Are they delicious?

I bought a Dell Inspiron circa 2014 intending to run Windows on it. I was dabbling in Linux playing with Raspberry Pis, but didn’t really have designs to run Linux on my main computers. I found Windows 8.1 so unlivable that I tried out Linux Mint.

That laptop just kept dying.

I went around and around with Dell support for a semester about that damn laptop. I was going back to school, I bought a laptop for school, I didn’t get that fucking laptop. I did an entire semester of coursework with a Kindle Fire and two Raspberry Pis (a 1B and a 2). They finally replaced the damn thing with a different model, that was missing a lot of features I had ordered. Dell is at the top of my goddamn blacklist.

Anyway, the first x86 machine I ran Linux on, Linux compatibility wasn’t a factor, and then I really didn’t get a choice anyway because I didn’t get the machine I ordered. But I’ve had dental surgeries that I enjoyed more than Windows 8.1.

In the early days, Linux Mint needed a kernel update to support the trackpad. I’m still not convinced the dedicated GPU ever worked. I had an external docking station that was very meh. It did the job though, I actually still have it in service. It won’t run Windows 11 I don’t think but modern Linux runs just fine.

I’ve since built two desktops with Linux compatibility in mind which have worked very well, and a little Lenovo thing to use as a shop tablet which…could be a lot better.

(Taking your questions seriously and attempting to offer genuine and practical advice with some of my usual psychotic sense of humor)

There aren’t billions of versions of Linux, only tens of thousands. Of those, some are meant for servers, some are meant for embedded devices, some are meant for supercomputers, some haven’t been updated in a decade and some are for specific weird niches. Filter out the joke ones like Hannah Montana Linux and what you’ll have left are five major distros called Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Arch and SuSe. These five are quite different from each other, they do things like develop their own package managers and such. Most other distros are minor modifications of these, most of the time just including a different desktop environment or included software. Debian’s forks include Ubuntu, Linux Mint, ElementaryOS and Neon. Fedora is a fork of Red Hat, Manjaro, EndeavourOS and SteamOS are forks of Arch, and I’m sure Slackware and SuSe have been forked too. The majority of forks are “What if this distro, but this desktop instead of that one?” This is why there are three different versions of Linux Mint, your choice of Cinnamon, xfce and MATE desktops. How do you choose? Try a few and see which one you like best. They’re all free.

You can play Steam games on Linux. Valve has gone BIG into Linux compatibility, their Steam Deck handheld gaming PC ships with a Linux operating system called SteamOS which as previously mentioned is a fork of Arch Linux that comes with the KDE desktop. They have a compatibility layer called Proton which, if I understand the tech correctly, translates DirectX API calls into Vulkan API calls which Linux can understand. At this point, the vast, vast majority of Windows games just work on Linux. The one big sticking point at the moment are kernel-level anticheat systems often used in competitive multiplayer games. The developer has to specifically choose to release a Linux version that enables this, and most don’t. So there are some games to include Fortnite that the developers have specifically chosen to not run on Linux. I’ve been PC gaming exclusively on Linux for over a decade now.

A lot of Linux users are indeed programmers, developers or sysadmins. I’ll remind you that Android and ChromeOS are also both Linux operating systems. Many distros these days have complete and polished graphical desktop environments that make the OS similar to use to Windows or MacOS. Take a look at Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition, I bet you’ll find your way around.

I don’t think it’s a given that anyone needs monetary compensation for that.

Stop paying them and find out.

Why wouldn’t people do this simply for the benefit of humanity?

Because the good of humanity doesn’t heat the house or put dinner on the table. Never has and never will. If you were a human, you’d have learned that from experience.

What’s with the disgusting eugenics? Just expropriate their wealth.

Some of that is exaggeration for comedic effect. “Okay, thanos snap every rich person everywhere is gone, we’ve solved greed. Now what?” But also…have we ever tried exterminating the rich? I think I’ve got a hypothesis here worth testing.

Right, so let’s distribute the burden of this labour

Who gets to make the decisions as to how?

Again, for the benefit of humanity and let’s distribute the burden.

Well now we’re getting into some Robert Heinlein. Service Guarantees Citizenship! Would you like to know more?

I believe he once backed down a little bit on the requirement for military service, in favor of civil service in general. And I can kinda get behind that. You want to have a say in how society is run? Go spend 6 years as a mailman or a middle school janitor. Go be an NTSB accident investigator or one of those folks working in the USDA’s kitchens testing canning recipes for safety. Those are the folks who should be running the show.

I do not know what those are.

Downvotes, but no answers.

What good has ever come from people standing in a street waving a cardboard sign?

But what does the G in GNU stand for?

What would “a protest” accomplish? What have they accomplished in my lifetime?

I do want to use that machine for gaming, though more demanding games will be played on my main desktop machine. One thing about that GTX-1080 is it’s a blower-style card, and the Node 202 case …kind of needs it. Not a lot of ways for hot air to escape that case especially in the GPU bay, and I haven’t seen a retail blower-style GPU since the GTX-10 series.

