If you allow artists to display their work in various communities along with the ability to post links in their profiles, but you restrict actual posts to disallow self-promotion, it’s the best of both worlds, IMO.

In other words, if you can’t include self-promotion in your community posts, but everyone knows you have the links in your profile, it attracts less grifters and keeps the feed clean, while allowing anyone interested to contact a poster directly or ask them promotional questions via DMs.

That said, hosting a full-fledged marketplace is not a good idea, IMO. There are laws and banks involved, which mean lawyers and taxes, and volunteer management does not work for that. There are already marketplaces that do that well, and allowing artists to post their own links of choice in their profiles will let them steer actual business to other platforms, while keeping the fediverse for display, review, share and critique. My opinion, anyway.

This is the way. I have a decade+ old HP OfficeJet that I more or less inherited, and it has pigment black ink but dye color inks. When the colors are fine but the black is not, it’s because the black (pigment) cartridge is blocked again. It does this with both HP and third party blacks, though, so it’s definitely pigment vs. dye thing. Easy enough to clean with isopropyl, as you said.

But just to be clear, when we bought new earlier this year, it sure as hell wasn’t HP. I’ll ride that old OfficeJet and my 20+ year old LaserJet until they die, there’s no chipping of cartridges and I’m quite good at printer repair as long as parts are available and it’s not too complex, but otherwise I’m done with HP.

Music is art to me, no question at all. I care a great deal about it, and don’t listen, and by that I mean really sit and listen, often enough. But yesterday I came across a video by Mary Spender about some emails she got in regard to some Spotify statements she made, and it reminded me of what a real pleasure music is when I actually attend to it, so last night I sat and listened to two full albums start to finish, and it was a joy. I used to do that frequently, that’s how my generation did it back in the day, and now I’m reminded so I will likely do that more often. I don’t talk with passion about my favorites because nobody knows who the fuck I’m talking about anymore, but I definitely think of them that way.

My headset is decent, and I have good speakers, but I don’t do earbuds. I never need the very very best of devices because back in the day, these analog releases had to sound good on the shittiest of car speakers and even transistor radios, so while I absolutely get more nuance from better devices, it’s not the be-all end-all.

The only streaming service I have is my own CD library ripped into MP3s, because of course the vast majority of artists I listen to recorded back in the days of analog and full albums, plus I have bought MP3s of various one-hit wonders, so there is literally zero upside to me in a subscription service. As others far more astute than myself have noted, the algorithms don’t even really direct you toward new-to-you music, nor to music that will actually “interest” you, nearly as much as it is designed to suggest music that you will not click away from. I used to try suggested music but have never actually liked anything musically I got from a “Suggested for You” source, so I don’t bother anymore, and to me I miss nothing.

I have often searched YT for more of the same by a specific artist I am already into, or for something I heard while watching a movie, but other than that, no, I do not search for new music. I’ve already got so much to enjoy, I don’t ever want it to fade into background noise.

That’s a hell of a thing to dive into and grab hold of: it cannot be successfully white-knuckled forever and you actually have to get to the root cause of it. Not impossible, not at all, but definitely uncomfortable. Worth it, though. You have my sincere respect.

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Just like your own experience vs the experiences of others, there is an entire universe of difference between affirming tangible facts and claiming to have a solution. I stand by every word I actually wrote, and you should read them: I never claimed to have a solution to shitty people who choose to be parents despite their shittiness in parenting.

You arrogantly and dishonestly tell me “Your argument is stupid and draconian” without ever seeing it’s not an argument I ever made. It’s some unknown vile mess that you wrongly inferred because of your own internal baggage.

So when you can acknowledge the vast difference between stating established fact and claiming to solve the world’s problems, then we’ll talk. But in the meantime, you must not be nearly as happy and fulfilled as you claim to be with your own life, or you would not have needed to twist my words and those of others into strawmen that you then slaughter with openly displayed rage.

I do have one solution to offer you: instead of attacking strangers who rightfully acknowledge the horrors of bad parenting that actually exist in the world, honestly looking in a mirror at why you are reacting to this subject the way that you do throughout this thread may indeed give you the answers you are clearly desperate to find. Peace out.

I shoulda looked it up, lol. Thanks for the correction.

Both HP and Dell are partnered with Microsoft, and have been for decades. Isn’t a discrete GPU one of the things required for Microsoft Recall ready machines?

There’s NO way they broke HEVC just for 4¢. Something else is paying them a lot more, and Recall would be one of those things.

According to me, for one. You seem to not understand your own privilege, or you’d be aware of the countless unwanted, unloved children born to parents who do not give a fuck that the world then exploits relentlessly until they manage to remove themselves from the abuse cycle or are dead. The foster system is full of them, and so are the prisons. Ever heard of the school to prison pipeline? It’s a thing, and while many of those parents are simply disadvantaged but otherwise loving, many others are worse. Far worse, apparently, than you can acknowledge.

So according to me, a person with skin in this particular game, if a parent is unable or unwilling to see potential offspring as vulnerable little humans in need of protection, nurture, and provision until such time as they can manage on their own, they should not be parenting. And honestly, if a parent or would-be parent sees children as means to an end, things to use or worse, to sell, then “judging” them is quite frankly the least bad thing that should happen to them.

I’m glad you enjoy your life. But your kind of life is not the only life being lived. You are privileged beyond your own awareness.

Gay folks can be edgy shitheads too, though. I would not let any of my queer friends get away with using the word “gay” as a pejorative. I’m not asking that you push back against them, just understand why I choose to do even if you don’t.

Not every gay person is a self-loather, kid.

