While this is true, if your pc is secure and you don’t install crap then this is not going to be a major issue for the vast majority of people. Both desktops have their own security flaws but always the number one flaw is the user.

Keep systems up to date, do not side load software from outside well managed official package systems, use strong passwords, use encryption etc. This counts for far more than the various security flaws and fixes that constantly come and go with any system. If you don’t give bad actors a route into your system to exploit flaws then you are generally OK.

Like the screen copy flaw would need someone installing software that would exploit that - possible but unlikely in a well managed environment with a good robust distro.

And it’s worth saying that generally Linux remains less targeted than Windows and Mac for malware. That does not mean people should then be lax in their behaviour but it’s a better starting point for being secure if you look after your Linux install properly.

You can install both but it can get a but messy in menus with 2 settings apps and 2 versions of lots basic apps all over the place. It can be cleaned up but it can be a bit frustrating to do.

You may be better trying them both out with live images on USB sticks or a virtual environment like virtualbox. Both are relatively easy to set up without making any major change to your current pc.

I use KDE. It’s very powerful and flexible. While it can be windows like, you an also craft pretty much any GUI you like with it with relative ease. It can be Mac like or something unique, or even Gnome like if you really want that.

It’s also intuitive and user friendly, with well made apps and a comprehensive settings menu.

I’ve found KDE to be reliable and stable, as well as attractive and customisable.

There are a lot of apps made for it - the only downside is software bloat if you install all of them. I’d start with the basics KDE desktop and add apps one by one rather than install the whole KDE app suite. Although the apps are usually excellent lots of the apps may not be useful to you personally . For example I don’t like installing the PIM suite (email, contacts etc) as I don’t use it - all that is online for me so I don’t need the native apps.

I’m personally not a fan of Gnome. It’s got a single rigid GUI philosophy which you can now expand with extensions but I find they can be hit and miss on whether they work or are stable, and time consuming to set up how you want.

So for gnome you either like it as is or you don’t, and if you dont like it then honestly I’d say don’t bother trying to make it be what you want - just use something more flexible.

But regardless of what desktop you use, Apps will work on either or any of the others available.

Not sure what a studio is to you, but here in the UK it’s a 1 room apartment with everything in one room? Kitchen in the corner, couch and a bed. Bathroom. Usually a separate room though. Bedsit is the other name.

But what you describe is presumably a 1 bedroom apartment? Separate rooms for bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom?

The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.

Now generative AI has come along to dilute knowledge in a great sea of excrement. Humans have to hunt through the shit to find knowledge.

Yeah this is an example of corporate corruption, where enough voting shares are in the hand of a minority of investors and the leadership team is under their control.

It is in no way a good idea for Tesla to give away $54bn. The only person this pay package is good for is Elon Musk.

Elon is trying to extract money from the company because he knows it’s in decline. Profit is down since 2021, sales are down, and most of the crazy high value of the company is around expected future tech that is basically broken. Tesla’s self drive tech is broken because Elon Musk himself interfered to keep the costs down, and they are stuck with a lemon.

Meanwhile their competitors are making more and cheaper electric cars, and also are further along in self driving tech. The idea of a fleet of autonomous cars that Tesla sold itself on is sound but it isn’t going to be delivered by Tesla.

Tesla stock is a speculative bubble and it’s only a matter of time before it pops as people realise it’s not going to deliver the dream it claims. It’s conpetitors will. Tesla could have succeeded but the guy who didn’t even found the company fucked them by interfering.

Elon Musk is nothing more than a loud mouth investor. He’s had a lot of luck in what he’s invested in but he himself is a moron.

Yeah, for US money the serial number is prefixed with a letter to donate the year it’s from and the note also has a series year for the actual design printed on it.

Money has evolved a lot since the 1980s so modern money would be obvious. And banks in the 80s would probably be pretty hot on money fraud as hard case was so central to the economy.

A better option would be to collect money printed prior to the year you wanted to time travel to. It’s unlikely they would be able to detect duplicates of real money already in circulation elsewhere in that time. But it might be hard to fine money that old in large volumes as so much gets taken out of circulation and replaced with new money every year.

A steam engine back to Ancient Rome, just to see what they might have achieved with that kind of idea.

There is literally a kettle on the left lower side of the image (likely deliberately as it seems awkward having it in front of the air fryer like that)

If it doesn’t say the year it means Nov 10 this year. The page you linked shows last release was 2 weeks ago for me.

