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.

Yeah when you’re in the middle you kind of know enough to be able to get around the safeguards and properly break things, but not always how to fix them again necessarily.

TBH I don’t really believe anything NASA says when it comes to stuff like this. It’s basically been ~5 years away from going back to the moon and ~20 years from going to Mars for my entire life, and I’m not a young person.

Oh weird, I use it with a touchpad on my laptop (Lenovo Ideapad if that makes any difference) and it’s always been fine for me.

I genuinely use Floorp as my main daily browser lol

I think historically Canonical has always been a bit or a weird company. I ended up ditching Ubuntu because they seem to have this weird penchant for picking some new shiny feature (Unity, the convergent Desktop/Phone OS thing, Mir, currently Snaps) and just going all-in on it whether people want it or not, working on it until it’s almost good, then ditching it for the next shiny thing.

Also their hiring process is apparently bonkers.

Chat, please write an apology that clarifies Diversity Policy 15 and assures the reader that as a company we are not homophobic. Please use a professional, courteous tone and limit the response to 500 characters or less.

There is also a Calibre plugin that’s supposed to deal with .ascm files. I’ve never managed to get it to work personally but maybe someone else will have more luck.

Given that until 2024 their Executive Director was a professional shaman, I’m starting to suspect that they might not have what you’d call standard vetting practices.

This is great news for us! If you ever get pulled up for pirating things, just say you’re using them to train an LLM and it’s legal!

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This definitely will not work unless it does. But it probably won’t.)

I’ve gotten exactly one thing to ever run properly in Bottles, and that was an accident lol. Which is weird because I can get things to run in Wine no problem, and I assumed that Bottles would be easier since it’s essentially just Wine with a GUI. But for reasons that elude me, everything I throw at Bottles just doesn’t work. I’ve even taken things that work perfectly well in Wine and setting them up in Bottles with the exact same settings (as far as I can tell) and they just don’t. work. I assume it’s something I’m doing wrong, but there’s no real reason to spend the time to figure it out when Wine is right there getting the job done.