Solid video, and it comes from a pretty grounded viewpoint. It’s not very techy or pros/cons-focused; it’s more about the “spirituality” of what we’re even doing with the technology in our lives. They’re obviously not a tech expert, but their mindset and “breaking point” are a lot more relatable for most casual people. This is the sort of realization that people are going to continue having as big tech encroaches further and further on their lives. E.g. their example of “it’s not one big problem, it’s many small problems that add up” with why it’s so frustrating to use Windows, but then why people continue to use it.

It will take a “breaking point” and self-motivated change to critically evaluate the power that you’re giving to corporations and decide that you’re going to accept some discomfort in order to fix it. There will never be a perfect time to effortlessly switch your entire workflow across operating systems. I daresay that if there ever was a point at which switching to Linux was effortless, big tech would flash something new and shiny and make that no longer the case. They prey on keeping people in the path of least resistance, and understanding their strategy is the first step to doing something about it.

Wish people would have realized this a couple decades ago, but it really does feel like Linux is re-entering public discourse as people are getting more and more jaded about their relationship with big tech companies.

Their prices lately have been very unimpressive.

Maybe HDR on linux? I’m fairly clueless about how it all works under the hood, but I’m currently on debian 12 and I’m hoping that by the time 13 comes around it will just work without me needing to do any manual system tweaks. As I understand it, it’s currently semi-working or fully-working in KDE6, but I’m still on KDE5 until debian 13 comes out.

Rutracker is pretty solid for a public tracker. They’ve notably got a ton of music rips mirrored from what.cd and RED, and they seem to have a good handle on gaming releases as well. Their uploaders seem to focus at least a little on making releases well-annotated and a custom/high quality experience rather than just mindless scene content dumping. Use an adblocker and page translator and you should be good to go.

I don’t think ‘cattle not pets’ is all that corporate, especially w/r/t death of the author. For me, it’s more about making sure that failure modes have (rehearsed) plans of action, and being cognizant of any manual/unreplicable “hand-feeding” that you’re doing. Random and unexpected hardware death should be part of your system’s lifecycle, and not something to spend time worrying about. This is also basically how ZFS was designed from a core level, with its immense distrust for hardware allowing you to connect whatever junky parts you want and letting ZFS catch drives that are lying/dying. In the original example, uptime seems to be an emphasized tenet, but I don’t think it’s the most important part.

RE replacements on scheduled time, that might be true for RAIDZ1, but IMO a big selling point of RAIDZ2 is that you’re not in a huge rush to get resilvering done. I keep a cold drive around anyway.

“Cattle not pets” in this instance means you have a specific plan for the random death of a HDD (which RAIDZ2 basically already handles), and because of that you can work your HDDs until they are completely dead. If your NAS is a “pet” then your strategy is more along the lines of taking extra-good care of your system (e.g. rotating HDDs out when you think they’re getting too old, not putting too much stress on them) and praying that nothing unexpected happens. I’d argue it’s not really “okay” to have pets just because you’re in a homelab, as you don’t really have to put too much effort into changing your setup to be more cynical instead of optimistic, and it can even save you money since you don’t need to worry about keeping things fresh and new.

“In the old way of doing things, we treat our servers like pets, for example Bob the mail server. If Bob goes down, it’s all hands on deck. The CEO can’t get his email and it’s the end of the world. In the new way, servers are numbered, like cattle in a herd. For example, www001 to www100. When one server goes down, it’s taken out back, shot, and replaced on the line.”

~from https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/

Can’t believe it’s someone’s job to make this list and this is what they came up with. A 14-year-old with internet access could name way more major players.

Maybe tangential but this reminded me of how much I hate setting up systemd timers/services. I refuse to accept that creating two files in two different directories and searching online for the default timer and service templates is an okay workflow over simply throwing a cron expression next to the command you want to run and being done with it. Is there really no way we can have a crontab-equivalent that virtually converts into a systemd backend when you don’t need the extra power? I feel like an old person that can’t accept change but it’s been a decade and I’m still angry.

You might be able to read Arches faster.