This is such a bizarre story. First as others pointed out 1 in 125 is 0.8% not 0.008%. They presumably forgot the 100 but in percent conversions. It’s presumably 0.8% as if it’s 0.008% then they’re saying 9billion devices were sold on the last quarter. At 0.8% it’s 90million laptop devices. They later say 20% of all laptop sales were AI laptops at 13.3 million which would be 66.5 million laptops overall, not 90milljon. 720,000 would actually 1.1% of all laptops and 5.4% of the AI subcategory.

So whoever wrote the article doesn’t seem to know how to do basic maths? They also don’t make clear how they arrived at their figures with these contradictory figures elsewhere in their own article.

But the main thing is this whole story is some bizarre idea that a new device getting nearly 1% of global sales in its first quarter is doing badly?

To me that’s actually good? But maybe the manufacturer had some crazy expectations? Or maybe the writers think that all products should behave like incumbents?

This reads like shitty journalism - trying to make big claims to get clicks. I have no idea if the product is doing well or not versus expectations, but I don’t trust this articles take on it.

I’m personally skeptical about the “AI” bullshit in these products, but I do think the power efficiency of ARM chips may give these Snapdragon X a chance to take market share from traditional chips.

He sounds very Trumpian.

If you’re worried about DRM then look at GOG.com - they sell DRM free games, and you can download the installers direct from their website if you don’t want to use their client and want permanent backups. The installers are not online either. I have a large library of classics and new games from them.

For electricity generation: Solar across the UK was about 5% in last year, while Wind was about 29% and Nuclear 13.9%, and hydro 1.3% - so 49.2% of electricity generation over the last 12 months was carbon neutral.

That’s a huge success story - still a long way to go, particularly as that does not include Gas burned in homes, but the UK is moving in the right direction. And Scotland is a huge source of Wind & Hydro power for the whole country.

So even if the barriers to solar in your home are still high, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner every year. There are also community projects installing wind generators which you can join/invest in if you do want to try and get a slice of cleaner energy and solar is not realistic.

Edit: Source on UK electricity generation: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical Good data on UK electricity generation

Polyamory is more common these days. It may be experimentation or real for her - only she can decide that. Be there for her, try to not to seem judgemental or negative so that she can trust you and be open with you if things do go wrong. That also means being accepting if this goes right for her.

I do wonder whether you are misinterpreting what you are seeing too.

You are seeing the guy as in control of this and bringing his 2nd girlfriend along. But actually she brought her boyfriend and a girl to dinner at home. Is your daughter also trying to tell you she is in a relationship with the girl too? Was it her boyfriend and her girlfriend?

It does seems odd to bring the girl to meet you if she was purely his girlfriend. Maybe she is more to your daughter than that or maybe she was trying to get a rise out of you? Or maybe she just wanted you to understand how the Polyamory thing works?

I do understand your reluctance around this, and your likely worries for your daughter. It’s easy to see her as being the “victim” of her boyfriends wants. But she does have agency and she has chosen this lifestyle - so I think you have to let it play out and be cautious about expressing your concerns too hard as it may push her away.

Be there for her - it’s very important to keep being her support network and not inadvertently isolate her if you disapprove of her lifestyle. You need to be the ones who are there for her no matter what and where she comes for advice and support if this does goes wrong.

Interesting. Although I’d contend no one “celebrates” daylight savings. It’s not a holiday, and unfortunately saying “it’s not 9am in my house” probably won’t get people far.

I do like the percentage clock idea.

I have a 24 hour analogue clock on my wall - one turn of the clock with the hour hand is a full 24 hours instead of 12. It really changed my concept of time in the day. 12 noon is at the bottom of the clock.

It always feels striking to see the clock at noon and realise how small the morning really is due to sleep and how much of the day is left.

It was intended to bring the existing Julian calendar in Eastern orthodox churches closer in to line with the gregorian calendar. It was not meant to be a universal calendar.

It’s not realistic to alter the existing calendar in this day and age. The gregorian calendar was already too embedded in 1923 to change, and now it’s globally dominant.

The only way to replace the calendar now would probably have to be a brand new calendar (to prevent confusion with the existing calendar, it’d need new month names for example) OR a global agreed change to the gregorian calendar.

Neither is likely; there doesn’t seem to be a big enough need or benefit to get countries together to change this. They can’t even agree on action on pressing crises like the climate crisis.

Yeah I get what you’re saying. I would put some caution for Fedora Kinoite - if you want a system that just works and you don’t want to tinker, then it’s great. It just works, and it updates in a very sane and stable why. But if you want to learn Linux and tinker, then it can be very frustrating working with an Atomic distro at the start.

