I tried slackwear in '94. Getting it running was no big deal, but I had zero experience and documentation / help guides were thin. Installing applications or getting peripherals to work was prohibitively difficult without having a pretty decent amount of knowledge about it.

My high school had a rather large dose/novell Network but there was no internet yet. BBS’s were a thing and you could get a lot of installers and information from them. But they were all running in dos for the most part

My college had a VAX, it was more or less there just to get email and power a metric ass load of terminals in the library for research purposes. They really tried to keep you out of the CLI, everything was menued. I figured out that you could go for it to a South African University about seven times in a row and it would explode and give you a telnet session, but even then I wasn’t really working with an OS shell. The school had a computer lab. It was all Windows 3 and Novell, No internet for the longest time.

My ISP had options to dial up into a terminal session. My home dial up line was awful. Trying to FTP over PPP was a fool’s errand. I started getting used to connecting to my ISP and FTPing files down to their local node on with their T1 and then switching over to z modem to download the files to my house with the ability to auto restart on failure.

I didn’t try to run a Linux based OS again until Gnome came out.

I’ve been Linux in the desktop for years. You really don’t have any choice other than to be a little bit flexible.

More times than not it turns out to be a plugin that screws over the site. Here’s my general path:

Won’t load in Firefox? Disable privacy badger and ublock origin

Still won’t load? Try it in a private window with no extensions loaded

Still won’t load? Move over to brave.

Still won’t work? Disable Shields

Still won’t work? Straight to a vanilla copy of edge, (a vanilla copy of Vivaldi would also be reasonable)

Just last night I ran into a problem with my ADP work portal. Things worked fine for ages, All of a sudden my password wouldn’t work. I went into private mode My password now works but loading the actual page netted me a blank page

I opened it up in brave and it just worked outright.

I was totally on board until centos got screwed over ( and subsequently AM2 )

I’ll be a cold day before I touch any fedora or redhat again or even mention to another person that they should run it.

So there are 43+ NixOS users and noone switched away for another OS?

Woot!

I keep pondering switching back to Debbie and every time I get in a fight with … well everything I try to install … And I look at my configuration.nix and sunk cost fallacy sits in.

I don’t really need Splashtop, NinjaRMM, Parsec Server right?

Maybe this will be the straw the causes them to port librelec to it

I hope they haven’t disassembled it and sold it on eBay for bribe money

There’s no clear path from getting the computer out of the box just setting it up without internet. If you call the manufacturer and they know what the hell they’re doing they’ll walk you through doing the OOBE no internet fix. It just needs to be an option in the damn operating system. The fact that they’re hiding it from you is unconscionable.

I used to work in a company that was VC adjacent.

Most of the people sitting on piles of money don’t have any knowledge or radar to help them negotiate where to put it. They lean heavily on other people to tell them what to invest in.

When AI first started getting big everybody was guessing where the curve was going to be and where the technology was going to head. The people guiding the venture capitalists were putting their oars in the water early.

To be fair there’s a lot of money to be made in AI assistants if they can manage to run the back end affordably. If you’re asking Google, Siri, and Alexa complicated questions they’re miserably fit for the task. But when we get to the point where you can expect a reasonable answer from something like look up all the places to rent cars near Tucson Arizona give me the cheapest price with the best reviews. Or tutor my kid on basic calculus, test him, and give me a report on where he needs more assistance. That kind of stuff is worth money and something that many people with money will pay for.

This form factor is off-putting and honestly AI at this point is still only mostly right.

The VCs are all over AI and there’s opportunity there. Just not on every product and probably not yet.

Nah, all the original data came from humans. If it was all good and happy and properly tagged correctly there’d be no intervention.

Unfortunately they scraped it from wherever in the hell they could get it from and it’s not all tagged correctly.

I’m sure they use more AI to pre-grade it, but at some point a set of real eyes need to verify that something is what it’s supposed to be.

This is more of a blood diamonds or fair trade coffee thing, US legislation isn’t going to have anything to do with it. You need to expose the places using the data.

Oh my God my wife bought this bean bag once. It was a photography thing so it had to be absolutely packed full. So the skin came folded up in this tiny little plastic bag and then it came with three giant bags of styrofoam balls.

If you stuck your hand in the back and pulled it out it would just be coated. I spent hours just trying to scoop them into the bean bag.

When I got to the second bag to fill I found a long narrow box and taped it up to the side of the bean bag slice the bean bag open and used it to pour them through.

The whole experience was awful. And the cleanup took nearly as long as the fill.

If the price was even relatively sane I would be okay with that honestly.

But no, they need to keep driving the price up and up. I have to pay my part so that little Jimmy can host 297 hours of white noise on his account that no one wants to watch.

They simply need to change their tactics a little. It cost you some small sane amount to host your videos there. If your videos don’t g gather watches and make money you should be the one paying for them.

I want to pay about nine bucks a month for a family account it’s just b-f rate content. You can pay less to get actual well rated movies from other services.

Also give me the option not to throw in Google music I don’t give a s*** about Google music.

OBS background removal in Linux is bad.

In about half a dozen distros VFL does not work out of the box for OBS.

If you flat pack your OBS and don’t do it exactly right with all the plugins at once, the plugin sandbox causes issues in OBS.

If you’re running an OBS bot camera things get extra spicy.

In most cases high color support is not allowed.

If you’re trying to do stream Deck stuff that can be an issue.

Don’t get me wrong I’m glad it wasn’t a big deal for you but for your average person coming in complaining that terminals are too much, they might be in for a less than stellar experience.

If you just want to browse the web and edit work documents you have nothing to fear.

If you just want a game and don’t want to be too awfully picky about what you’re playing you have nothing to fear

If you want to play anti-cheap games and host docker components you’re going to have to do a little console here and there.

If you want to stream to YouTube and twitch, You’re probably not going to have as much of a good time. You can still do it but there’s work and compromises involved.

Yeah that’s the same conclusion they reached.

Google nearly went through trouble to make sure that takeout is a pain in the ass to import anywhere else.

As a matter of fact anytime I use any company’s product and try to export it from there and import it somewhere else it goes horribly wrong.

I don’t want my text documents in HTML.

Load up a live CD of your distro in your VM. Install a browser. Load up all your plugins, bookmarks, sites, when you have it completely how you want it, tarball your Firefox config folder to a USB drive.

The next time you want to use it, start the live CD again and untar the tarball back in your config directory. Anytime you want to update it, just remake the tarball.

It’s ephemeral, no logs are stored, you have almost no chance of accidentally loading the wrong thing.

My 2015 air has been running Ubuntu for about 6 months, I even did the hack to swap the function and control keys.

Power’s not the best. It can only do about 2 hours even after I tune the crap out of everything and apply to every cheap power saving gimmick I could come up with.

ping site.com

Not http://site.com

I mean, if you want secure/private communication, email should not be your go-to. It’s a horrible platform by today’s standards. It was never designed to have any serious level of security. Once they have an unencrypted email on the target with timestamps and mail headers, all they need to do is see who was communicating with Proton at that point. I don’t know if anything has changed since the PRISM days, but back in the 2000s, they definitely had that level of insight into the web.

Always better to argue with strangers than family.