Perhaps social media has had an impact, but IMO the larger issue at hand is that people (especially in the US) have both less time and fewer places to have casual conversations. People are working more across the board and have more distractions and things vying for their attention (mostly because of the internet and social media, ofc), so even when a situation appears, there is a higher cost to interact, whether that’s in real life or on the internet.

Fwiw, direct messages can be a swamp of nonsense, especially for people who post a lot publicly on social media platforms. They may not be intentionally ignoring you, but you get lost in the mess. Women especially get harassed via DM on basically every platform so there is a tendency to ignore DM functionality. Platforms that are already set up to facilitate random chats like forums, discord, etc are going to be way better for having a real conversation that could even become a friendship

Tiktok has been useful for several groups that are normally extremely supressed with other algorithmic social media. Tiktok isn’t geared towards the “what will make you angry therefore keep scrolling” or “what will make you buy more things” motivations that facebook et. al. are geared towards, so it will actually show you things you care about. It also has a tendency to show you opposing viewpoints from time to time, which makes it surprisingly useful for deprogramming people from misinformation.

For people with specific medical disorders or conditions, tiktok was excellent for finding others and sharing information. For people of different minorities that are normally supressed on social media, it was excellent for building community.

So sure, if all you watch on it was dancing teenagers, that’s what you are gonna get: Vine 2.0. If you curate your feed a little then it’d help you branch out from your interests without the primary goal of keeping your eyes peeled to it or grabbing more ad revenue.

if you are part of a group that tiktok was basically the only social media network that had ever been helpful for, it’s a big deal that it’s going away. Its not about the format of the videos, but the algorithm and its focus on your interests rather than making money.

I’ve used linux on my laptops and non-gaming devices for a long time, but it took me a long time to switch my gaming desktop over. I’ve felt i could use linux full time most of the last 8 years (and especially for games since 2020 as i rarely play anything with anti-cheat anyway), but i only went linux on all devices as of 2 years ago when i built a new gaming PC so it required starting from scratch anyway, and aside from a few components i intended to retain for the new one, i could easily drop back to play a game if i ran into problems.

They won’t do it, whether they just fear change or think it’ll break stuff or they can’t bother

Not everyone has the time nor feels the need to just rip and replace on a dime. Not everyone has the luxury of multiple devices to gain confidence. Some people only have a handful of hours a week to play games, so switching OS isnt going to be an immediate priority sven if its their desire.

And I’m not going to lie, I don’t hate them or debate with them for it, I just hate the bold lies they tell just to get with the crowd

The world already has enough things to tear us all down, why flip a table and possibly be unable to game for a time just because doing it right away, according to you, is the only way to be honest or whatever. A vocal desire to dump windows doesnt equate to lying. Let people be excited about linux even if they dont make the switch themselves. Maybe their excitement inspires someone else to take the plunge who wouldn’t have done so otherwise.

Also, if you felt the need to write this rant, seems like you do kinda hate them.

At least don’t lie that you’ll move to Linux at a goal post that you’ll just move whenever you get close, maybe say that you’ll move to Linux when you finally get a new pc with a new disk or something?

even tho i knew i was “done” with the windows since like 2018, I just simply waited until it was convenient to switch. Should i have qualified every conversation where i discussed linux gaming with this? Idk, maybe just let people be excited about something, even if it takes them a long time to get to it.

Maybe they will, due in fucking 2028 or something when they invent a really easy way to use built in Linux tools to move your files from NTFS to Linux and then when you launch steam you have a perfect library of Linux compatible games that are as good or better than windows

Uh… This has existed a long time. Mounting ntfs on linux is rather easy. Even a windows boot disk. Just point steam at the library folder. In fact, my steam library is installed on ntfs in case i ended up dual booting or using gpu passthrough to a windows vm for a few items. If you’re gonna sit here and virtue signal about who is a real linux gamer or not maybe you’d at least know something as basic as mounting ntfs in linux…

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/filelink-provider-for-send/ this add on can be pointed at any send instance, so long as the instance isn’t too diverged from the popular fork or Mozilla’s original project.

The Thunderbird team has talked in the past about bringing Mozilla Send back as more of a feature for Thunderbird files embedded in emails, hence some of the work that’s happening off and on by Mozilla themselves in the original project, some of which has been merged into the project this post is about.

I moved one of my computers to endeavor, but one is still on manjaro and the contrast is kinda hilarious. Manjaro machine always gets funky after updates, it struggles to deal with sleep and hibernation, and it feels slow even when its like 4x as powerful as my EndeavourOS machine.

Its been in testing for a bit. It got bumped from the last major desktop Thunderbird release and since Thunderbird releases used to be synced to firefox ESR releases its been a slow turnaround to get their schedule moving faster.

Its an f-droid metadata issue that the team is already aware of https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/8478

I mean, the issues were present and widely reported for several months before Intel even acknowledged the problems. And it wasn’t just media reporting this, it was also game server hosts who were seeing massive deployments failing at unprecedented rates. Even those customers, who get way better support than the average home user, were largely dismissed by intel for a long time. It then took several more months to ship a fix. The widespread nature of the issues points to a major failure on the companies part to properly QA and ensure their partners were given accurate guidance for motherboard specs. Even so, the patches only prevent further harm to the processor, it doesnt fix any damage that has already been incurred that could amount to years off of its lifespan. Sure they are doing an extended warranty, but thats still a band-aid.

