Guns are still a thing here in Australia. It’s just more balanced and reasonable than the USA.

My town has a shooting club, game reserves and is surrounded by farms. Seasonally we wake up to the sound of gunfire in the distance from hunters.

I’ve known professional people in the heart of our biggest cities who love nothing more than to head out bush and shoot feral animals when they can.

You won’t stumble onto a firearm at your kids school for obvious reasons but there could be some under lock and key in a gun safe at your mates house. It’s not unreasonable to know some basics.

For someone who subbed to self hosted almost as soon as they joined Lemmy I am really conservative about what I host. I have tried to keep all media in jellyfin to keep things sinple. But recently I expanded to audiobookshelf and wow!

Ripped some of my audiobooks and added some podcasts and now we have a family library and everyone has their own progress and settings working across devices. I am still spending a lot of time consuming media but I think it’s a much healthier balance.

It was (and is) spot on but Microsoft won the war for minds and lots of people in the Linux community started using Microsoft products like vscode and calling them good guys because they were running Linux datacenters and making kernel contributions. Microsoft employed some really good people working on some cool things. You were called out for being immature and holding outdated grudges if you used slang terms and you couldn’t participate in conversations and be taken seriously.

Meanwhile Microsoft was still being Microsoft. They bought the defacto town square - github - in an attempt to control the platform. Then they mined the content to train LLMs. Now the LLMs bombard open source projects with crap. Even as Windows is dying they are trying to drag us down as well.

They are a big company and big companies sometimes do good things. No hate on their engineers. But Microsoft have always been the enemy and they will always be the enemy. It is their nature.

AI investment isn’t rational like consumer spending. Consumers will only spend what is reasonable for their needs.

The AI bubble allows companies to purchase inventory at higher prices than consumers will ever pay then leave it on a shelf unused. The suppliers are making record profits supplying them. Unless China increases supply beyond the current memory cartel all we can do is wait for the inevitable market collapse.

The bad guys normalised racism, fraud, sexism and a lot of other evils and had people cheering for them as they flouted the law and protected each other from prosecution. It has been bad for ever regardless of who was in power with the two tier justice system that protected the elites while punishing everyone else. But we are in the end game now. The masks are off

You too can be allowed to sample the vices of the wealthy elites, in moderation and under their control. In return all they ask is your loyalty. Seems kind of weird and out of touch to me. Regular people mostly just want good health, a place to raise a family, some free time and a decent income. No AI hallucination is going to substitute. They think so little of us.

We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.

Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.

Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.

We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.

A lot of people seem to feel like this. It’s obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.

And it’s always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.

I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don’t tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.

Don’t consume any AI products. Don’t consume any products made or marketed with AI products. Don’t support any companies than invest in AI or are invested in because of AI. Lets kill this nonsense in 2026 and bring computing, jobs and wealth back into the hands of ordinary people. And a prememptive - NO BAILOUT for the tech bros when this shit crashes.

You could replace most management people with a rack of GPUs and nobody would notice. Mostly they are a very unimaginative lot parroting the same misguided group think that devalues the employees that create all their companies value. Infosys is a consulting company. They don’t make anything or own valuable IP. They pimp out Indian labour to undercut the labour rates and conditions in developed countries which already makes them a shitload of profit.

You would think with increasing options to Indian professionals, their recruitment people would be shitting bricks trying to hire talent with this bullshit out there but they have probably sacked them as well. Though, if I wasn’t poor I would probably say all sorts of shit to pump share prices and cash out before the AI bubble bursts.

I still use Debian all the time. Have for over quarter of a century. I develop in a debian container and run Debian in production. For years I used unstable, pinning etc on desktop/laptop and can make Debian work on modern hardware. I tried arch and was suprised how much I liked it. It is a very vanilla upstream experience. The Debian maintainers have added a lot of baggage over time and some of it annoys the hell out of me (particularly when they add shit patches to ssh). Otherwise it might have been my distro for life.

