TBH this is just how petitions in the UK work: enough people sign it, it goes to parliament, they say a bunch of stuff about it that often sounds reasonable enough, then they do nothing about it. It’s just a way to give the public the illusion that they’re being listened to without having to actually do anything. It was the same with the digital ID petition, which I still signed but with 100% expectation that it wouldn’t actually achieve anything.

I like Betterbird, I find it slightly more less worst.

I just go around looking for other people who post their problems, then aggressively tell them to read the wiki and report the thread so it gets closed.

As a KDE user, I have long ago accepted that no flatpaks will ever follow my system theme, and they will all look completely different from each other lol.

If only the Prime Minister who used to be a fucking human rights lawyer was able to explain why jailing people without a jury trial is a bad thing.

That’s essentially what I do. I’m an old user and was running arch before it had archinstall so I’m fully capable of doing a manual install, but I also don’t have a particularly unusual computer setup so the script is like 95% fine for what I need. I do a few post-install tweaks but that’s pretty much it.

You can also offline the whole of Project Gutenberg with Kiwix, it’s about 70GB IIRC.

I just don’t see the point of them when there are flatpaks. I’m not super knowledgeable on Snaps so maybe there’s some huge benefit I don’t know about, but they always just seemed like a worse version of flatpak to me.

As an old-timey Linux user, I eventually stopped using Ubuntu because they have a habit of kind of fixating on whatever they think is the new cool thing, and going all-in on it while other important things stagnate, then they get it to the point where it’s almost really good, then ditch it and go chasing after the next shiny thing.

Off the top of my head there was the Unity desktop, Mir, This thing where they wanted an OS that would run on both desktops and phones interchangeably, and now it’s Snaps. I don’t think Ubuntu is a bad distro, but I also don’t think it’s the best distro for newcomers necessarily because of it’s habit of suddenly lurching off in a new direction every few years. But that’s just me of course, if it works for you then go for it!

Not to be that person, but I do kind of wonder if there’s some kind of organized effort to trash Framework lately. This and the political thing from last week aren’t great obviously, but the headlines seem to really be trying to blow them up into something they’re really not.

If you want to check specific games you can use ProtonDB to find out how well they run/any specific tweaks to get them working.

Yeah I have two Linux machines, the laptop which is my tinkering machine and the desktop that other people use that I’m not allowed to break, and I run Kinoite on that one because it’s pretty hard to do anything to mess it up. At least I haven’t managed it so far lol.

One thing you could look into is your router, some of them let you run a VPN directly on the router and you can choose which devices go through the VPN based on MAC address (at least that’s how mine works) so that way I get my Steam Deck going through Mullvad without installing it on the Deck.

Of course that only works when you’re on your home network though, so it’s a bit limited.

I have an ancient Brother laser printer that I’ve had for like 15 years. It weighs a ton, is about the size of my entire desktop computer, but it’s also never broken or fucked up in the slightest (despite having a drink spilled on it and a cat throwing up directly into the mechanisms), works on every Linux machine I’ve ever plugged it into and is still only on about it’s 2nd or 3rd toner cartridge. I genuinely think it’s going to outlive me and I’ll have to bequeath it to somebody one day.

They also likely won’t be threatened by it - they’ll either wreck it from outside or weasel their way into it and enshittify it from the inside, as with all things.

For just text LLMs, they seem to run on surprisingly modest hardware. My laptop only has 8GB RAM and integrated graphics and it can run one. It’s a little slow and it runs the CPU kind of hot, but it works.

It’d be neat if data centers could also be desalination plants. IE, you extract the seawater, desalinate it, use it for cooling, then add the fresh water into the general water supply when it’s done with. I’m sure there are probably many reasons why that wouldn’t work though.

I dunno how people here feel about Banksy but I’ve always quite liked this quote:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Mine says ‘Code’ for some reason.

I’ve done that before too! Last year I was having a very specific issue and I was googling it, found someone who had the exact problem I had like 5 years ago, and it turned out to be me from my old account back when I used to use reddit lol.