I’d also recommend considering a more gaming-focused distro, they are increasingly popular, easy to use and tuned for gaming with everything you’re going to need. SteamOS, Bazzite, PikaOS are all strong choices with rapidly ongoing development at this point (and there are others).

Gaming distros may not be as inherently “stable” as more productivity-focused distros like Mint, but for gaming you don’t really want to be. Gaming is pretty cutting-edge, even on Windows you need to get your updates promptly and keep your drivers up-to-date etc if you want many games to work properly. And that situation is doubly true on Linux since it is still a bit less mature for gaming and some parts of the ecosystem are a bit “experimental”. A gaming distro balances the need for stability with the need for the latest and greatest games to run properly and with good performance.

That push and pull is exactly why they’ve been intentionally using them to rot people’s brains. The dumber and more apathetic you can make your users, the more you can monetize them, you first minimize the push so you can maximize the pull. This is not an accidental “quirk” of modern algorithms, it’s part of the design. Money must be maximized at all costs, including the mental health of the users and the stability of society. Money uber alles. The techbros will drive our society into the ground without a second thought if it makes them a few bucks richer. They’re not planning to stay here anyway. We are just a resource to them, and they will exploit us to the fullest to pursue their unachievable techno-utopia fantasies.

It might actually be. Linux gaming has come an awful long way thanks to Wine, Steam, Proton, Wayland, etc. Driver support is improving with or without the manufacturer’s help. OpenGL’s constant playing catch-up with DirectX has given way to the limitless potential of Vulkan. The web has moved almost entirely to properly open standards like WebExtensions and Canvas, and has become powerful enough that many well-known apps are literally just Electron wrappers around a HTML/Javascript core that can run on any plaform. Likewise Mono has implemented almost all of .NET and even Microsoft’s own “.NET core” cross-platform (mostly so it can run on containers and cloud more effectively, not to help Linux specifically, but we’ll take it) All these buzzword technologies add up to a seriously strong open source gaming ecosystem, and distros like SteamOS, Bazzite, and others are finally starting to put all these pieces together and polish them into something seriously usable as a daily driver and for gaming.

And once you’ve got the gamers and enthusiasts, you’re on the cutting edge, you’ve got the tip of the spear, and the rest of the spear tends to follow where they lead. Is it happening? Too early to tell, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. The “Year of the Linux desktop” has always been a joke, but some people weren’t joking and have been seriously working on it. That work appears to be starting to really pay off. Combined with Microsoft’s various Windows 11 missteps continuing to fuel the fire, a lot of people are increasingly receptive to alternatives.

We can helpfully answer that for them by making sure they get sued.

Florida is basically the unofficial US Capitol now, so it would be confusing and ambiguous to have it associated with the traditional forms of unexpected insanity. Now it’s going to be an entirely new kind of unexpected insanity, so Ohio has been selected to represent the old kind of unexpected insanity that Florida used to represent.

Bernoulli’s explanation and Newton’s explanation are the same explanation made from different frames of reference. They’re equal, I don’t understand why people insist that one or the other is incomplete or that they somehow both have different contributions to an airplane’s flight. They’re the same. The airplane flies because the air pushes it up turning some of the energy from its substantial forward movement through said air into enough upward acceleration to counteract gravity. That happens both due to pressure differential AND the sum of the deflection of air in exactly the same measure, they are directly linked and have to be equal. Bernoulli’s explanation is one particularly nuanced and clever way of looking at and understanding the exact mechanics of how that happens and if you plug the resulting values into Newton’s math it matches perfectly. The zero “angle of attack” for a cambered airfoil shape is actually measured this way not by measuring the angles of the physical surfaces or anything like that. The Newtonian explanation is just another way of looking at it. Either way it requires intense computations to come to exact numbers, but the numbers are the same either way. The pressure differential of the air IS the mechanical force of the air, happening as an equal and opposite direction to the deflection of the volume of air the plane is flying through, either of which is what we call lift. They’re all the same thing, happening at the same time and yes you can look at them from different perspectives but that doesn’t mean one perspective is wrong and the other is right. They’re all accurately describing the same thing. It is useful to know both, but not necessary and it does not make either of them incorrect.

This discussion always reminds me of the “airplane on a treadmill” argument where both sides read the premise differently and scream at each other that only their way of interpreting the question is right.

Matrix and its implementations like Synapse have a very intimidating architecture (I’d go as far as to call most of the implementations somewhat overengineered) and the documentation ranges from inconsistent to horrific. I ran into this particular situation myself, Fortunately this particular step you’re overthinking it. You can use any random string you want. It doesn’t even have to be random, just as long as what you put in the config file matches. It’s basically just a temporary admin password.

Matrix was by far the worst thing I’ve ever tried to self-host. It’s a hot mess. Good luck, I think you’re close to the finish line.

While it sounds a bit hacky, I think this is an underrated solution. It’s actually quite a clever way to bypass the whole problem. Physics is your enemy here, not economics.

This is kind of like trying to find an electric motor with the highest efficiency and torque at 1 RPM. While it’s not theoretically impossible, it’s not just a matter of price or design, it’s a matter of asking the equipment to do something it’s simply not good at, while you want to do it really well. It can’t, certainly not affordably or without significant compromises in other areas. In the case of a motor, you’d be better off letting the motor spin at its much higher optimal RPM and gear it down, even though there will be a little loss in the geartrain it’s still a much better solution overall and that’s why essentially every low speed motor is designed this way.

