Game development and teaching.

Two industries that would be right up my alley. Two industries that prey on and exploit people who have a strong passion for their work. Two industries that I have stayed far away from. :/

Insert joke about it taking balls to use it

Insert another joke about it being the root of the access tree/graph in the image

Not just him but undoubtedly millions of fellow Americans.

When one is dead and broken inside, they look to external quantitative factors for validation. They convince themselves that the more measurable & “objective” those factors are, the more they must be representing some underlying truth. They represent the meaning of life.

And the shitty thing is that those who only care about money and power see the worst of humanity getting rewarded with more money and more power.

Their fucked up personal lives aren’t evidence of something wrong with them. They are evidence that such silly feel-good nonsense is unnecessary at best, and a terrible weakness at worst. You know, the kind of shit you’d expect from a cartoon villain in a children’s movie.

Edit to add an anecdote: I’m sure people from conservative families will feel this one. Say in front of one of the broken people that Musk is an idiot and a bad father, and the reply will be something like “well he’s made a million times as much money as you, so that shows how smart you are!” Or maybe “his kids are set for life - have you done something like that for your kids?”

Fortunately my kid is always going to have his own Linux desktop at home. Even though the hardware is older than he is, the PC still runs better than most Windows machines I’ve used recently.

I commented elsewhere that his school laptop (for 2nd grade, 8 years old) is at least a lightweight Windows PC. And while Windows is much more relevant to the PC & professional world than chromebooks or iPads, it’s still important to not get pigeonholed into that one proprietary thing.

My second grader’s school laptop is a cheap lightweight Lenovo Windows machine. So not ideal, but better than many options. At least it’s something I’d be willing to call a PC.

The password situation is just as funny though. His login and password are on a nice printed label stuck right below the keyboard. The login is typical, lastname-firstinitial-middleinitial, but the password is just his 6-digit student ID number. So not only is it the classic “post-it on the monitor” situation, but it would be pretty trivial to log in as any student.

Though so far in elementary school the laptops have been a teaching tool and occasionally a remote learning tool. Somebody couldn’t log in and mess with his homework or whatever.

Arch-based is only going to become more of a thing thanks to SteamOS.

I use mint btw

I think both of our statements are correct.

I bet the absolute number of laypeople using NAS is way up while the percentage of users is still tiny.

Backups being mainstream is awesome, but for them backup means cloud and almost certainly Apple/Google/Microsoft. Even I personally still use crashplan for actual backups primarily because it’s offsite and has unlimited version retention. I might roll my own one of these days though, whether finding some cheap cloud storage or putting a small server at my parents’ house or something like that.

I haven’t dealt with it on network drives yet, but just recently I was redoing my main machine and had to decide how to mount some big spinning drives for storing media. The graphical disk manager included with Mint, which is just gnome-disks, made it pretty quick.

That was probably my favorite version. It’s when the integrated the NT kernel into the regular consumer desktop windows iirc, which led to XP.

It did the job pretty well. And I’m sure even Windows 11 is good enough for most. But these days using even windows 10 after being used to Linux is painful.

I don’t think I’ve seen OpenSUSE recommended for beginners.

The vast universe of distros is definitely a confusion & intimidation factor for a lot of people. But we are talking about people who do not choose or install their own OS in the first place.

Linux Mint is the big daddy of Ubuntu derivatives, and it comes with snaps disabled and no flatpaks installed.

Everything in the graphical software manner that’s a flatpak has a big clear icon right on it.

I just checked on my own Mint system and the only flatpak installed is kdenlive. There IS a standard apt/ubuntu version available too, but I installed the flatpak (stable) because it’s a newer version and KDE’s website even touts that version.

The average person does not mount network drives themselves.

I would hazard a guess that for the truly average user, booting to a desktop with Firefox and LibreOffice installed is like 90% of what they need.

Neither darktable or RawTherapee doing it for you?

I still have to try them out when I have some raw photos to edit.

OneDrive and all of M365 is much nicer on Linux. It’s all just webpages that I use when I need them (pretty regularly) but that don’t interfere with anything else going on with my system.

Yeah, and I don’t see the risk being there when you look at the numbers. My CPU is sitting at around 30C right now, and if I shut it down, it might gradually drop by as much as 10 degrees over a period of hours.

But if I start an encode, the temperature will rise by 20-30 degrees in seconds, then drop back down 20-30 degrees in seconds when the encode stops. And if I run some ridiculous synthetic stress testing tool for stability testing an overclock, that could make the core temp shoot up and down by 60 degrees.

I usually leave it on all the time though, because it does server stuff too.

As a user, it seems to me that Microsoft figured out a way to get the customers they care about to hire and pay for their own “Microsoft support” people.

If I have a problem at work with one of those M365 websites I use, or with the Windows partition I don’t, and I can’t fix it myself, the person helping me is going to be a fellow employee and not [email protected].

This makes sense, within reason. Limiting the visibility of low level system settings and statistics is good for the normal user’s experience. That is not just to keep them from breaking their system, but it also makes the commonly used settings easier to navigate and use.

I don’t say this in a gatekeeping way either. I am a developer and old computer nerd who has a terminal open pretty much all the time. But I also run Mint and I use the GUI for all kinds of stuff. If I may stretch to make a metaphor, the primary user-friendly UI from the driver’s seat of my car doesn’t have indicators or controls for all kinds of things I care about, but they are things I don’t need to do every day in the middle of a drive. I can do something out of the ordinary to get to them when the need arises.

The nice thing about Linux is that in the GUI these things are merely hidden. They aren’t locked down and denied access entirely like you might get with a commercial OS.

The worthwhile discussion/argument IMO is just where best to draw that line. I personally don’t have strong opinions on the computer side because I am comfortable with CLI and text files. My gut feel is that more GUI is good, but my suspicion is that actual “normie” users want simple. To them the OS is just the screen that holds the icons for their apps, like a smart phone. It is not a gargantuan tree of settings they can peruse like I might.

Funny though, I DO have a strong opinion in the case of my car metaphor. I currently drive an old economy car, and it doesn’t have a coolant temperature gauge. There’s just a warning light for when the coolant is already too hot or is still cold and warming up. The lack of the gauge doesn’t affect the performance of the car and it has not ruined my day in over a decade of ownership, but I’m a bit of a car guy and an engineer to boot, so I want more information like you might see in a truck or sports car.

That’s another nice thing about the open nature of Linux. There isn’t one official setup that everybody gets out of the box, which can be confusing, but it can certainly be made to fit many different people’s needs.

I’m sure it’s different in many distros, but in Mint the ability to open a file browser as root is in the right click menu.

Yeah what I’ve always done is use the previous gaming/workstation PC as a server.

I just finished moving my basic stuff over to newer old hardware that’s only 6-7 years old, to have lots of room to grow and add to it. It’s a 9700k (8c/8t) with 32GB of ram and even a GTX 1080 for the occasional video transcode. It’s obviously overkill right now, but I plan to make it last a very long time.