What you’re describing is just compressing in a ZIP file. Zip files are lossless, you have nothing to worry about. When you throw a JPG in a zip file, and then extract it later, you’ll get the exact identical JPG back.
You only have to worry about jpg’s lossy compression if you’re using a photo editor like Photoshop, GIMP, etc. “Compressing” it in a zip changes nothing. Moving or copying it doesn’t lose quality either.
Debian. So many other distros are based on it anyway. I use it on damn near everything now.
Dance Dance Revolution. More specifically, an open source clone of it called StepMania. Very fun way to lose weight. You’ll want to invest in some high quality metal dance pads if you really enjoy it though.
Pretty horrible. Wife wants a divorce and is unwilling to try and fix things. Barely communicates with me at all.
I met my stepson when he was 9 months old. He’s 11 now. I’m the only father he knows. I’m devastated, because not only am I losing my wife, but I’m also losing my son, as I have no legal right to him. I’m estranged from the rest of my family, so the world is looking pretty cold and lonely from here.
To be fair, Five Guys is every bit as expensive. But I’ll take Five Guys over most of those places anyway. Free peanuts is tempting.
I’ll go against the grain a little bit and say it’s a little weird. There’s nothing wrong with liking multiple distros, but a lot of people either stick with RPM-based (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, OpenSUSE, Mageia) or Debian-based (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, Elementary). Then you have weirdos that like Gentoo, where nearly every package you install has to be compiled on the system. Or Arch, where the “installer” throws you in a terminal, and damn near everything has to be done manually to get your system up and running. And updates are “rolling release”, and if you try to update just one package without updating the rest of your system things can easily break.
I am mostly a fan of Debian-based distros myself. But I’ll use CentOS on a VM if I’m trying to self-host anything that recommends it.
My personal favorite is Debian. I’m the IT director at my job, and 90% of our machines, including end user workstations, are running some form of Linux.
One really nice thing is that most stuff is saved somewhere in your home directory. You can switch between all sorts of distros, and if you install the same software, browser, email client, etc. most of your stuff will automatically be there and work out of the box.
Ubuntu is pretty upfront about any telemetry and allows you to disable it easily. A lot of Android’s telemetry can’t be opted out of, unless you happen to have an unlocked bootloader and can install a privacy-focused custom ROM.
These are not the same, although I get the point you’re trying to make. Ubuntu has a user-friendly interface, with a goal of making Linux accessible to all. But for anybody who wants to, it’s fairly easy to dig into the internals and become a “power user.” It certainly makes no attempt to stop you from doing so. Android, on the other hand, on MOST instances, locks down everything, with little to no overrides, even from the user, many times “in the name of security.”
Old computer equipment. It wasn’t being used for anything, and would have ended up being thrown out if I didn’t take it. Stuff was too old to be useful in a business environment now, but I built a small retro gaming rig running Windows 98 out of it.
It should also respect your PRIVACY! There are numerous articles about CPAP machines transmitting your data to not only your doctor but also your insurance company, WITHOUT your consent. Possibly your employer as well. If your insurance company decides you’re “not complying” and using your CPAP machine enough, they’ll take it away from you. Your employer could fire you.
Having a sleep apnea diagnosis can also limit you from certain jobs, and can make it harder to get life insurance. In some ways it feels like you’re not a free man anymore.
I bought my son a used Surface Pro 4 for schoolwork. Luckily we haven’t run into many problems, but there is a known problem where the processor still runs the battery dead when it’s shut off. You’re actually better off using standby.
If he runs the battery dead, we can plug it in and it will boot, but shortly die afterwards. But if we wait ~15 minutes to charge it a little, it stays on as long as we want it to.
I actually have a APC UPS at work that uses a USB-A to USB-A cable. You can look up the cable online, it’s part number 940-0504. I was surprised APC used such a cable. I think if you tried to do something dumb like connect two PCs together with it, one of the USB ports would fry.
You can pirate without a VPN, just don’t use torrents. All major file hosts (like MEGA, Google Drive, etc.) use HTTPS. Your ISP can see that you’re downloading from them, but they can’t tell what you’re downloading nor whether it’s pirated content. People get busted for torrents all the time, downloading from other places (NOT P2P!)? Practically unheard of.
This broke the “MAS” scripts, at least as far as HWID activation. From their website:
Note: Microsoft servers are currently rejecting HWID activation requests when activating through MAS, we’re checking what’s going on now. Use the KMS38 activation option for now.
We’re running Linux on the vast majority of PCs at my job. We used to run Lubuntu, but switched to Debian. You can use pam_mount so user folders are mounted from a server at login, to create a “roaming profiles” environment. But there really isn’t a great solution for laptop users that might be away from the office.
If you do use pam_mount, don’t mount their entire home folder. That will end up throwing a bunch of stuff on the server, like chrome temporary internet files, and their .config folder, that just aren’t needed on the server and will slow everything down. Just mount their individual Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos, Desktop, etc. folders.
We’re a small business, we don’t have any Enterprise Support or anything like that.
Because there are free and open source alternatives available, rather than having WinRAR beg you to pay for it every time you open it. You should really try 7-Zip. Haven’t looked back at WinRAR or any other utility since.
There’s no one “proper” way. Running multiple DEs shouldn’t break anything, but each DE comes with it’s own set of dependencies and other software, so it does add clutter. There will also be considerable overlap with config files, so if you change a setting in one DE, it could change settings when using another DE.
Having a separate user account per DE will prevent most of the configuration overlap, but it doesn’t solve the abundance of packages you’ll have installed from having multiple DEs. I don’t think there’s a great “clean” way to do it.
One thing I love about Linux though, is how relatively flexible the user home directory is. When moving to a new distro or PC, usually everything you need to copy over is within your home directory. For what you’re trying to do, I’d consider throwing /home on a separate partition. That way, you can try out multiple DEs and distros, without blowing away your home folder. And you’d be surprised at how small your root partition can be, the vast majority of your storage should likely be reserved for /home. The Steam Deck, for example, uses a root partition that is only 5 gb. On a typical Linux system, I’ve found 64 gb to be plenty for root.
When switching distros and/or DEs, consider cleaning out various config files in your home folder. Almost all of them will be hidden files that have a filename that begins with a period. I only keep specific config files for programs I want to retain data for, like Google Chrome (.config/google-chrome), Thunderbird (.thunderbird), and Steam (.local/share/Steam). If you use SSH keys you’ll want to keep your .ssh folder too. But deleting all other config files will give you a pretty clean start when changing DEs.
Try installing Linux on it. Check out AnLinux. I’m running Debian with KDE on mine.
One of my favorites from Oh Bo by Bo Burnham:
Pull it out, stick it in your mouth, and I bust in the back of ya
Swallow bitch, there’s people starving in Africa