All Linux regular distros give the user complete control over their system (as they should) and that can be a problem for people coming from Windows. Microsoft had to protect them from deleting their system directory because it turns out people are actually that stupid. People like Linus Sebastian get views telling a Youtube audience of millions how one command made his Linux install unusable. And it is a legit criticism for a typical Windows refugee. We need to re-learn all the shit Microsoft discovered over the last 30 years about what complete morons their users can be because we never cared about that. Linux was for power users and destroying your system a right of passage.

Our football team preferences make no difference to Windows refugees. They want a game console experience, an android/ios experience. Something better than the shitshow that is Windows. We can do that. I have never used Bazzite and it might be shit but they are trying to address those users. SteamOS and ChromeOS do a very good job providing a safe install for non-technical users based on arch and gentoo. The base distro ultimately doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. The differences between Ubuntu and Debian aren’t that huge. But you ship updates as a signed immutable root with a fallback to the previous install and run everything else out of user storage and your in consumer appliance territory.

Nothing wrong with Arch as a distro base. The meme stuff is all bullshit. It is a peer of Debian and Fedora. These foundational community distros are not a good starting point for a beginner or for a painless consumerist experience but they are solid for experienced users and have the best support and documentation.

If you are approaching Linux from the PoV of someone who wants to learn rather than someone who wants a reliable consumer computing platform the big community distros are still absolutely the right way to go IMO.

People go on about Mint being friendly for users but under the surface it is Ubuntu which itself is pulling from Debian. People laud Bazzite despite it being Fedora based. ChromeOS is shipping Gentoo to school children. If you package Arch well and ship it to people like Valve has its an extremely pleasant consumer platform. CachyOS improves the arch installation and micro-optimises FPS but you can screw it up as easily as any other mutable Linux system so fundamentally it is not much better or worse than Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora for a consumer experience.

SteamOS, Bazzite and ChromeOS all recognise that immutability is the key to a reliable experience for consumers - an experience that surpasses Windows. Updates are the most likely way to break a system and the hardest thing for non expert users to troubleshoot and rectify. Immutable distros with good support for new hardware have to be the S tier choice for Windows refugees. I have never tried Bazzite and likely never will (I use arch btw, with one system being a cachyos hybrid) but on paper it seems like the most sane choice barring a general release of StreamOS. A distro like Mint might be user friendly but it is bringing nothing new to the table when it comes to a reliable experience for consumers.

The real solution for the majority of WIndows refuges is going to be pre-installs with the supplier guaranteeing all the hardware is supported like Steam Machine. That way you get rid of all the cursed Nvidia systems. I think something like PopOS is the wrong way to do it for normies as the old LTT videos demonstrated, it is still a fragile system for naive users underneath the friendly skin.

It is hard to know exactly what we see because our brain processes it so much and then we have to put it into words and we could easily be describing different experiences the same way or same experiences differently.

I would guess any light receptor produces noise whether that is a few stray protons or just thermal chemical/electrical processes. I would think for most people the brain is receiving noise very much like this but how they experience it depends on how it is processed. Unless there is some after image from recently staring at something bright, when my eyes are shut my brain gives me an impression of nothing which is almost certainly not what my retina is detecting.

People keep on saying stuff like this like these games are all people care about. Meanwhile Silksong sales crippled stores. Indy games and older games are hugely popular. I don’t know a single person who plays these games that don’t work. My kids friend group is playing on cobbled together hand me downs and half broken laptops and can’t play AAA titles.

They will sell millions of these things. People who demand a 5090 and Windows 11 to play games are the true niche. Everyone else is having too much fun to care.

While there is a huge amount of circular money happening because it’s all a financial scam, it is inflating share prices which are invested in by lots of institutions so when the bubble bursts and those shares are worthless a huge amount of wealth will be wiped out and the suffering will be very widespread hurting regular people.

The billionaires won’t be the ones queing for food. Hard to see much glee ahead unfortunately.

The stability of Arch/Cachy updates is not just about time between updates (more often is generally better) but also about accumulated old configs files with deprecated options that have been ignored and reading about breaking changes.

