Pet peeve. Whatever three-quarters of the world seems to believe, any sewerage system can handle TP. That is: real TP has almost zero fiber integrity, it literally turns to goop on contact with water. Goop that has no more structural consistency than an average pile of sh*t. If still in any doubt then just make sure to flush it in single sheets, each one will be a pea-sized ball of goop. This misunderstanding seems to be purely cultural. I’ve been to a ton of developing countries, all with the usual dodgy sewerage systems and narrow-bore pipes. Yet only some of them, notably Latin America, have the disgusting cultural norm of TP bins. The rest understand that there is a difference between TP and paper towels designed for the kitchen and your face. TP is always flushable, by design.

Seafile is not FOSS, as I understand it. But I tried it anyway, since I also found Nextcloud bloated.

In the end I went back to the purest strategy of all: peer-to-peer. My files are synced between devices over the local network using ssh, rsync and unison and never touch an internet server.

Ideally, you don’t go anywhere. You talk to those assholes and degenerates and try to understand them a bit better and maybe even try to make friends with them (yes, yes, crazy idea). They are your fellow citizens, after all.

From over here in Europe, questions like this really make America look screwed. Let’s hope it’s not.

Thanks, that is useful. Roughly what I was thinking.

Can someone do a quick explainer of what this move to ARM means for free computing? The prospects for hassle-free installation of alternative OSs? Is it good news or bad?

Completely agree. Training normies to click OK on warnings like this is a no-good terrible idea.

That’s perfectly fine. Don’t worry about forgetting words. You will forget them, look them up again, forget them look them up again, eventually they’ll stick.

This is exactly what I tell people who ask OP’s question. Technology made this a feasible approach. In the era of paper dictionaries it was a different story.

Babbel. Was not paid to say this.

In rc.conf put map f shell -tf $SHELL ~/myscript.sh. When you press f it will launch myscript.sh in a new terminal with the selection as an argument.

man ranger and check shell command for appropriate flags. For example, skip the -t if your script is in turn going to launch a GUI application.

Shell commands can easily be integrated into ranger.

But why does a fertility-rate decrease “need to be solved”? Obviously if it’s in absolute free fall that’s going to cause short-term problems, but the underlying reality is that our planet is overstressed with 8 billion humans and counting. Personally I just do not get this anxiety about fertility rates, it seems so disconnected from reality.

They recognize that one person’s rights can infringe another’s. That’s all.

In contrast to those “many reviews”, this reviewer says that Ubuntu is fine and always has been.

Seriously, Ubuntu hate is mostly just Snap hate. The Snap problem is overstated and easily worked around if necessary. Ubuntu remains a very solid choice on desktop.

Indeed, this is the case with Revolut, a bank which literally requires iOS or Android spyware to sign up and use. But it’s rare. And a reason to NEVER USE that bank.

Alternative utopia: do online banking in a desktop web browser while seated comfortably at home, rather than on a street corner in the sun squinting at a tiny screen.

Not if the alternative is that people begin to see the role and the person as the same thing. That’s the dream of every would-be dictator. A certain chancellor of Germany knew this very well in 1934 when he abolished the titles of Chancellor and President and made the army swear its oath to him personally.

This is just standard political theory: to protect democracy, respect its institutions. Absolutely does make sense to me.

Yet the idea underpinning it is sound. It’s to separate the office from the individual. If you attach reverence to the role, not the person, you make it easier to change the person and avoid dictatorship.

Crazy that you are getting hate for this perfectly reasonable and well-expressed opinion. No counter-arguments, just “muh i no like muh go away”.

Apparently this place is not so different from the R-site at all.

As I see it, there are two solutions to the trust problem.

The strong solution: read the source code.

The weak solution: trust as few actors as possible, if possible a single one - and download from their website.

I was advocating the second solution.

Wish I could agree with you on the underlying point.

My own anecdata is of normies who are absolutely resistant to the very idea of touching Linux because of its connotations of complexity. And really I don’t think they’re wrong.

My personal preference for GUI liveUSB tools is [etc]

Imagine what even this phrase must sound like to someone who has only ever used pre-installed Windows. Not being facetious.

My opinion remains that Linux could only benefit ifs distros would take hand-holding to its logical extreme and provide the actual Windows-Mac executables that make installing Linux a genuinely one-click experience. Last time I checked, Fedora did this. Pity it’s Fedora and not Debian.