speech to relay detailed information it does so in a short and efficient message

So the antithesis of modern capitalist mindset of cheap devices that are designed solely to advertise?

Yeah, IDK if that’s ever going to happen unless we achieve Star Trek levels of societal restructuring.

I kill you now

Whoa, that escalated quickly.

I noticed this as well. It’s a shame as I still use it as my daily search driver.

Regarding VPNs, I wish this was an easier way of doing it. Unfortunately it requires all friends to be tech savvy enough to understand why a vpn is necessary.

Yeah, thanks for sharing this. I’m going to have to give this a try sometime.

I had previously been building it manually, but I think I’m starting to realize that gitlab/github CI is basically essential to running a proper repository anyway.

I hate writing a serialized format

I mean, that’s why it’s serialized. It’s not supposed to be written by hand, that’s why you have a deserializer. 🤦

I mean, yes. But also no, it sort of depends.

If you have very low bar of needs (needing a web browser and some utility apps, without specific apps in mind) then it’s actually never been easier. If you use a Silverblue based system, all updates are done in a transactional way and old versions can be booted into at any time in case something breaks (which basically never happens with silverblue, with some exceptions.) Read only systems means you can’t muck around with the root files and can’t accidentally “break” your system in the way you used to be able to on older OS designs. I would say that “Linux with Guardrails” is effectively invincible, and I would like to recommend that new users try OSTree based systems. For example, Fedora Silverblue, Ublue’s Aurora / Bluefin, Bazzite (Steam OS clone), etc etc.

If you have more specific needs, it can be a crapshoot depending on whether or not the hobby in question has a strong linux presence. Particularly, bespoke non-game windows apps are still a bit tricky to get working and require some Wine (Windows process wrapper for compatibility) knowledge. There are edge cases where running certain applications in flatpak (Steam, Bitwig) can mean that, while it’s impossible for these applications to break your system, you’ll be very limited in options for these programs. For Steam, this can mean more difficulty with out-of-steam application management. For Bitwig, this can mean no choice in VST. These are all programs that have work arounds, but on a read-only system like Silverblue (which I would like to recommend for new users due to the indestructibility) those are all a little more difficult to implement and require you to know a thing or two about virtual desktops. (Thus, not new user friendly.)

I would still say that it’s never been easier, but as you get more famililar with any system, you generally demand more and more from it. Thankfully, with linux, its always been a case of “if there’s a will there’s a way” and the UX utility applications being made by other people have been getting better and better.

My recommendation to you would be to try UBlue Aurora. It’s familiar to Windows, it’s being managed in a way that makes gaming relatively simple, and it has an active discord community to help new users. It also has that indestructability that I was talking about before, but has a lot of the “work arounds” pre-setup for new users.

6 years ago I got about 70 dollars on my limited pokemon card collection from when I was a kid (like 2000-2001 era) with only a few good ones. I’m pretty damn sure I spent more on the starter box + other packs combined than that lol. On the other hand, I actually used part of that money for a new graphics card, so it was in general a pretty good time.

I know this is The Onion, but I just wanted to share. I can’t imagine anyone making any actual money off these things unless they have been playing speculative investment from card #1 and never bought a pack in their life. Yet people do seem to talk about the card game as if it’s some lucrative thing. 🤷

P.S. as an aside, did anyone else have any difficulty getting the right group of friends who actually cared about playing the cards instead of collecting them? I had maybe one friend who liked playing the card game as it was, but we had to make a special rule about evolutions because we didn’t have enough cards to make it make sense (Something about playing certain energy cards to sacrifice an introduction of a evolution directly, I can’t remember exactly how we did it or if it was any good at all.)

I would use BTRFS and Snapper over using Timeshift due to the lack of granularity it has. You should be able to back up any volume you want, not just the home directories like Timeshift does.

Some applications, such as those with tablet demands, are not met by current wayland des with proper tablet support and xwayland is currently the better option. This may have changed in the last year or so, but this is roughly my recollection of certain big art programs.

I’m currently using debian with Docker.

If I were to do it again, though, I’d probably just use either fedora or the server equivalent to silverblue (I can’t remember the name). I am so heavy on docker use at this point that I wouldn’t mind going full immutable.

I use BTRFS for the snapshot and subvolume tools.

It is pretty good but usability is a mixed bag. Always getting better by the month though, it feels like.