So if I was putting Linux on my parents laptop and didn’t want to be dealing with too much tech-support, I’d probably go for an atomic distro. But if the user wants to learn how to use linux, play with it, tinker then I think an atomic desktop is too restrictive to start out on.

While Mint with Cinnamon isn’t the most cutting edge feel to it, there is a huge wealth of resources out there for people to tinker and play with the system and it’s a great spring board in to other parts of the Linux world. I do love KDE Plasma though - it’s my favourite DE and I used to run it on Mint before I finally moved to a KDE based distro.

I’d recommend Linux Mint generally for noobs. It’s popular and has lots of tips and advice available online, easy to find. It’s easy to install, and as it’s an Ubuntu derivative you get a lot of the benefits of the big user base without the downsides of Canonical (such as Snap being forced on you). I used to use Mint, and it’s a good stable daily driver.

In terms of your specs, you should have no problem with running it as laptop, but as a 2-in-1 device you may find some specialised drivers don’t work out of the box. The most common is finger print readers, but also some of the switching between Desktop and Tablet mode can be tricky. Having said that, I own a Toshiba Satellite 2-in-1, and I installed Linux without issue. I don’t and never have really used it as an actual Tablet though; it ended up being a gimmick too far for me - they’re just too heavy and cumbersome as a tablet, and even the touch screen (which works fine in linux) is just a bit pointless for me. However I have KDE on my Toshiba now and it works well as a 2-in-1 for me at least.

The best thing to do is flash a USB stick with Linux, for example Mint, and try it out to see how it works with your hardware “out of the box”. Linux Mint has a few spins for desktop environments: Cinnamon, XFCE and Mate. None of them are really designed to be Touch based interfaces to be honest. Cinnamon is the main/high end DE and it is ok with Touch interface.

I would say KDE and Gnome are better DEs for touch screen and convertible devices; I personally prefer KDE but both support Touch well - they just have different design ethos. Both can be installed in Mint, although as they’re not “main” DEs for the distro you sometimes get some minor janky integration of the Mint tools in the KDE or Gnome desktop (e.g. sometimes the task tray icons for Cinnamon based tools just aren’t as well integrated into the system themes of KDE & Gnome). You also can end up with duplicate apps in your app menus (cinnamon tools sitting alongside native KDE/Gnome tools which can be a little irritating). But the system works fine and a lot of these things can be tidied up if it bothers you.

But Mint is very Noob friendly, and I think it’s a good way to get into the Linux world. Pretty much everything can be done via the GUI, and it has opted for a default Windows-like feel which can really help with getting used to it. Cinnamon is also still pretty flexible for creating some other interfaces to experiment. Gnome is far removed from that windows feel and is also pretty rigid in it’s design philosophy - it’s kinda “take it or leave it”; personally I don’t like it. You can push it do other things though with extensions, so there is still potential to experiment. KDE does a good job of a default Windows feel but with more design flair/slicker feel, but it also has a huge range of options for making pretty much any interface you like. One reason I left Mint is because I wanted a distro which is built around KDE rather than me installing it separately (I’m on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed now).

So overall, I’d recommend Mint, and use the Cinnamon version. Flash a USB and try it out (note it will be slower/feel sluggish compared to a native install, but should give a feel for how it handles your hardware). If you install it, I’d also recommend a dual-boot setup rather than ditching Windows completely if you’re completely new to Linux. Another option is install on a portable SSD attached via USB, and don’t touch your actual hard drive. That way you can get a reasonable feel of an actual Linux system without messing up your laptop. It’ll still be slower than a true native install but generally faster than a live-USB stick (you can of course also partition and install a full install on a USB stick itself rather than an SSD for the same effect).

EDIT: Just worth saying; if you decide to install Linux, be very careful where you install it. Double and triple check, as the last thing you want to do is accidentally wipe your windows install!

OpenSuSE Tumbleweed is my current favourite. It’s user friendly with good system tools in Yast, it’s got good repos including community repos with lots of software.

Its also a rolling release but has been stable and reliable for me. Leap is their point release version if rolling is not right for you.

I’ve been using Tumbleweed for over a year, and it’s my main OS since I stopped using windows. I’ve dual booted Linux for many years but always mained windows up until Tumbleweed.

Previously I used to use Mint; it’s decent but switching to Tumbleweed (and in particular KDE) convinced me to completely switch from Windows. Everything “just works”, and I do a fair bit of gaming without issue with nvidia drivers, steam, and lutris.

For example I’ve been playing Stardew, Cyberpunk 2077, Distant Worlds 2, and Factorio recently - all in Linux and all without issue.