Don’t listen to them, I installed Linux multiple times and I‘m still a fat nerd

Yea. Used it for four things. To keep up to date with creators I like, to keep up to date with friends, to keep up to date with a bunch of webcomics and to randomly rant into the void when I felt like it.

Yea, that’s pretty much the reason I always go for mint, when I need something that just works

They’re not the only ones anymore though. Apple, Amazon, Deezer, Qobuz and Napster also have lossless audio support.

From what I’ve read (although my numbers are a few years old), Qobuz and Napster pay artists even more than Tidal. The former even significantly so (about 3x, from what I’ve read), although it is slightly more expensive. Both also support lossless audio.

And, for completion: Among the big-tech streaming services, the one that seems to pay the best is Apple Music, with a little more than half of what Tidal pays. The worst ones are amazon and Spotify which both pay about a third of Tidal.

Back is already bullshit. We have a few trashcan mac pros at work and usually they’re just turned so all the cables stick out towards the user because then you can easily reach the power button. Which makes it look worse than just having a power button in an accessible place aka the front or the top in the first place.

On the one hand, I agree. Apple has positioned their power buttons with the assumption that the devices wouldn’t be turned off very often for quite a while now. It was on the backside of the previous mac mini design and also on the backside of the 2013 trashcan mac pro, for example.

That still doesn’t make it less annoying though. We use a lot of macs for work, including aforementioned mac minis and mac pros and we do turn them off regularly because there’s no need for them to use power 24/7. Having to turn them around to find the power button is just stupid. That’s form over function in its finest. But if you’re the type of person who never turns off their computer, obviously it doesn’t really matter.

That’s not to say, that the new mac minis aren’t remarkable machines. The redesign was necessary and is very good in general. It’s a tiny powerhouse. They could’ve just chosen less of afterthought of a power button location.

Well, my internet connection would have to be a lot faster, and they would all need devices that support UHD h.265 and HDR10 playback. But if you have have gigabit upload and they all have shields or similar with just as fast connections, you’re good to go without transcoding (if no one wants to access it through mobile)

I regularly watch on my server when I’m not home and a few friends of mine also have access to it, so I need the content to be available in SDR and lower bit rates. When I stream from home, I‘d like to have access to the full quality and HDR though, so either I need multiple versions of each film or hardware encoding/tonemapping and a used gtx 1050ti was a lot cheaper than the required storage would be to have 4 or 5 versions of every film.

But yes, if you’re only streaming within the same network, hardware transcoding isn’t necessary in the slightest. But then a SMB fileshare might also suffice…

As I need hardware transcoding, that makes emby immediately non viable for me. I also usually watch via various apps and on tv, which, if you don’t have emby premiere are also not free to use.

It’s free and open source. That alone is a big plus. And it works fairly well. What does emby do better, that warrants paying $120 for it?

I really love our German equivalents: Harald Lesch and the show TerraX. Had the privilege of seeing him live in a guest lecture in my uni about the anthropocene. He feels so much more genuine and less arrogant than Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If you know German and don’t know him, check him out. Both on TerraX and his YouTube presence. There are even some full lectures on there, similar to the one I saw life.

For e-readers? It’s fine, if it’s modified heavily enough. The tolino e-reader line (before they just became kobos) used a heavily modified version of Android and they were great devices.

They still have much longer battery life and they’re still like reading on paper. Just not in a very high “print” quality when in colour.

I mean, in general it’s pretty neat. When I was 12 or 13 I had a kindle touch with 3G and since I didn’t have a phone or computer I used the kindle touch to read a lot on wikipedia (it didn’t work for everything, I think. Just a handful of selected sites). Also, it generally costs extra when you buy it, just not monthly.

Normal tablets don’t have e-Ink screens and for reading electrophoretic displays are vastly superior to LED/LCD screens.

Some Kindle devices come with a built-in „free“ cellular plan. Maybe it was that?

Second this. Airplane mode is on and books are sideloaded. However, if it hadn’t been a present, I‘d probably have gotten a Tolino (German/European e-reader brand that is identical with kobo) because they support epub directly (and yes I know the Kindle technically does that, too, now but wordwise n stuff only works if you convert them to kfx)

You‘re a step too far again though. The average newbie would insta-panic by the thought of using the terminal. Needing a command to install drivers or to update is already too hard.

Arch based distros like Manjaro, endeavorOS or even SteamOS, for that matter are great (have used manjaro myself in the past until I settled for fedora/nobara) and the AUR can make acquiring software a lot easier. However, the moment something breaks, a newbie will be lost and the Arch Wiki won’t save someone who doesn’t know what to look for in the first place.

If anything, my recommendation for absolute beginners (as long as their hardware isn’t state of the art or they want to game, primarily) would be Mint. It’s easy to set up, has a nifty (and graphical) driver installer, has a default DE that is close enough to windows as to not confuse someone who hasn’t used anything else in their life and also, it shares enough DNA with ubuntu that most tutorials out there work without having shit like snap in there.

Sure but it’s not a rarity that forum answers expect you to be very familiar with linux file structures and terminal commands. If you’re a beginner who runs into an issue (as beginners do), you oftentimes need to find a tutorial and then tutorials that explain the tutorial. It gets even worse if you’re not on a debian/ubuntu based distro (although, to be fair, if you’re a newbie, that’s sorta asking for trouble).