Docker also isn’t available in the package manager for this thing, probably for similar arbitrary reasons; unless it would need to be side loaded.

I’m not buying another commercially made NAS after this one dies/is remotely bricked by Synology.

It’s a Model DS218. I don’t see Container Manager in the software center for it. Apparently there’s some hack workaround for this but…meh.

Walk out into the wilderness and make it on your own out there, tell me how much manpower you have to spend keeping your core temperature above 90F. It takes a lot of effort keeping a human alive; by yourself you just can’t afford things like electricity, sewage treatment and antibiotics. We only have those things because of the economies of scale that society allows.

Yeah, capitalism is a bit out of control at the moment, but…let’s kill all the billionaires, kill their families, kill their heirs, kill the stockholders. Let me pull on my swastika and my toothbrush mustache for a minute and go full on Auschwitz on “greedy people.” That the Musks and Gateses and Buffets of the world must be genetically greedy, so we must genocide that out of the population. And we get it done. Every CEO, every heiress, every reality TV producer, every lobbyist, every inside trader in congress, every warden of a for-profit prison, dead to the last fetus.

Now what?

You want to live in a house? Okay. At some point someone built that house. Someone walked out into a forest and cut down the trees that made the boards. And/or dug the clay that made the bricks or whatever. Somebody mined the iron ore that someone else smelted into large gauge wire that someone else made into nails that someone else pounded into the boards to hold them together.

We’re still in the 21st century, there are people on this planet lighting their homes with kerosene lanterns. We still have coal miners, fishermen and loggers. Farming has always been a difficult, miserable thing to do, we’ve just mechanized it to the point that it’s difficult and miserable on a relatively small number of people. Those people probably aren’t going to keep farming at industrial scale for the fun of it.

Star Trek, especially in the TNG era, shows us a very optimistic idea of what life would be like if we had not only nuclear fission power, not only nuclear fusion power, but antimatter power. The technology to travel faster than the speed of light and an energy source capable of fueling it, plus such marvels as the food replicator and matter transporter. The United Federation of Planets is a post-scarcity society. We aren’t. Somewhere on this planet right now is a man hosing blended human shit off of an impeller in a stopped sewage treatment plant so he can replace the leaking shaft seal. We use a man with a hose for this because it’s the best technology we have for the job. We do the job at all because if we don’t, it’ll cause a few million cases of cholera. Who do you think should pay for the hose that guy is using?

Yes, hence I referred to them as “afterthoughts.” James Madison and company drew up the articles (he didn’t create it alone but I think it’s in his handwriting), it wouldn’t pass as-is without ten amendments, it passed, more or less the current federal government was in place, and since 17 (very nearly 18) more have been added for a modern total of 27, two of them extremely stupid.

Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to peacefully assemble. These are pretty important, foundational personal liberties, right? In the United States, these are found in the first amendment of the Constitution. The first afterthought.

The basis of copyright, patent and trademark isn’t found in the first amendment. Or the second, or the third. It is nowhere to be found in the Bill Of Rights. No, intellectual property is not an afterthought, it’s found in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

This is a very wise compromise.

It recognizes that innovation is iterative. No one invents a steam engine by himself from nothing, cave men spent millions of years proving that. Inventors build on the knowledge that has been passed down to them, and then they add their one contribution to it. Sometimes that little contribution makes a big difference, most of the time it doesn’t. So to progress, we need intellectual work to be public. If you allow creative people to claim exclusive rights to their work in perpetuity, society grows static because no one can invent anything new, everyone makes the same old crap.

It also recognizes that life is expensive. If you want people to rise above barely subsisting and invent something, you’ve got to make it worth it to them. Why bother doing the research, spend the time tinkering in the shed, if it’s just going to be taken from you? This is how you end up with Soviet Russia, a nation that generated excellent scientists and absolutely no technology of its own.

The solution is “for limited times.” It’s yours for awhile, then it’s everyone’s. It took Big They a couple hundred years to break it, too.

Managing your own AV equipment has always been a pain in the ass.

See? That’s great branding.

I’ve said this before, or tried to.

Official Democratic party policy is pro-business, pro-stock market, pro Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio. In the parallel universe where Kamala won, inflation and slowly tightening corporate policies are slowly pressing Americans to death, we’re not in a bullshit trade war with Canada, exactly the same number of Palestinians are being killed, absolutely nothing is being done to address healthcare, reproductive rights, gun crime, poverty, disease, the environment, net neutrality or basically anything of that nature.

Official Democratic party messaging is “At least we’re not the Republicans.” Which means less and less as time goes on. They’ve got no progressive policies. No one in this nation I think is rabidly pro-Democrat. There are a few that are rabidly anti-Republican.

How many times have I seen this conversation play out: “The Democrats need to reach out to moderate Republicans.” “NO, they need to move to the left!” No, the Democrats need to reach out to the majority of Americans. Which is going to mean actually appealing to men. Which they currently DO. NOT.

Europe isn’t a region, it’s a brand.

Remember when programming a VCR was a stand-up comedy joke?