Yep. I run Garuda and the main pull is that it’s a more user-friendly Arch with a lot of stuff I want to use preinstalled. I don’t really care about how XTREME it is or whether I might potentially get 1 FPS more.

Also, Ubuntu is moving towards using snaps for everything so they’re pretty much the successor to PPAs.

Mostly yes but there’s one other option that simplifies the whole thing: Chromebooks. They’re actually pretty decent for someone who doesn’t need much beyond a browser, a mail client, and a basic office suite.

Sure, they’re tied to Google with all that entails but they can be a real option for someone like a senior who relies on relatives for tech support.

I actually went back to a light gray theme for my new Linux machine after I’ve been stuck with Windows’s options of “flat pure black with hairlines” and “flat bright white with hairlines” for too long.

I don’t actually need dark mode that much (except for coding) if a bright mode theme is easy enough on the eyes. Windows 10 is just so ugly that only the dark mode is halfway palatable.

If only the old themexp.dll hacks still worked I could have a decent looking desktop on all of my machines…

Ugh. I just finished dealing with what turned out to be a simple configuration problem that took me three days because the tool’s documentation sucked. Turned it in feeling bad only to hear that four other devs had previously failed to get it to work.

One important lesson on life is that everyone is bumbling around all the time. (Like me with autocorrect in the first version of this comment…)

Garuda’s gaming spin should. At least mine runs on Plasma 6 + Wayland and I didn’t do anything special to get there.

No, you get to set that. The defaults are global. But you can override that (both globally and per community) only for you. If you never like jokes except in joke communities you can set “Funny” to -1 globally and to +1 in Ten Forward. But that doesn’t affect how it works for me.

This would, of course, man that posts are sorted completely differently for us. A really funny post might be extremely highly upvoted for me but in the deep negatives for you.

It would also mean that a global karma counter doesn’t exist.

I think Latte-Dock has been unmaintained for some time now. It’s a dead project and maybe doesn’t even work properly with Plasma 6. So it’s a good time to drop it.

Why not just go to a collection of votes with configurable values of +1, 0, and -1? They all have global values that default to something sane and each user can define custom values both globally and per community.

I might set “Funny” to +1 except in /WorldNews, where it’s a -1. I might appreciate controversial posts so I might set “Flamebait” to a global 0 so it doesn’t affect a post’s rating. And so on.

(Wait, that’s basically just extended Slashdot. Eh, I like Slashdot’s system.)

On the one hand I like the basic idea, on the other hand I think that some fundamental problems aren’t fully solved yet. There big use case are passkeys and direct password manager integration – neither mesh well with the idea of software that isn’t allowed to talk to most of the system.

I’m certain that this will be resolved at some point but for now I don’t think Flatpak and its brethren are quite there yet.

True, although that made people think that Windows 2000 was the intended successor to Windows 98 – me included. Not that I minded; in my opinion Windows 2000 was straight up better than Windows XP until XP SP2 came out. Anyway, Microsoft spends far too much time getting cute with version numbers.

They could’ve sold Windows 2000 as Windows NT 5 and Windows Me as Windows 2000; that would’ve kept the “NT X” versioning scheme for the professional line and the year-based scheme for the consumer line.

But the versioning scheme for the NT line is all kinds of weird in general. Windows 7 is NT 6.1. Windows 8 is NT 6.2. So we’ve established that the product name is independent of the version now. That means that Windows 10 is NT… 10.0. Windows 11 is also NT 10.0.

Okay.

True. “Suck it up” works in some occasions and in others it makes everything worse. It’s a terrible default approach to teach your children because they can end up never learning how to deal with stress in a healthy fashion.

The result is usually someone who builds up stress where other people don’t (and then acts accordingly) and who has absolutely no ability to comfort other people when they need it. Few parents want their children to be lonely assholes.

Of course it’s harder to teach someone nuance. Identifying when it’s okay to be vulnerable and when you need to tough it out by yourself is difficult. But if you’re not capable of both you’re lacking essential tools.

To be honest, the first incarnation of Spaces was really damn good; they deserved some credit for that. Then they made it worse so it matches iOS.

There’s also oh-my-fish.

I wouldn’t call the Framework “cheap”. Its price is higher than other similarly-specced laptops. But in the long term you can save money by not having to buy a whole new laptop when it breaks or becomes obsolete. You can even take your old mainboard out and repurpose it as something else.

The MacBook is expensive to buy and has no upgrade path. macOS is sleek and well-designed and the M1/2/3 is a very capable CPU but saving money is not a thing you can expect to do here.

Both are reasonable choices depending on what your use case is.

Not the user you responded to but in my case nothing. My Xperia 10 III is still working well after three years so there no reason to buy a new one.

Okay, I might be out of the OS support window so I might want to do see how AOSP does on my phone. But hardware-wise there’s really no reason to upgrade (and much less to a comically expensive device like in the video).

DX1 runs fine with an alternative renderer (the Community Update should have everything you need to get going).

I could run Invisible War with few issues as well – but then I realized it’s Invisible War and played something else instead.

Gentoo is great for two things: Firstly, learning about all the parts that go into a Linux system and how they interact. Secondly, typing emerge world into a shell and feeling like a god raising the continents from the ocean.

You don’t need to; the Brussels effect has you covered.

It’s cheaper to sell phones with replaceable batteries worldwide than to design the same phone twice for different markets. So most major manufacturers will probably just sell EU-friendly phones everywhere just like when the EU required USB charging ports.