there’s at least one package that is more or less critical. When I start updating, and before hitting Y, I pause for a second and realise I should totally check the news first. Usually, it’s fine, but over the years, there have been a few times when intervention was necessary.

Remember this one from 2022?

Yeah, that one ended up being a learning experience… After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.

In Debian, that’s opt-in, whereas in Ubuntu it’s opt-out. Tells you something about the core values, doesn’t it?

In my experience, Debian has been very low maintenance. Occasionally, you may run into an issue that would be solved by having newer packages. If that happens, consider switching to Fedora.

My Fedora installations have been pretty smooth. The only thing that always breaks randomly is the software update GUI. I just got fed up with that and ended up using the terminal for installing all updates. Apparently this distro requires a bit more maintenance.

I think this is one of the big steps that make Linux gaming more accessible to the general public. Proton was clearly the first major step and Bazzite might be the second one.

Gardening, hiking, camping and hunting (if you believe the whole society is about to collapse)
Sewing and mending clothes (if you believe you won’t be able to buy new clothes very often)

Exactly!
With that clever coupling trick you made sure that if one thing happens, another thing happens as well. I don’t have that sort of connection to my lunch box, and I’ve paid for it many times. Probably should develop some sort of routine for that as well. So far, I just hope that I remember to do everything in the morning.

As long as the sequence of actions isn’t altered, it works pretty well. When something unexpected happens and I have to deviate from my routine, that’s when everything goes off the rails.

I try to avoid breaking the routine. Today, my morning was different from normal, and as a result, I forgot to take my lunch with me. Good job!

As long as I put my phone and keys in the same place every day, I will always find them easily. As soon as I break that routine, they just disappear mysteriously.

There are many special distributions designed for different purposes, such as gaming or being easy for new users. While I’m aware of their existence, I haven’t personally used them, so there’s not much I can say about them. If my list doesn’t appeal to you, don’t hesitate to look elsewhere. There’s a distro for every purpose and style.

However, Here are a few I can recommend for different kinds of users:

Debian: If stability is important, but you don’t mind the old packages, Debian is a good choice. It also has one of the largest package repositories.

Ubuntu: It offers excellent package availability and plenty of tutorials and forum posts. Many new users have already asked the questions you’ll likely have, making it generally easy to learn.

Fedora: While not as new as Arch, Fedora still offers very fresh packages. It requires very little tinkering when compared to Arch.

Arch: This is for demanding users who want to customise their system. You’re comfortable taking responsibility for your decisions and enjoy reading up on various topics. Having very new packages is important to you. This one is a rolling release distribution, so there are no big annual releases of the next version number. Just install the updates, and you’ll have the latest Arch.

That looks a lot like a video card issue. If it isn’t, my next guess would be the power supply. Some of the weirdest things I have encountered were cause by a semi-functional power supply. When nothing makes any sense, borrow a power supply from somewhere just to rule out some of the really obscure cases.

Having a compact energy storage. Coal was fine for steam engines, but gasoline, diesel and related fossil fuels were a game changer. Sure, they pollute, have destroyed our environment, cause various diseases and might even result in our extinction sooner rather than later, but hear me out.

Liquid fuels made it possible to build and operate compact and light engines that provide an amazing amount of power. Also, the fuel lasts a long time compared to coal and wood. This means that we can transport items and people across the globe, visit distant places within a single day, and commute to work in places that have barely any infrastructure.

All of this has transformed individual lives, large parts of the society and even the global economy. Imagine doing all that a hundred years before knowing how to build solar panels and batteries. That sort of global change was totally unimaginable in the 1600s.

But seriously though, that change didn’t come for free, and it’s about time we stop relying on this shortcut. It was literally quick and dirty, so we really need to switch to something more sustainable. If only solar panels had been invented before oil…

You know, you are allowed to cheat in this test. Just write those numbers on your arm with a permanent marker or whatever. Get a fake tattoo, if you want.

That account seems to be posting once every hour, which is more cautious than what I’ve seen with some other bots. Some other accounts just sleep for a few months and then suddenly wake up to spam 10 posts within two hours.