Note: I had deleted my two comments because I genuinely did not want to offend, but when I realized that these “gay” observations, made by men my age who are simply glad to still be standing after the debacle that was the latter part of the last century, were being taken for internalized homophobia I put my comments right back. If anything they are celebratory and may they ever be so. Given what these guys have survived they have every right to be happy, and as far as I am concerned so does every gay person. Nothing wrong with being gay at all, and never has been.

So you need to sit down with that self-hating shit, because it does NOT apply to Every Gay Person Ever.

That’s fine, but having heard so many times from openly gay people statements like the following, and I quote,

“Gay.”

“That is SO gay.”

“Gay.”

“Gay!”

“Oh. Yeah. Gay.”

. . . you have to accept that at a certain level of commentary, the call is coming from inside the house.

TL;DR: I don’t know what looks gay because I am some self-proclaimed cis-het expert on gayness; I know what might look gay because I was personally tutored by obviously authentic experts in the field. Just sayin.

This kind of anti-gay apologia was legitimately discredited decades ago by all accepted standards, and your research is shit.

Anita Bryant, shut up.

I’m sick and tired about hearing about Zorinn when there’s a dozen excellent Linux distros that aren’t derivative trash that astroturf social media and pass off other Foss projects as their own.

Your quote, but when asked to name a better “easiest distro for Windows users” Fedora KDE was the best you could do.

Somebody asked you a genuine question, looking for real information, and out of this “dozen excellent Linux distros” you came at her with, you lazily just shat out the name of a single one, and that being one of the more advanced distros out there.

Hell yeah, try harder. People who ask genuine questions deserve genuine answers. Unless that’s just your best and you need pity.

Nothing against Fedora KDE, it’s the best of the best, but it is hardly the easiest for a noob to Linux: just the install process alone requires a working understanding of the Linux filesystem and partitioning if you’re not using the entire disk space, you have to understand root vs sudo, god help you if you want to encrypt a disk, and there’s a lot more CLI at every step than other distros. Try harder.

I’d be surprised if he does. If he’s “sick and tired” of hearing about Zorin, it’s because Zorin is getting a lot of deservedly good reviews from the Windows crowd right now. If it really were ass he’d have nothing to say about it. The only social media I’m on is Lemmy, and I tried Zorin because it was highly ranked on Distrowatch, so if people are getting “astroturfed” elsewhere it’s news to me.

But you should know I tried over twenty (conservative estimate) distros before I settled on Zorin. USB drives are cheap, and you can try as many distros as you like without ever having to install one. Don’t take my word for it, nor his: buy a handful of USB drives, create some LiveUSBs and start trying out whatever distros catch your attention. I found distrowatch.com to be a good front page to the distro world, with rankings and extremely detailed reviews: start there if you’re looking for a fairly exhaustive list of what’s out there.

Oh, they’re customer focused, alright: focused on scraping customer data via the installed OS to feed to their AI and then aggregate for sale to other data brokers and/or interested governments.

The Dell logo is the BIOS loading, the black screen is your bootloader and the beginning of your OS loading, and of course the Z is Zorin loading. While it could be hardware, to be honest where it’s hanging for you makes me wonder about how well your Zorin video driver suits your actual hardware, based on some similar issues I had with Fedora doing the exact same thing that you describe.

I am still learning Linux myself so I am not the best person to tell you what to do, but I know where I’d start if I were in your shoes: use the lshw command (see below) to get the details on your actual hardware, specifically the graphics chip; see if anyone else is having similar problems with the same graphics hardware; and in the meantime put Mint on a LiveUSB and run Mint for a while to see if it performs better or ends up doing the same thing.

That’s just beginner tips off the top of my head; I know you will get better advice if you run your problem by the Linux communities, esp because they can tell you how to capture the load process to see exactly what’s causing it to hang, and I’m just guessing. But at least you now have some hints of where to start.

Quick primer on lshw: To use lshw to see your hardware specs, type at a command prompt:

sudo lshw -short

If it says it’s not installed, to install it type

sudo apt-get install lshw

That will get you started, I hope. Either way, whatever you do will get you further toward a solution, whether that solution is a different distro or tweakling this one. I hope this helps.

Love it. Just wrote a separate comment about it. I ran the free versions for over a year, then decided to go to paid just to support the project. Paid gives you GUI for appearance adjustments and desktop “personalization” but not a whole lot else; other than superficials like that, under the hood the free version is exactly the same. I can’t remember what the Zorin folks say about it, get the details directly from them of course, but IMO don’t feel like you have to buy the paid version to get a true taste of how it will work for you.

EDITED to add: This incessant, eternal negging shit from the Linux crowd kept me away from Linux for a long time. I found OPs question legitimate, which is why I answered it, but whether you like Zorin or not noobs should not be downvoted for simply soliciting opinions on a distro. I’m very fortunate that some people were generous enough with their time and answering questions to make me give it another go, but there were over thirty years between the first time I tried Red Hat that came on a dozen 3.25" floppies in the early 90s, and last year when I tried Linux again: that absence had EVERYTHING to do with the core haters that apply purity tests to any mention of any Linux distro that they personally find some fault in. Seriously, for the sake of Linux, shut the fuck up and piss off, unless you’re just concern trolling for Microsoft or some shit, in which case you’re doing a fine job, never stop.

Just for clarity, when you say it won’t boot, where in the boot process does it fail? Do you get as far as loading the BIOS, do you get a little way into the OS and then it crashes, or does it just not start at all?

I ask because depending on how far it gets into the boot process, you may not be looking at a software problem at all. Generally speaking, you have to get past the BIOS and into the bootloader before assuming the problem has to do with your choice of OS.

Further comments may have been disabled, but a number of them are still up and are highly entertaining:

https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336