I’d recommend CachyOS over SteamOS on non-valve hardware. As much as I love SteamOS on my Deck, it’s highly tailored to the hardware, and has some limitations. But that comes with caveats I’ll cover later.

I also find Bazzite to be too locked in, and complicates how to do things that aren’t managed, for a general gaming desktop. If it’s a media center PC Bazzite can be great, but can easily feel locked in if you want to start adding TV apps or Kodi.

That said, for a beginner friendly Linux distro I’d point most users towards Mint or Pop!_OS depending on their use case. If the user has a high technical knowledge and capability, but lacks Linux experience, I’d point them towards CachyOS, their docs, and the Arch Wiki. Maybe Garuda if they want to additional bundling and update management tooling.

Vista was overall “ok” when paired with hardware that could actually run it. Biggest perk was that for a small window of time, it was the only OS that had DX10 support outside of community patches to emulate DX10 in XP & 2K

UAC was implemented in an extremely overbearing way that trained users to ignore any critical system pop-ups.

Aside from that, many of the core systems were unoptimized, and when added on that many hardware partners under spec’d the entry level machines that were being sold with it, the OS performed far worse than it’s predecessors.

Thankfully, I don’t use Tidal for music discovery. I luckily have a lot of people I’ve met over the years that love music, perform themselves, work for venues, or are crew for artists. That plus indie radio like KEXP and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts has kept me exploring for new music via recommendations from those areas.

I use Tidal for high fidelity music with a more acceptable artist payout than Spotify.

That said, I’m slowly working towards going back to the old days where my massive CD collection rips (i still have those binders too), direct purchases of high fidelity content sitting on my network share, and records aremy primary source of listening pleasure. The only problem here is acquiring the hardware to scale thanks to the AI boom buying up all the production lines of consumer grade hardware, and business class storage drives having gone up in cost. Technically I can afford it, but I could also spend that same money and buy tickets to several local shows for both my wife and I, which will support the live music industry and artists more directly.

You also have to remember that Google has been switching their search tools over to AI search tools and the results have degraded as a result.

Even before then, there was manipulation of the search algorithm by content creators, even on the YouTube side.

It’s probably a combination of all factors tbh.

• Google is slowly pushing on the scale of authoritarianism.
• Search changes being a degradation in results.
• Search algo manipulation.
• Google intentionally showing divisive content due to the higher revenue opportunities
• And the sheer breadth of right wing grift content.

You just described a sizeable portion of the FOSS community.

As somebody that loves FOSS, the community around it can come off like a morally superior vegan/christian/other-commilunity-known-for-this-attitude quite often. “I DID IT, WHY CANT YOU!?” Is an attitude I’ve encountered frequently, and it’s hard to get them to understand that not everybody has the same tech knowledge level, or use cases, or can manage the loss that comes with stopping/moving away from corporate solutions.

There is.

It’s called Parental Controls.

It also does a fairly good job at preventing stuff from getting through.

One of the big issues right now is that there’s a lot of sexualized content on social media right now that’s bypassing parental controls because the social media services are doing a poor job of limiting that content when encountering a parental controlled device.

You don’t need a native mobile app to use the Progressive Web App (PWA) installation.

https://web.dev/learn/pwa/installation

Federation of self-hosted servers is on the Fluxer road map.

However, the team has had massive growth in the last two weeks and pulled enough visibility that assholes being assholes decided that it would be fun to DDoS them while also dealing with sudden growth.

Fluxer’s majn benefits are that it is so close to discord that it, in theory, supports existing Discord bots with minimal effort, and the kid behind it is obsessed with the tech stack and FOSS.

To add on about using a knife for defense that you lightly touched.

You never want to be in a knife fight. Nobody wins in a knife fight. Especially if it’s a pocket knife.

I have a bright neon orange & green bush/field/combat knife that I take with me when I go camping. It’s largely a tool for managing my camp, but I have practiced defensive fighting with it, but I am no knife fighting expert. I see it as a last-ditch effort of defense against a wild animal or human where my life is already on the line. And wearing it on my hip around camp advertises “this person is armed” to any human that has ill intent that comes across my camp during daylight hours. I’d still rather grab my walking stick for a good head bonking and sternum busting, and I would do my best to do that before pulling the knife for defensive combat use.

So, to be abundantly clear. There are no winners in a knife fight. The “winner” goes to the hospital.

Sweat plus the scent of sexual fluids.

We don’t? Says who? You? Your bubble?

I live in the PNW and am surrounded by progressive people and hear “Zionist” used as a perjorative for fasciast frequently. Hell, I could easily go into a local coffee shop or bar and find a sticker that will have a “fuck zionists” message on it. Hell, one of my best friends is of Jewish heritage, and is the biggest critic of the Zionist movement I know, to the point where he even attends a moderately sized local synagogue that’s also critical

So obviously there are US citizens in the PNW that use that language. But I’ll be sure to tell them that according to some random internet gate keeper of the American English dialect says they don’t talk like an American.

I know this isnt cannon, but it my personal head cannon. I’ve always thought of Han as somebody that “the force” is using as a pawn to maintain balance and as a result, has a shit ton of “luck”.

I’ve always wanted to see media in the SW cannon to explore this kind of concept minor force users that either unknowingly use the force, or the force uses to maintain balance in the universe/galaxy.

Why under 60?

One of my most interesting friends is a retired 68y/o Italian immigrant (we met when he was 62). I met him while cycling up a giant hill week after week. The third or fourth time we saw each other both heading to the same hill we struck up a conversation and started regularly riding together. He was also far better at climbing than I was!

Besides cycling, he had a connection to the local restaurant industry due to his previous career as a wine importer. So our coffee stops were often at places where he knew the staff and more conversations and frindships would arise. After his retirement he had a warehouse full of old wine crates and has started a small business turning those crates into custom furniture that is unbelievably beautiful.

Don’t let age be a factor in making friends.

Or it could be the economy tanking,a particularly bad winter storm or other natural disaster, another epidemic/pandemic, a complicit billionaire caught on a hot mic doing something dumb with the world watching, another inflamed and unstable right winger takes another run at Trump for some unhinged reason.

We’re in such a precarious position right now that we’re ready to burst at one of our many weak seams.

There’s always a Franz Ferdinand.

I have to use a Win 11 machine for work.

If any of you are able to install software on the Win10/Win11 you’re using, install Microsoft PowerToys (Run). It adds a Spotlight-like run/search dialog with a hotkey press that works as you would expect an indexed search to work. I never use the windows start menu anymore due to the enshittification of it.

If you actually read that page, you’d realize that “Requirements” is a misnomer, or at least misleading, page title for what’s being described.

This article is more of a Troubleshooting page and how to resolve for your specific configuration.

There is not an Ubuntu official support requirement for Proton.

With SteamOS being Arch based, and Valve being a significant Proton contributer, if there were a specific OS requirement, it’d be Arch or AUR capable distro. But that’s obviously not the case.

And runs even better on Arch thanks to CachyOS.

The multiplication is implied and has been part of the standard mathematical notation for far longer than any of us have been alive.