We don’t.
Right wing cultist morons do, because I guess they think that everything is somehow a giant conspiracy against Trump, because thinking that helps them process and cope with the fact that Trump is always in the news for saying and doing bad or dumb shit.
Hardware wise, you’ll be hard pressed to find any even half-way popular computer that can’t run some form of Linux. So I’d say just get something that’s within your budget. Those x86 APU-based mini pcs that you can find for ~$200 are becoming pretty popular for projects these days. Something like a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi or whatever might also be fine depending on what you want to do with it, just keep your power expectations in check. If you want to spend more money on something with graphics hardware, I’d recommend going for AMD over NVidia, just because the drivers are built into the kernel and essentially no-hassle.
When it comes to software, especially if you’re on x86, just arbitrarily pick one of the reasonably popular distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, PopOS, or any of the other ones you’ve probably heard of. One of the first things to learn about “Linux” is that there’s a whole ecosystem of software projects behind it, and there is a lot of overlap between the software that each distro runs. Yes, there are some meaningful differences between, for example, Ubuntu and Fedora, but I think they are much less meaningful to a noobie (who is just learning the basics of Linux) or an expert (who probably knows enough to bend and customize just about any distro into whatever they want).
Small caveat #1: If you prefer to have a desktop that more closely resembles Windows (like the one of the Steam Deck’s desktop mode) you might want to pick a distro spin that uses the KDE Plasma desktop. On the other hand, if you want to play around with something that’s a bit different than what you’re used to, it might be worth checking out a distro spin that uses the Gnome desktop. I can recommend them both for different reasons, so you might want to check out some videos of them to see what you’re more into before picking. (Other desktops are available, these are just the two big ones! So there truly are a ton of options to explore here if you want to.)
Small caveat #2: At this point in time are you more interested in stability or customization? If you want a truly rock-solid Linux system that’s hard to ever break, you might want to consider one of the new “atomic” distributions like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (or others), though you might find some of their limitations annoying. On the other side of the spectrum, if deep customization and flexibility is what you’re looking for, then you might want to venture into the deep end with things like NixOS or ArchLinux, just keep in mind that they can be very technical and overwhelming for noobs. Personally I have been using Fedora Silverblue for a couple years now and I love the stability of it, and I can work around it’s limitations with distrobox.
Another thing to consider is just using what you already have. For example, playing around with Linux in a virtual machine, setting up a Linux-based server on one of the popular VPS services, or just plugging your Steam Deck into a dock with a keyboard and monitor attached and playing with something like distrobox (which you can probably find a guide on how to set that up for your deck).
Everything, in one sitting. You might as well go out with a fucking bang, am i right?
Hopefully he’s dead (from natural causes) or in jail (from natural consequences).
Modartt’s Pianoteq is a nice Linux native, physically modeled piano plugin.
In my experience yabridge is fantastic. With a bit of initial setup, it’s the closest thing to a native experience that I’ve come across.
You do control it with a CLI interface, so you need to be comfortable with that.
You also need to have already installed the Windows VSTs manually using WINE or whatever, and so there’s a bit of a typical “how well does this work under wine” crapshoot and a bit of a learning curve there.
I think it’s really easy to overlook Ping Ping.
I didn’t know or care about the sport at all going in, but the show presented it in such a way that you can’t help get invested in the characters. On top of that it’s just a excellently told story with a lot of good drama, and I think it says a lot about people and their relationship to sports/hobbies/art/etc. I hope other people will give it a try. :)
Cowboy Bebop - Tank
Trigun - HT
Neon Genesis Evangelion - Cruel Angel’s Thesis
Lupin III Part 2 - Opening 1 bad video but best i could find sadly…
City Hunter - Love, Don’t Leave Me
Ping Pong the Animation - Tada Hitori
The Tatami Galaxy - Maigoinu to Ame no Beat
Gunbuster - OP
Samurai Champloo - Battlecry
Re: Cutie Honey - Cutie Honey Theme
Paranoia Agent - OP
Macross - OP
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann - Sorairo Days
Detective Conan - OP1 or OP3
Nadia the Secret of Blue Water - Blue Water
Dragon Ball Z - Cha La Head Cha La
Death Note - OP1
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 2 - OP
I could probably do more…
Now, endings are another story…
I think some people (usually right wing Americans who watched too much Fox News back in the 2000s) are opposed to “happy holidays” because they don’t want to acknowledge other religions.
And then there are snobby Europeans who hate and avoid the phrase because it sounds “too American”.
