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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2025

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  • Ok… At least stop putting words in my mouth. And aside from what you’re trying to do right now, there have been no strawmen in our conversation so far. Something not being illegal doesn’t inherently mean everyone should do whatever that is. I’m not saying “you should do that but you shouldn’t do that”. I’m saying you shouldn’t do that, but that is has to remain legal. As an example that I truly hope most people would agree with, cheating on your partner isn’t illegal (most places), but it’s still a really shitty thing to do.

    We can definitely disagree on the social ethics around such jokes. As you say, you think such jokes are fine and I don’t. And that’s fine. I’m not advocating for censorship or anything like that. I think I’ve made it very clear that I think freedom of speech is important.









  • Not if you follow the normal safety precautions for using the AUR. There are several things you can do to look for red flags, but the most essential thing is to read the PKGBUILDs. And helpers like yay, paru and Shelly can all show diffs which makes that much easier after the initial installation because in most cases you’ll just see that the version and checksum has changed which means it’s as trustworthy as last time.

    This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case unless the Arch team restricts the AUR which quickly can make it lose exactly what makes it so good.



  • Even Microsoft (probably) isn’t that stupid or desperate yet. What seems much more likely to me is that they will keep introducing AI features and more invasive ads gradually and making them opt-in or removable with the intention of making them mandatory later on.

    I 100% believe that Microsoft fully understands that a lot of people aren’t happy with most of these changes, but profit must grow and they are elbow-deep in their AI gamble so they must keep pushing just slowly enough to avoid most users and businesses feeling like looking for alternatives is worth the effort. They are treading a fine line and are sometimes pushing too hard, but that in itself can be a solid negotiation tactic to manipulate people into accepting bad deals and my guess is that it’s fully intentional.



  • I would recommend Mint over PopOS if that ends up being the choice, but Bazzite is probably the safest choice here. Both Cinnamon and Plasma should be pretty easy to navigate for someone used to Windows. Nobara is great, but personally I would stay away from distros with so few maintainers (only GE?). GE is an amazing dev and has done some great things for gaming on linux, but the chance of having to switch distros sooner or later is fairly large. If you don’t mind helping them with that, then I don’t think you can go wrong with Nobara either. Personally I currently run CachyOS with KDE Plasma and it’s been super solid for my use case including gaming, but I would not recommend any Arch-based distros to “the kind of person who needs help if their TV is set to the wrong input” even if it is quite beginner friendly and stable. But I also keep Windows around on a separate drive regardless for the times when Linux isn’t the right tool for the job, most notably because a lot of competitive games do not run on linux as they require kernel level anti-cheat (https://areweanticheatyet.com/). If the person you are referring to have no interest in those kinds of games, then that becomes a non-issue, but if their favourite game is something like Valorant or Fortnite then Linux simply isn’t a good choice for them yet. That is also true for some Windows-exclusive applications. Most applications have good alternatives or can run fine through something like Bottles or Lutris, but some don’t.

    Otherwise, most games typically work fine (https://protondb.com/). Some work flawlessly without having to do anything. Some only require minor tweaks like setting a launch parameter or selecting a specific proton version. Those I believe would be acceptable, if not perhaps a little frustrating for such a person, but there are also a lot of games that run but can have issues of varying degrees that you can’t do anything about. They are almost always good enough, but sometimes those issues can be significant. What I suspect would be a killer is that some games may stop working after an update which requires further tweaking or simply staying broken until either the game devs or proton devs fixes it.