If nothing else, though, it seems like people might actually be posting OC now. When I first got there, it was like a single account blatantly reposting from TikTok, Instagram, etc. Like the 9gag of short-video content. Seems potentially better going back into it now.

I would honestly go so far as to suggest that in the long term, not having this monster raise them (given they’ll still have plenty of money) probably leaves them better off.

Fuck off

PV Magazine is more or less an outlet for press releases by companies trying to innovate (often in air quotes) with photovoltaics. I’m honestly not even sure why it’s allowed here; it’s completely uncritical. May as well cite a press release on the manufacturer’s website at that point instead of laundering it through a magazine.

Okay, anyone who’s saying this either tinkers way the hell too much without the know-how to back it up, has never used Linux for more than a week, or should probably be using this as their daily driver.

• Software is, in the vast majority of cases, obtainable through a GUI package manager, versus going out onto the Internet and finding whatever you trust to give you a valid version of the software. Software is updated all at once and without even being forced to reboot (save for some niche cases). With two (2) clicks and one (1) password, every single piece of software on the OS is up-to-date. It’s like a half-step up from an app store in difficulty.
• I have never once in two(?) years using Linux had to fuck around with software drivers. Whereas trying to connect game controllers to Windows was a fucking nightmare, and it feels like I would have to go mucking around with audio drivers every time Windows decided my headset didn’t want to work anymore.
• Windows 10 has, at least once, completely shit the bed to a point where I spent most of my day trying to get my desktop working again. Zero catastrophic issues with Linux.
• Windows 10 placed itself into a state where it couldn’t update at all because Microsoft fucked up and pushed an update that enlarges the recovery partition without regard to the users whose recovery partition is bordered on the right and can’t be enlarged.
• Linux’s install is extremely fast and trivial, whereas Windows’ is full of dark patterns, makes you sign up for a worthless account just to use your desktop (lol), and can be completely fucked if you replace too much hardware in your own PC.
• The shell experience if you actually do need to get some kind of even light power user work done is way less intuitive than Linux.
• Customizing Windows is the biggest pain in the ass imaginable. I had to go into the registry on Windows 11 just to give me the basic tools present on Windows 10’s context menu. Go try to uninstall Internet Explorer. Go ahead, I dare you.
• Whereas Linux has extensive, crystal clear, and highly specific guides for basically any problem you’ll ever fall into (see: the Arch Wiki), Windows has support forums where you pray someone has the same issue as you, and if you find it, 90% of the time it’s a canned response with fuck-all to do with the issue, terminating the thread. So then you go searching your issue appended with the term “reddit”.

I use Manjaro KDE with Wayland on an Nvidia GPU, and it works right out the box. I then have maybe half an hour’s worth of personal customizations which are not at all necessary to use. Something like Linux Mint is what I would recommend to my grandparents any day of the week over Windows.

Yes, they called themselves the “most open operating system”. Which in fairness doesn’t imply all the “free” FSF freedoms, but at least being unable to work around restrictions or reverse-engineer to me definitely contravenes “open”.

That said, this is just beating a dead horse; literally anyone with a brain who knows what Linux is knows that Windows is less open.

I found it effective to think back to this time in high school bio where we had to dissect a frog. Gnarly and absolutely reeked of formaldehyde.

I was going to say: “I’m honestly surprised you’re able to find any content at all. I want PeerTube to succeed, but I can find nothing worth watching on it.” But logging back into PeerTube, I do see a semi-prominent YouTuber I occasionally watch on there called Shifter… And there’s also The Linux Experiment. (Edit: And RMTransit.) And Flipboard discussing fediverse stuff. But it’s still not nearly enough. The only other channel I see consistently in Trending is someone called Lety Does Stuff, which from what I can gather is a generic reaction channel serving as a front for affiliate links and an NSFW Patreon. (Not sure if I can block those from appearing, since they’re spammy as hell.) For high-production video essay stuff, I already have Nebula, so I don’t mind its absence here too much.

The indie OC on PeerTube could at least be interesting from a kind of early YouTube Wild West perspective, except that it’s just so sparse. For example, there’s a quaint channel I found called Cohan Magazine that does a bunch of camping and wildlife stuff. Not my thing, but I think it adds to the indie vibe. But a lot of the OC is let’s plays, and that to me feels basically like filler content.

It just has that issue where unlike posting on Lemmy, Mastodon, etc., creating content is much harder, so it just can’t get enough momentum. Granted I think PeerTube right now might be in a better place than even a couple months ago when I last checked, but it’s definitely a slow burn.

Shhh, don’t call it “haptic feedback” or they might make them flat, unmoving buttons that have a vibration motor behind them.

It’s a shame Firebird doesn’t seem to be on F-Droid. But Graph89 is really good for the older calculators!

Good. Fuck Chegg. Let cheating, plagiarizing dipshits have the dubious AI slop.

I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.

I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).

CosmicRaySort.

Hence “4+”, because I agree with you wholeheartedly.

When I told people that literally every aspect of life will be worse under Trump, I absolutely meant it. Republican poison will seep into literally every aspect of our lives. And this is exactly what I mean when I say “everything is political” to those who only single out a handful of hot-button issues as “political”.

With the rise of fascism in the US, just keep “everything is political” in the back of your mind for the next 4+ years, and if you don’t believe it by then, I don’t know what to tell you.

Incidentally, we try not to use these sorts of “Forbes contributor” articles on Wikipedia when possible. They’re effectively just blogs masquerading under the credibility of Forbes staff’s actual journalism.

That said, I don’t see anything wrong with this excerpt. This is legitimate attack vector.

The two criteria I suggested were “not saturated with ads and AI trash” (technically just the latter would satisfy OP’s problem), and DDG meets both of those with no problem. Its AI “assistant” and its ads can both be trivially disabled. I use DuckDuckGo because I love its frontend and because it gives me fewer problems than Google did. I’ve only ever used alternative search engines that piggyback off the major ones (as you listed: DDG, Startpage, and SearX), so someone else would have to answer that for you.

Using a search engine that isn’t saturated with ads and AI trash also solves this problem.

insultingly tiny, unupgradeable storage aside, that’s surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops

Decentralization actually can be really powerful to give you a backup even if you prefer Signal; Signal’s servers very infrequently go down, but when they do, you entirely lose that channel for an unpredictable amount of time.