I’ve started learning Catalan, it’s going slower than I hoped because the class I’m taking is filled with people who already speak the language and spend the entire class discussing about technicalities instead of letting the teacher teach.

The short answer is because I’m lazy. I might lose 30 min during the system setup instead of 20, and now I have a system that I don’t have to worry about until the hardware gives up.

Arch is a rolling release distro, which means it’s unstable, which doesn’t mean what you think, instead it means that you can update your system indefinitely without worrying about “versions”. For example, if you had Ubuntu 20.04 installed on your server, in may you had to update it to 24.04, and that’s something that can cause issues. And in 2029 you’ll need to go through that again. Arch is just constant updates without having that worry. Which means no library is safe from updates, ergo unstable.

Also the AUR is huge, and I’m a lazy ass who likes to just be able to install stuff without having to add PPAs or installing stuff by hand.

Also there’s the whole customize the system, I use a very particular set of programs that just won’t come pre installed anywhere, so any system that comes with their own stuff will leave me in a system with double the amount of programs for most stuff which is just wasteful.

Finally there’s the wiki, while the vast majority of what’s there serves you in other systems, if you’re running Arch it’s wonderful, it even lists the packages you need to install to solve specific errors.

Yes, it would be very difficult for the owners @outlook to create 10k accounts.

And then Microsoft or Sony would bulk buy 10k steam machines to use in their server rooms. They can’t sell at a loss because the hardware is not locked, otherwise people could just buy these and use them for whatever and Valve wouldn’t see a cent from those machines. At the very least they need to be sold at a neutral price point, but more than likely they’re looking to get some profit over them.

I do enjoy MMA, not actively watching or anything, but it’s one of the only sports that if it’s passing on the TV somewhere I actively pay attention and have watched some matches (I find especially interesting the first UFC championships when it still was Karate vs Sumo type of thing). I’ve also trained martial arts for a good chunk of my life, so I watch those matches for the technical side of the fight. All of that being said, I have to agree with him, a good chunk of people I know who actively watch MMA are douches, there are a few exceptions, one of my best friends watches every fight, and he’s only a douche to people who deserve it, but most of the people who watch the fights with him are very douchy.

However, I will issue caution to others who may believe themselves to be higher on the tech savvy ladder: forget most of what you do with Windows and accept that Linux, no matter the distro or DE, is not going to be 100% like your previous Windows experiences. Tech peeps typically have a high level of OS/system customization. These don’t usually translate well to a non-Windows OS. On other “managed” operating systems, you might try things, but not be able to really do damage. If you try to force it with Linux, you will fuck yourself.

This, right here, if you’re a tech savvy windows user considering migrating, read the above until you’ve internalized it. Don’t trust me? Go watch Linus from LTT use Linux and break everything in a matter of hours because he literally answered “Yes, I know what I’m doing” when he had no idea.

It’s my experience that tech savvy windows users know enough to be a danger to themselves, and worse, have the confidence to shoot themselves in the foot.

needing a closed source instead of open source nvidia driver.

Yes, you need Nvidia closed source drivers, especially if you want to play games. Although you had no way of knowing this if you hadn’t interacted with the community before, this is well known and part of the reason most of us who’ve been here a while use and recommend AMD.

Shes all switched to linux, and if her trial goes well and i don’t end up tearing my hair out doing tech support. I may switch over as well, probably a different distro though.

That’s an interesting approach, I usually experiment on stuff myself before making others switch, makes me more comfortable on the stuff and more confident that I’ll be able to solve their issues.

the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul.

Care to expand on that, I’m not too used to modding games, but from the times I tried it, it’s my understanding that 99% of the times it’s just putting stuff into the right folder. If not how is it different from Windows?

Even trying to get her game open, we first had a xbox game controller bluetooth not connecting issue

The game wouldn’t open if the controller was connected via Bluetooth? That’s weird, or did you mean that you had issues with making the game run and after that the Xbox controller wouldn’t connect?. For the Xbox controller thing I will assume you’re 100% sure it has a Bluetooth chip (not all of them do), I’m not sure how it’s in Bazzite but in other distros you need to install xpadneo to get them working via Bluetooth, they also need to be in a updated firmware (but I never had to do this step), you can read about it here even though you’re not using Arch, their wiki is extremely helpful.

see this in her game. What i can only imagine is some sort of video player error, but the game works. Its rough, but it works.

You’re almost correct, for legal reasons Steam can’t include transcoding for certain proprietary video formats that games love to use. There’s an alternative version to proton called Proton-GE (or GloriousEggroll because that’s the name of the maintainer), it includes those codecs plus some other extra fixes, as a general rule it’s always better to use it. To use it you either download it from the release page and extract it in ~/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d and restart steam, or using ProtonUp if it’s available for you which will make things easier on the long run.

