Any of the Minds from Iain M. Banks Culture series, because that would mean the Culture was real and I want to live there.

I guess for a specific one, maybe the Arbitrary? That one seems pretty chill and knows where Earth is:

Also while I’d been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC’s World Service, asking for ‘Mr David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.’ (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth’s entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn’t get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.

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.

Yeah I like Strawberry too. It’s not flashy looking but it does everything I need.

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.

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.

It’s such a genius idea because it’s not only a super original way to do FTL, but it also gives you a perfect way out for any plot holes lol

That was what happened to my friends eBay store here in Canada. Tariffs meant he couldn’t ship to the states anymore and the ongoing Canada Post strikes made it difficult to ship within Canada. Still possible but just not really worth it anymore.

Apparently it’s called the Royal Order of Adjectives, and it’s essentially: determiner, opinion, size, shape, age, colour, origin, material, qualifier.

You don’t have to use all of those in the description, but that’s broadly the order to use them in to make it sound ‘right’. So for example in the comment I made above, it fits because I used:

• determiner (The)
• size (big)
• age (old)
• colour (red)
• material (wooden)

in that order. I’m sure I was never taught that in any organized way (I just had to look up what it was called lol) but I still got it in the right order anyway just by typing it out in the way that felt right, which I think is interesting.

And this might just be a UK thing but if a person goes off it means they get really angry. And it can mean to leave for somewhere.

So a firework goes off which makes the fire alarm go off which makes the safety officer go off. Then he goes off to get a fireman. But he leaves the milk out, so it goes off.

One of my favourites is the word jam, which can mean:

• A fruit preserve
• Traffic that’s stopped
• To play music
• A door that won’t open
• A difficult situation
• To force something in somewhere it’s not supposed to be
• To interrupt a signal
• Something you don’t like or can’t do (“that’s not my jam”)

And probably others, all spelled and pronounced the same way but with wildly different meanings depending on the context.

The other English thing I find super interesting is how there’s a sort of unspoken but very clearly understood order to adjectives. So for example, if I say “The big old red wooden door” it works as a description, but if I say “The wooden old red big door” it sounds weird even though it’s the same information. People aren’t usually formally taught the order (as far as I know), but everyone seems to understand it.

Although the past tense of write is wrote, so maybe for read it should be rode… dammit!

I before E, except after C!

As long as you don’t count the word caffeine. Or protein. Or species. Or seize or heinous or leisure or weird or feign or their or reignite or any of the other 923 words that are exceptions to this rule lol.

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.