In the case of an ammeter, it seems totally reasonable to bring it up to a more ideal operating range by adding a constant artificial load. In fact the high precision/low range multimeters and oscilloscopes are usually internally doing almost exactly the same thing with their probes, just in a somewhat more complex way behind the scenes.

The end result is exactly the same.

The difference is that you can install an iso on a computer without an internet connection. The normal iso contains copies of most or all relevant packages. Although maybe not all of the latest and most up to date ones, the bulk are enough to get you started. The net install, like the name suggests, requires an internet connection to download packages for anything except the most minimal, bare-bones configuration. The connection would hopefully be nearly as fast if not faster than the iso and be guaranteed to have the latest updates available which the iso may not. While such a fast connection is usually taken for granted nowadays, it is not always available in some situations and locations, it is not always convenient, and some hardware may have difficulty with the network stack that may be difficult to resolve before a full system is installed or may require specialized tools to configure or diagnose that are only available as packages.

In almost all cases, the netinst works great and is a more efficient and sensible way to install. However, if it doesn’t work well in your particular situation, the iso will be more reliable, with some downsides and redundancy that wastes disk space and time.

Things like windows updates and some large and complex software programs and systems often come with similar “web” and “offline” installers that make the same distinctions for the same reasons. The tradeoff is the same, as both options have valid use cases.

To be fair, in the case of something like a Linux ISO, you are only a tiny fraction of the target or you may not even need to be the target at all to become collateral damage. You only need to be worth $1 to the attacker if there’s 99,999 other people downloading it too, or if there’s one other guy who is worth $99,999 and you don’t need to be worth anything if the guy/organization they’re targeting is worth $10 million. Obviously there are other challenges that would be involved in attacking the torrent swarm like the fact that you’re not likely to have a sole seeder with corrupted checksums, and a naive implementation will almost certainly end up with a corrupted file instead of a working attack, but to someone with the resources and motivation to plan something like this it could get dangerous pretty quickly.

Supply chain attacks are increasingly becoming a serious risk, and we do need to start looking at upgrading security on things like the checksums we’re using to harden them against attackers, who are realizing that this can be a very effective and relatively cheap way to widely distribute malware.

I still use Nextcloud for syncing documents and other basic stuff that is relatively simple. But I started getting glacial sync times consuming large amounts of CPU and running into lots of conflicts as more and more got added. For higher performance, more demanding sync tasks involving huge numbers of files, large file sizes, and rapid changes, I’ve started using Syncthing and am much, much happier with it. Nextcloud sync seems to be sort of a jack of all trades, master of none, kind of thing. Whereas Syncthing is a one trick pony that does that trick very, very well.

I feel like you are the one who is confusing a “NAS device” or “NAS appliance” as in a device that is specifically designed and primarily intended to provide NAS services (ie, its main attribute is large disks, with little design weight given to processing, RAM or other components except to the extent needed to provide NAS service), and a NAS service itself, which can be provided by any generic device simultaneously capable of both storage and networking, although often quite poorly.

You are asserting the term “NAS” in this thread refers exclusively to the former device/appliance, everyone else is assuming the latter. In fact, both are correct and context suggests the latter, although I’m sure given your behavior in this thread you will promptly reply that only your interpretation is correct and everyone else is wrong. If you want to assert that, go right ahead and make yourself look foolish.

You can also automate this with autossh which is designed for exactly this kind of persistent tunnel. Although a simple “while” loop might seem like the intuitive way to keep it running, autossh is very reliable and takes care of all the corner cases for you.

It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”

It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.

That’s what LCARS means, it’s the name of the computer console in Star Trek. In the show, it stands for “Library Computer Access and Retrieval System” although it’s often used for stuff other than the library computer too.

Almost like the context matters and the world isn’t entirely made up of black and white binary choices because we’re not robots or computers and discrete logic does not apply to human moral arguments.

It is. The web was eventually corporatized and the corporations sucked all the air out of the room suffocating anything too small to compete. The fediverse is, if not taking it back, at least opening a space for those who don’t want to consume from a fully corporatized web. These include many of the people who used to make “websites” instead of “apps” or “platforms”. When people complain that it doesn’t have as much content as say, Reddit, I look at that as a benefit, it’s helping solve the (massive) discovery problem by self-curating thoughtful people who can curate content intelligently and provide real opinions and meaningful thoughts. The signal to noise ratio is much higher, and it’s refreshing.

Magsafe is a really great idea, it’s just a shame Apple came up with it first and I can’t wait for it to be the universal standard for all types of external connectors forevermore. It’s as close as we can get to wireless without being wireless.

Never had a single functional problem with Nextcloud, other than the fact that it’s oppressively slow with the amount of files I’ve shoved into it. Mind you I also don’t use MySQL/MariaDB which I consider a garbage-tier DB. Despite Postgres not being the “Recommended DB” for Nextcloud it works perfectly for me. Maybe that’s the difference.

Nah, I wanted to love NixOS, and granted it seems like a perfect fit for my recommendation, but a bunch of things about it rub me the wrong way. It’s just not for me. I’ve always been most comfortable with Debian and that’s what my setup script is designed for. Lots of apt.