I agree it doesnt mean one should completely dismiss the possibility of buying an Intel chip, but it certinally doesn’t inspire confidence.

Even if this was all an oversight or process failure, it still looks a lot like Intel as a whole deciding to ship chips that had a nice looking set of numbers despite those numbers being achieved through a degraded lifespan.

I’m in a swing state with an abortion measure on the ballot, and while all the polls claim it’s close, I’m not really sure they are properly accounting for the number of voters that have been activated by the possibility of enshrining pro-choice into the state constitution.

These polling strategies are complex and a lot of thought goes into them, but they rarely can account for uncommon circumstances that increase voter turnout in local or state elections and how that will effect the national election.

While this is entirely personal reexperience bias, I also wonder how effective these polls are at reaching a representative survey group. I know at least on my phone basically all survey calls and texts go to spam and I wonder if older, more conservative voters are getting overrepresented due to their likelihood of not having those kinds of spam filters in place.

So the site should just… Not work in firefox then?

A lot of the sites in the about:compat block or don’t work in Firefox because the sites don’t follow web standards

All web browsers have semi hidden pages like this for all sorts of purposes. Its not really intended to be secret, its just not stuff worth even adding to a file menu. Some of the about: pages in firefox are in some submenus, some on settings, but def not all. Tho you’ll fimd them mentioned and linked in support guides.

If anything, the ability to access these is better than them being blocked…

I’ve also had struggles with arch with printing, more so than debian-based distros. EndeavourOS is where i did the most troubleshooting, but its also a problem on my manjaro install (whicj ill move to endeavour… Someday) But learning how to use cups directly was worth it.

Currently, printing via GUI is like 5ppm and very low dpi so… Not great. But at least I can print for the casual use cases out of the box and could work out a terminal solution if I needed to in the meantime.

I don’t print much so haven’t put time into getting things working better for bigger jobs, but printing is definitely going to be a more hit/miss experience with arch. Its looking like better GUI experience for my specific model will require a driver from the AUR or scripting the Debian install from brothers drivers site. But my model is apparently not as widely used and just hasn’t gotten as much community support I guess

Brother, in particular, has always been fairly well supported via Linux fortunately. Especially great since their laser printers have been the best cost/value for home use for a long time.

Best be careful when changing sheets anyway. It’d be a shame if your mattress wasn’t properly killed before being shipped from Sqornshellous Zeta and it went on a flollop rampage after being exposed to too much sunlight.

Lots of mythology is compiled from many incomplete sources, and not all common accepted stories will completely mesh up with others. It’s also not uncommon for the myth of one village to be completely different from another regarding a particular entity, even if the towns are within a hour walk. What we have now is often just what survived.

Until recently, Wayland development was rather slow, especially in the areas where more specialized software run into issues that force them to stick with X11. Since Wayland does a lot less than X11 and is more componetized across multiple libraries designed to be swappable, some of these areas simply do not have solutions. Yet.

And, as always with FOSS, funding is a big part of the problem. The recent funding boosts the GNOME foundation received have also led to some increased funding for work on Wayland and friends. In particular, accessibility has been almost nonexistent on Wayland, so that also means that if an app wants to ensure certain levels of accessibility, they can’t switch to Wayland. GNOME’s Newton effort is still very alpha, but promising.

While big apps like blender and krita get good funding, they can’t necessarily solve the problem themselves by throwing money at it, either. But the more funding Wayland gets to fill in the feature-gaps and ease adoption, the sooner we’ll be able to move away from xwayland as a fallback.

Wayland and its whole implementation process certinally aren’t without fault. There’s a lot of really justified anger and frustration all around. Even so, staying on X11 isnt a solution.

While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.

Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.

If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.

As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)

I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.

(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)

Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.

Generally speaking I’m not opposed to sqlite. The case of a notes app is the one exception.

If i need to make a big find and replace change, i dont need to rely on the app to have the capability or whip out a sql editor or cli tool. I just open my favorite text editor and do it. Or chain some cli tools built into the os.

Its not even about data portability or export. Its about working with the data.

Exactly. Not a huge fan of notes apps storing the data in a db.otherwise there is a lot to like about joplin. With obsidian i open my notes in codium all the time to make mass edits or fill gaps that obsidians UI cant meet, which is not possible with joplin.

Fortunately with obsidian as long as you keep the plugins on the lighter side and keep any non-markdown content in seperate files via linking, im not too worried about having to jump ship if it ever goes bad. Worst case if a plugin dies or i have to migrate, the actual loss of data is that some plugin used json or whatever and it’d have to be converted or replaced.

I do have hope at least that if the company folds they’ll open source it, or turn a blind eye to a community reengineering effort. And what is unique about obsidian markdown and metadata will probably get community-built migration tools quickly if enough people jump ship en masse.

But for the time being Obsidian is the best option for me and i dont feel that bad about it.

Don’t feed the troll.

Especially not one that uses mental illness as an insult.