Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it’s quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody’s hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.

I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu’s star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don’t have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday’s hiccup) Nobara was much closer to “it just works” out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.

I’m an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh… twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that’s what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.

hard disagree. The residential building code isn’t terribly hard to adhere to – especially in new construction – and nearly every bit of it is written with the health and safety of building occupants in mind. I’d much rather deal with a bit of bureaucratic oversight to be sure my house and/or my neighbor’s house doesn’t collapse in a stiff breeze, or blow up from a gas leak, or kill all its occupants in a fire, or turn into a heap of rot after the first heavy rain, etc., etc. You might have the skills and ethics required to do the job right without somebody looking over your shoulder, but not everybody does, and I’d venture at least half the big home building firms would cut every corner they could in the absence of code enforcement.

There’s no reason you couldn’t still do that, as long as you pull the necessary permits and your work can pass inspection. Most jurisdictions make specific exemptions in the contractor licensing rules for homeowners working on their own properties.

Just got my late, not-so-great furnace and AC replaced with a new cold-climate heatpump setup, and in the process moved the indoor equipment from a too-tight niche in the main floor of the house into the basement where it really should have been to start with. Now I need to frame up a wall where the furnace access panel used to be, properly tie in the return ductwork, and (eventually, need to relocate some other utilities first) add a linen cabinet in the vacated space. Next big stage in the huge-slow-moving basement Reno I’m in the middle of is to get the 60-year-old galvanized steel water supply line replaced, and then I can start inside plumbing work.

Conservatism is about preserving a historical social order, rather than existing conditions generally. Acknowledging an environmental change and altering the structure of the economy to prevent it threatens the social order that allows oil companies, chemical companies, and auto manufacturers to be some of the wealthiest and politically powerful entities in the world.

Further, in the short term, ignoring climate change preserves the status quo for the wealthy and powerful. In the long term, though, it only really becomes an existential threat to those who are not positioned to profit from it – look at Nestle attempting to take control of water supplies for an early example of what this might look like. Cataclysm is a life-and-death issue for the masses. For the powerful, it’s an opportunity.

I think you’re okay here – the code requirement about solid or fully-grouted blocks applies to the masonry supporting the flue liner. What you’re looking at in the photo is a decorative brick wrap around the structural portion of the chimney. My main concern would be to ensure that this area is properly capped and sealed so that critters and rainwater can’t get into the cavity and find their way further into your home.

Problem is that if you’re looking for FOSS software outside of the absolute most mainstream use cases, that type of software is the only available option. GIMP and Inkscape have been mentioned but throw FreeCAD into the ring as well. Shotcut and Kdenlive are passable, but don’t quite measure up to the commercial alternatives.

My particular hobby horse is CFD code. OpenFOAM is fantastic from a technical standpoint, but until recently, to actually use it you either had to buy a commercial front-end, or literally write C++ header files to set up your cases. There’s a heroic Korean developer who’s put together a basic but very functional front-end GUI in the last year to change that, but it only covers relatively straightforward cases at the moment.

Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they’re considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I’ve only ever used their PLA(+) but it’s always been bulletproof.

They’ve got drawbacks, too, especially since most examples of them in residential construction are the efforts of, shall we say, enthusiastic amateurs.

1. Because soil holds moisture for an extended period of time, they tend to get saturated, and then excess moisture migrates down to the waterproofing system, which will inevitably leak over time. Most amateur-built earth sheltered homes are not using particularly sophisticated waterproofing materials, and rarely take a defense-in-depth approach to them that could mitigate a failure in one layer of the system.
2. Maintenance is expensive: once any part of the waterproofing fails you are going to have to dig it up to repair it.
3. Soil - especially wet soil - is heavy and the prescriptive structural parts of residential building code aren’t really intended to address this kind of construction. You need an engineer to ensure the house is properly structured for the loads involved, and if you’re building new that extra structure is going to cost money and limit design options.
4. Building into a slope to allow roof access for planting, mowing, etc., limits daylighting options, and particularly in the US where bedrooms are required to have an egress window it can be nearly impossible to design a floorplan with the expected gradient of public to private space.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept, and I’ve even drawn up plans for one I’d like to build on the lot next door to me once the nigh-derelict rental house currently occupying the space gets condemned… But this is one case where I absolutely do not want to be buying somebody else’s project. I don’t trust the other people who build them to do it right.

It’s the equivalent of “become a Hollywood superstar” for engineering specialties. Lots of grads chasing relatively few positions in the industry – many will ultimately take positions working in related engineering fields like mechanical or automotive engineering, but at the end of the day the aerospace sector just doesn’t develop enough new products to employ all the grads coming out of school with a degree.

My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.

Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.

I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.

I mean, neither was he, and given that the Saudis bankrolled his purchase and he’s apparently reduced the value of their investment by half, you have to wonder what he’s giving them that has saved him from a one-way trip to a Saudi consulate.

I mean, you don’t really have to wonder that hard. But still, somebody loses you multiple billions in an extended ketamine-fueled rampage, you start to wonder if you should make an example of them…