Good luck and welcome!

This one is one of the most stupid arguments IMO, the answer is so obvious that it’s impossible to defend the other side of the argument in writing without misspelling the word.

This is one of the reasons to always prefer docker over bare metal, if it was docker all you had to do is copy the volume over the new installation and starting the service there.

I don’t think this is an ethics question, you’re asking whether resentment builds or fades over time and the answer will be very specific to each person and case. That being said there’s one thing I would like to point out:

a person does X, I express disapproval. Is it ethical to express MORE disapproval as additional unforeseen consequences of X become apparent?

Those weren’t unforseen, that’s the worst part for me, they were clearly foreseen, foretold and warned about, and I could potentially be persuaded to believe people were unaware of that the first time around, but by the second time you are obviously okay with all of it.

Like many have said, the main disadvantages are:

• Any software installed outside of your package manager is difficult to uninstall or maintain.
• Compilation time can be an annoyance.

The main advantages are:

• Removal of unused features.
• CPU specific optimizations.

If you’re interested in compiling your own software maybe consider using a distro whose package manager allows to compile stuff, Gentoo is the obvious choice, but Debian based distros can also do that.

The Stanley Parable is very funny. I don’t want to spoil it, especially because reading or watching videos is not the same as interacting with the game, but the narrator reacts to what you do, even if you try to do something absurd there’s a good chance that it has a special reaction for that.

South Park games also are very funny, the first one (Stick of Truth) especially. But it is a very dark humor, e.g. the difficulty slider also changes your skin color.

To be fair, the å in Stargate is a coincidence, as it’s the symbol to represent earth which is represented by a pictograph of a pyramid with the sun behind it, i.e. this.

But I can imagine how annoying that is, I can read Cyrillic and every time people use a Я to be an R it bogs my mind for a second.

I have, in fact I have migrated my home config to nix. The syntax is still a bit weird and still unfamiliar in some cases, especially around the inputs, overlays, etc. Next time I install a system it will definitely be NixOS, currently it’s only running on a backup laptop that I use for testing.

I used it for a couple of years, it’s great if you love customizability and want to run a very clean system. However, the last straw for me was when I needed to edit an image, realized I didn’t had Gimp, so I installed it (which took a long time since I needed to compile it), opened it and it wouldn’t open the image because it was a PNG (I think, or jpg, the specific format doesn’t matter) and that format requires a compilation flag to be enabled, I added that flag globally because why the hell would I not want to have support for it, and recompiled my entire system. By the time I had GIMP able to edit the image I didn’t even remember what I was going to do. I went back to arch not long after that, but always missed defining the packages I want in files to keep the system organized and lean.

I worked for almost 2 years at a company with my Linux PC, until one day I requested a laptop for travel and they were shocked that I didn’t had one, I asked for one with Linux but was told that that’s not possible, that they only had windows laptops. I thought, okays this is temporary, as soon as I’m back from traveling I’ll return the laptop and things will be back to normal… when I came back and wanted to return the laptop they said that that was my work computer that I should use for everything, I was like, “you do realize our work runs on a Linux server, right?”. But nope, I had to use the Windows laptop until I quit a few months later. I knew of at least a couple other devs who were running Linux, but didn’t say anything because then they would be forced to switch too, but at my exit interview I remarked that forcing me to use Windows was part of the reason I had left.

I guess my point is maybe don’t make a big fuss and don’t try to convince HR people about it, they just don’t understand.

This is usually the case, people make it a monster in their heads but it’s not bad as long as you’re willing to accept it’s a different OS to be used differently.

Let me guess, you might have tried Linux on n the past but only really started using Linux full time around 2021/2022, because every time I see someone saying “Linux only became user friendly around year X” is always around a 1 year mark after they started using it daily, because it’s a lot more a matter of being used to than actual usability. I have been using KDE since 2004, and while things have changed it wasn’t all that much, I don’t remember any big usability refactor or anything of the sort happening, I’m fairly confident that if I were to put you to use a KDE 3.5 UI you would feel right at home.

This AI trend trying to replace coders with LLMS is very stupid. A coder is already writing in human friendly terms what they want from the machine, if you communicate it with less clarity there are edge cases you’re not covering, so either the LLM is allowed to add edge cases scenarios on its own (so it can decide to filter all entries that contain the letter A just because) or it isn’t and won’t cover any of them (so it can for example crash and burn when retrieving something empty from the db and happily allow it to be put there). What I think most AI pushers don’t understand is that we’re already writing as close to English as possible while still being very structured about what we’re saying.

I’m more scared of this one, “it should work but doesn’t” means there’s something I’m missing, usually small, maybe I forgot to change one function call or an import. “it shouldn’t work but does” means there’s a huge misconception in how the thing actually works.