The only people I’ve personally known who exclusively say “Happy Christmas” are Irish. Are you Irish, OP?
I’ve lived in America for almost my entire life and I’ve never once heard an American say “Happy Christmas”. “Happy Holidays”, sure, but that’s mostly reserved for the days leading up to Christmas. On Christmas Day it’s always just “Merry Christmas”.
I can see from your other post that you’re talking about Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:
The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar’s relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar’s residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. “Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users.”[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar’s Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]
Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don’t use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don’t you agree?
So what’s my point? Why is any of that relevant?
As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.
There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I’m saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it’s actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta’s staff would probably agree to that.
So what’s the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?
Frankly I’m not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.
I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that’s why we’re talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that’s simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.
As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.
For me personally there are two main forces at play here:
I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don’t use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it’s a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.
I don’t really know for sure, but I’d have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We’d be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it’d also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it…
So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.
I’m perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I’m willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).
From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.
From a cultural standpoint, I’m also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc… Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase–and that’s the Fediverse working as intended, imo.
On one hand, Kissinger was undoubtedly effective at achieving America’s foreign policy goals and was undoubtedly one of the most influential Secretaries of State in US history. Unfortunately on the other hand, his brand of “realpolitik”–working pragmatically towards concrete policy objectives without concern for ethics or ideology–meant doing things that prolonged and worsened wars, knowingly propped up autocrats and dictators, etc.
Objectively speaking, Kissinger was a powerful diplomat who accomplished a lot of what he set out to do. At the same time, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, and a lot of us can only look back and judge him harshly for the long term effects of his decisions. Kissinger is the perfect example of a person who is highly intelligent and objectively effective at what they do, but because he had so little concern for simple human concepts like right and wrong, it’s hard to look back at any of his “achievements” today with anything other than harsh judgement and disdain for the soulless husk of a man.
Which is hopefully a pretty good sign for the idea of the fediverse and open protocols in general.
Make sure you’re following hashtags on Mastodon. I see plenty of people posting stuff like art, food and gaming opinions because I’m following a bunch of topics that interest me.
When it comes to Linux, it’s only natural that FOSS people are more interested in the fediverse than the average normie, because that’s where all of this stuff came from. I know FOSS people who have been using Mastodon for years and years.
You should try to talk to a doctor or psychiatrist about this habit, especially if it’s beginning to bother you and affect your life in other ways.
As for things you can do right away, how about sticking bandaids on your sores, this will help them heal and it’ll also keep you away from the area. And don’t wait until it gets bad, but even put bandaids on prematurely if it’ll get you to stop compulsively messing with your skin.
Another thing is to buy some basic skin care tools. As someone who has the habit of biting my nails, sometimes until they bleed or are painful, I know that biting them can lead to making them rough, which just leads to making me even more compelled to bite the rough bits. For me it can really become a cyclical problem that’s also likely driven by anxiety and depression. But by clipping and filling my nails with proper tools I can quickly break the cycle, because my nails will start to generally feel better. So maybe you can do something similar with your skin by exfoliating and using lotion! It’s worth a try!
Finally I want to say that cannabis has been good for my personal type/level of anxiety, though I hesitate to recommend it because when though I don’t find it addictive I think it maybe isn’t great to recommend to someone who is experiencing addictive or compulsive behavior.
In the end I think some combination of therapy, behavior pattern breaking and maybe drugs if necessary, might be able to help you get away from self-harming compulsive behavior. Good luck!
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think a fedi-connected, self-hosted Bandcamp alternative would be huge for discoverability and helping fans keep tabs on new releases, tour dates, etc… As a musician it’d be great to be able to have fans be alerted right away when you post a new track or tour date, and as a fan it’d be awesome to be able to follow artists that you like from other fedi-compatible platforms.
I’m not a web dev myself so I don’t really know for sure, but I think the biggest challenge is probably not even content delivery but keeping track of ownership/library. It’s really nice that you can log into Bandcamp and access a library of all of the albums/songs that you’ve previously bought, and I’m not sure how something like that could be emulated in a federated way. It might be possible, I just don’t know how!
Also it’d be nice to be able to stream your library, and when your library is distributed across multiple federated servers I don’t know if that becomes more difficult to implement.
Still, I’m with you. I’d love to see a federated alternative to Bandcamp, even if it takes some years to reach maturity or feature parity.
I use Joplin and really like it. I sync it between my devices using nextcloud on my home server, but it seems like there are quite a few other options for syncing.
I love Evangelion. I don’t love this stupid bullshit.