I updated 4 machines at the same time earlier this week (pacoloco for the win). One is a cachy/arch hybrid that started life as arch. The one with the oldest continually updated installation (it is a ship of theseus, I don’t believe it has any of the original hardware) couldn’t get to a graphical login and it took me a few minutes to replace an obsolete config file with a pacnew and get it back up.

This might have been a show stopper for someone coming from Windows or Mac. Perhaps even for some Linux users. But I am decades into this and it is how I like it. I ran slackware for years and Debian Sid. The loss of time to breakage from upgrades is absolutely trivial to me compared with the advantages of a well packaged and up to date system. If people aren’t into that there is no shame in using an immutable distro. The diversity of distros might be confusing but it is a huge advantage because there is something out there for everyone.

Most of the people who are going to leave for Linux right now were probably going to leave anyway once Linux provided what they needed (eg Proton support for most of their game library). Linux has always been a lot of fun for serious tinkerers. Curious types would already have at least tried linux in a vm or dual boot but were being held back my some app or game.

My family has grown up with Linux desktops and gaming and is very comfortable using Linux for boring normie stuff but they aren’t power users. They use what is installed and what is installed is Linux. But when they have Windows installed on their school computers they don’t seem to care. It does all the same things, just differently. One of my kids had several keys not working on his laptop keyboard and just put up with it for ages without telling anyone. Makes no sense. They are my only window into the Microsoft world and what I see is complacency. I think most people have a huge capacity to put up with annoyances before they will take action and power users and enterprise can disable a lot of the shittier features.

Microsoft can probably go a lot further extracting revenue from their users through dark patterns, additional paid services, marketing, sales of data etc. They are a for profit company in a time when it is not just normal but expected that companies will cannibalize their long term potential for short term profit taking. I suspect Windows 11 will get a lot worse but if you walk into a store to buy a new laptop its still going to be the only pre-installed option outside of Apple or Chromebooks for years to come.

We have three windows laptops in the house. All for use in schools which were always heavily pro-Microsoft here. I haven’t paid much attention to Windows 11. The last time I used Windows other than setting it up or fixing it for someone else was probably XP. All three users of those laptops come home from school/work, put them on a charger then head to a linux machine to play games, edit video etc. They know they have linux support and they have grown up with Linux. Not one of them has asked to upgrade their laptops to Linux yet.

Perhaps Microsoft isn’t annoying regular users as much as the tech press and tech users think they are. Remember people still use shit like Facebook not just willingly but in some cases enthusiastically. We are a diverse lot. Some people, probably the majority, will put up with the same shit every day and not think to change their environment. I don’t know whether it is too difficult or they are scared of change or they don’t realize it is possible or perhaps they simple aren’t bothered by the same things. Possibly all of the above.

Libreoffice puts my docs where I tell it and they get synced to my other machines. Don’t understand why people store docs on other people’s computers. The business world is full of dumbarses leading dumbarses. You can’t tell them though.

I shouldn’t call it abandonware. First thing I found was Plants vs Zombies came up under EA in one of my kids libraries - sort of thing that runs well on his under powered school laptop. Think I mixed it up with Bad Piggies and all those old Rovio mobile games that basically got abandoned as publishers moved to adware and pay to win crap.

When I think of EA titles I think of Sims and sports and battlefield - which we don’t really play. I found It Takes Two and a few really old titles like Mirrors’s Edge that nobody plays and I don’t think are installed anywhere. Wasn’t sure about their relationship with Crytek. Not going to go too crazy removing stuff but its a good reminder to have a think about game sandboxing.

Podman, docker etc are all linux namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, capablities etc underneath. You can get similar restrictions with systemd or flatpack/flatseal(bubblewrap) or firejail or other solutions. It could be built into Steam or wine or via flatpak. Podman/docker isn’t very friendly for gamers coming from windows but its good for more advanced users. Something like distrobox. Ideally focus all the effort on flatpak and make it great for everyone else.