omg, you use = for eyes, you sick fuck?

Never even heard of it until now. Did I accidentally steal a plot-point from it? lol

Windows users seem to want to just buy, have, and use a computer, whereas Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun.

Can people please just stop with these terrible generalizations? Lots of windows users consider themselves “computer people” and tinker with their computer and solve problems. Plenty of Linux users aren’t doing shit but using it as it comes. It feels like a terrible rip off of the old apple ads “I’m a Mac”, “and I’m a PC”. It’s crap.

Imagine they take them out and dispose of them separately, and some dude finding out at the open casket that his wife was packing fakes for their entire marriage and being outraged.

It’s like a bad sitcom plot.

What are you, HR?

No it isn’t. At the right-most side of the graph “unknown” is higher than OSx, and “other” is above Linux and ChromeOS.

It is barely on the graph at all, and really only in 2012 - I’m assuming they released some product around then that is enough like a desktop computer that it made the list but ultimately fizzled out.

There are so many factors playing into this. Also, I don’t want you to think this post is suggesting we should give up on alternatives, because that is not my belief. We need to transition to something, and really we should have started this process much earlier. This is more to illustrate why it is a slow process.

1. Energy density is unbeatable. Around 100 pounds of gasoline (15-ish gallons) will push most small road cars 300-400 miles. To get close to that range from an electric car you are going to need 1500-2000 lbs of batteries.
2. Transportability. We have yet to really figure out how to get several thousand kilowatts of electricity from where it is easy to produce to where it is needed without losing a good percentage of it. You can fill a tank with Gasoline and haul it across the planet and lose basically none of it.
3. Safety. Batteries can be very nasty things if damaged, the fires they can cause are astronomically harder to put out compared to traditional gasoline fires after a nasty car accident. Hydrogen is so much more violent in a fire/explosion than gasoline as well.
4. Economics. Yes, Oil Companies have a huge grip on massive chunks of the world. MANY countries entire economies would collapse if fossil fuels were removed from the equation. And those countries are powerful, and scared, which is a dangerous combo. They are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their GDP as there is not a good replacement. It could be a civilization crumbling event if all money tied to fossil fuels just stopped in an instant.

Our habits need to drastically change as a society. Fossil Fuels are not the only problem we need to change, as an example, industrial farming is also pretty catastrophically bad for the environment (as we are currently doing it). We need to consume less (both power and stuff), we need to travel less, we need to eat less meat, and we need world governments on board for these changes in a meaningful and peaceful way. Or we need someone to invent a way for us all to survive the problem or reverse it without us changing a damn thing, but that sounds like magic.

Amazing, thank you for the in-depth (but simple enough) explanation!

OH. So like, it’s a situation where the “lock” has 2 keys, one that locks it and one that unlocks it. You keep the “unlock” key on your person and never let it out of your sight, but let the “lock” key just gets distributed and copied anywhere because all it can do is LOCK the door, and it really doesn’t matter who locks the door so long as only you can unlock it.

That is very interesting. I still don’t quite understand how it technically works, because I thought if you encrypt something with a key, you could basically “do it backwards” to get the original information… This is probably due to getting simplified explanations of encryption though that makes them analogous to a basic cipher (take every letter, assign it to a number, add 10, convert back to new letter - can’t be read unless someone knows or figures out the “key” is 10) and now it is obvious that it is significantly more complex than that…

But I am much more confident that I understand the ‘mechanics’ of it, so thank you for the explanation!

Considering they don’t want your address or name, how the hell would that work anyway? This had to be a joke…

I find the best way to torment Linux ISOs is using the live environment exclusively to:

1. Bing search “how to burn iso to usb” 1a) immediately change search to “how to burn iso to usb linux”
2. Bing search “windows 11 install free iso” 2a) download the first link that is an iso
3. Follow instructions from step 1a 90% to the letter using the iso from step 2a, changing the 10% ignored until it “works”.
   3a) bonus points if you try to write the image to the same USB the live environment is on - if the “chosen” method allows this, congratulations secret ending unlocked, skip to step 6.
4. Bing search “is windows 11 free install safe” 4a) change search to “is windows 11 free install safe reddit”
5. Either unmount the live USB while it is still running, or just hard power down the computer, without even closing the browser.
6. Plug USB drive directly into USB power wall adapter and never plug it into a computer again.

Now, before you ask, yes, you absolutely could do all of this in a VM, but I’ve found it is more tormenting if there is real actual hardware wasted and/or at risk of damage. Linux is the natural enemy of consumerism, so buying a 12 pack of flash drives just to do this on a thinkpad over and over until the thinkpad dies really hurts the linux ISO to their core.

Okay, but like, if the carrier sees all your texts, don’t they also receive the public keys and can then also decrypt the messages?? I’m genuinely curious how this works. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced I don’t understand how any encryption works because the intended recipient needs the key to decrypt it, and if I’m giving them that key, but my traffic is also being watched… doesn’t whoever wants to snoop get the key too??

I feel like I have to be missing something because this just sounds like having an encrypted flash drive that you leave out in the open for someone else to grab, but it has the password written on the side of it in sharpie.

They try to do it all the time, but there is actually some push-back from the law - google recently lost an anti-trust case, the eu passed laws to protect “side-loading”, etc. This new legislation gives them a legal backing. “Oh no, I’m sorry you can’t get your app store working on Android. We aren’t stopping side-loading or other app markets, we are just complying with the legal age-verification requirements”.

They already know the age of their users… They bloody well know. They backed that bill because it gives them a legal leg to bully out smaller 3rd parties and solidify their respective monopolies.

The entirety of what little remains of independent media discovered the apparent undiscoverable over a month before our Tech-corp’s AI super-intelligence overlords. Amazing.

It requires every Operating System and “App Store” to know the user’s age. It requires every piece of software installed to receive the age-range token. It could be catastrophically bad for the open source community - the bill does nothing to define how these tokens are communicated and received. The largest players in the industry can use their market share to exert control over how it happens and bully anyone that doesn’t get on board. For example, Google could tie it to the Play Integrity/Services and effectively kill 3rd party roms and possibly even open source app stores like fdroid, or all side-loading entirely if it was tied into the Play Store enough.

The bill isn’t specifically a privacy dystopian nightmare, but it is still a dystopian nightmare. We need the government and mega-corps to have less influence and control over our devices, this gives them more.

I’m pretty sure I watched some random youtuber’s video explaining how circular this shit is nearly a month ago… I guess it’s 2025, so human observations doesn’t matter, what matters is “what does the AI think”.

The CA bill is also dystopian nightmare fuel… The US isn’t going to build an enormous firewall like other countries have, we are just going to pass a bunch of stupid laws and threaten companies to block our citizens from access instead. Put the burden of building the wall on someone else, the modern American Way™!

An entire generation of fuck-wad parents that just gave their kid a tablet and zero supervision instead of actually raising them are now using their failings as an excuse to control the population; control their devices, control their habits, control their knowledge, and control their thoughts.

I’m perfectly fine with Mint as a recommendation. It’s not what I would choose, but it does work for a large portion of people without issues.

I am very glad that I hardly ever see Manjaro recommended to new comers anymore though - that’s a curse/trap. There are so much better “Arch but easier” distros now that are rock solid.