I’m not sure what a good written guide for manually running linux games is off the top of my head, but generally yeah you install Lutris, install the latest Proton-GE version through e.g. ProtonUp-QT, create a game entry in Lutris with a “Prefix” location dedicated to your wine prefix, pick Proton-GE as the runner, copy the game into the generated prefix, target the normal EXE, and launch it. Sometimes if a game isn’t launching you’ll need to use “winetricks” to install vcrun2022 and dotnet48 dependencies into the wine prefix, since each Wine prefix is sort of like a copy of windows, and windows has a handful of dependencies that games sometimes rely on. I’ve heard you can also just add the game as a “non-steam game” to steam, but I’ve not bothered as Lutris gives more control. Again I can’t vouch for any specific guides, but the keywords from this post should help target a general direction to move in.

In my experience, there is nearly no difference between windows and linux when it comes to piracy. There are a few games that linux can’t run (anticheat), but generally that shouldn’t be an issue for games that you would typically pirate. Linux does have a standard learning curve though, and you’ll need to get familiar with Lutris or some other Wine prefix manager to manage your games. If you’re dedicated to moving to linux, game piracy should not be a deciding factor.

Wow you weren’t kidding lol. I watched the 2.0 demo and at this timestamp there’s a CSAM-related room title that Matthew was invited to (at the top of the right window). Granted it’s probably someone stream-sniping, but it goes to show that there’s apparently active bad actors trying to interfere.

FWIW at my job using Slack threads are critical. I’ve never used threads anywhere else though. I think it just depends on the nature of the community.

Nice, I’ll have to watch this. A quick skim through the YT comments says that it’s AMD drivers which is the only thing I could think of. Linux Mint 21 actually has an “EDGE” iso which has a newer kernel version, and Linux Mint 22 is instead going to track the latest HWE kernels, so my understanding is this type of hardware problem should be a thing of the past at least in Linux Mint’s world. I don’t know if Ubuntu has their own plans or not.

Mint uses the same kernel version as Ubuntu, so that’s not really a point in favor of Ubuntu in any case. Do you remember what video it was?

“Escape hatch” specifically refers to the speculation that Valve is positioning themselves in a way that they can’t be forced into paying fees for existing on the Windows platform, and that if push comes to shove they can say they only support Linux now. This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a strategic stance which will likely prevent it from even beginning to happen. This doesn’t have to do with the Steam Deck specifically; it was also part of their intentions with the Steam Machine and etc.

Maybe it needs to be more obvious that there are many ways to do things in Linux, and give new users a short “learning to learn” primer on how things operate differently in Linux-land, and where/how to look online for help. There are always first-boot popups but I imagine most people are conditioned to click out of them without even reading; forcing people to confirm a couple times that they want to skip “very helpful reading” may cut down on people that play the search engine lottery on what information they use for their first steps.

Also semi-related, I hope that mainstream Linux eventually “un-stupids” computers for regular people again. I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft and Apple have, at least somewhat intentionally, imposed ‘learned helplessness’ onto average computer users. “Oh computers are magic no one knows how they work. We are the only wizards that could possibly understand them and we will sell you the solution.” Windows/OSX/iOS/etc are so locked down that people have rightfully learned over time that if they run into a problem, there really is no solution. I suspect that’s permeating into the new user experience on Linux where people will encounter one problem and throw their hands up and say “fucking computers” instead of using basic problem solving to try another approach.

Their rough new user experience is concerning though. From what they described I suspect many of their “problems” are not actually “real”, but it doesn’t really matter because they still ended up in a scenario where they thought there were problems. How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu? I know in the last ~10 years there’s been a big focus on the new user experience, so what more can be done to prevent this? My gut says there are too many online resources that are confusing new users when they try to onboard themselves - especially resources that are old, written for other distros, or written for people who just want to find the command they can copy-paste to do something.

Gaming has been the only pathway to mainstream desktop since forever. I’ve been around for a hot minute and I remember that consistently, the “real Linux users” for years repeated “we don’t need gaming this is an adult OS go back to Windows and play with your toys” and then turned around and whined that no one wanted to use desktop Linux. Valve stepped in and casually created the year of the Linux desktop as a side-effect of just wanting an escape hatch for their business model. Now the casuals and elitists alike will have a better experience via the magic of Marketshare, and all it really took is not listening to people that don’t know what’s good for them.

So doesn’t that still mean that they think gender-neutral pronouns are political, i.e. they don’t accept them? I’ve also noticed the dev in question is Swedish, so I’m not sure where German language quirks came from?