Hey, honestly, thanks for being mature and real about this. I 100% am going to be migrating away from systemd after seeing how quickly this happened at the project and yhat Microsoft can basically decide they want code added to it; but I’m not gonna drag this random junior dev… I’m gonna choose to direct my hate at Microsoft instead. If they orchestrated these changes, that is the story here. When did that corporation get its fingers into the cookie jar, and how do I now make sure my entire software stack is free from projects where Microsoft can have this level of influence? That’s the tactical picture that matters.

They actually run a surprising amount of local software aside from the web browser. They come with the Play Store installed and run Android Apps natively. They’re basically what Android would be if it was made for 2-in-1 laptops.

Not to mention the Linux support. They are legit computers once you enable the Linux environment. I got by on that for a couple of years for my main computer… not what I’d recommend now, given Google being evil and all, but it’s doable.

Anyways, Apple is now offering a budget laptop that kicks the ass of any Chromebook at that price point, and thinkpads with good specs can always be had, so there’s no real need to get a Chromebook these days. Unless your kids’ school requires it…

It depends. Is there a voicemail box I can wait for? Around 5-6 rings, I start hoping to hear that so I can hang up and try again (or in rare cases, I might leave an actual voicemail - i know ao many people who don’t check theirs though…)

If there is none, and I really wanna get through to someone, then I’ll let their phone ring off the hook, especially at work where our users have landlines at their desk. Hey, if you put a phone number on a ticket and then come back and have your boss contact my boss to escalate the ticket, then you better answer your phone when I have follow-up questions about your poorly-written ticket. After ~10 rings, I’ll put my phone on speaker and turn the volume down as I turn back to my computer and resume working, the ring barely audible in the background…

Good riddance. I hate that so many communities moved from forums to using Discord. It’s such a ratty little pigeon hole for communications to go and get lost in forever. It’s a shitshow for anything other than instant, live messaging. And so many communities use it as their only real forum. The day that private equity and public investors liquidate the servers and sell off Discord’s IP after their future bankruptcy will be a very happy day.

I had to make a newsletter for work for a while, and the template I was given was in Publisher. It was a little bit of a pain sometimes but actually fun to use once you figured out its quirks. And it had some quirks- like, you know how you move an image 1mm in Word sometimes and the entire document gets lanky? Well, Publisher is like if they kinda fixed that but the regular word processing was actually the janky part. It’s a Microsoft office product through and through, and you can definitely tell.

No real annoyances on either the desktop site or the mobile website tbh. I don’t even need a client for my phone because the mobile site is that good - which I wish I could say the same about for other social media apps/websites who’ve intentionally kneecapped their mobile web UI to force users onto their app. Glad Lemmy is fully accessible and usable in a smartphone’s web browser, I hope it stays that way.

And, like, what do you do on Linux about that key? Is there a way to just make it act as an additional Super key, or do anything at all without Logitech’s program?

There’s people who think parts of my lifestyle are a mental disorder. That’s their problem, not mine tho.

It must be nice that there’s not a dedicated ideological movement hell-bent on making it your problem.

Who did he want eradicated from public life?

Transgender people.

Honestly it seems like you’re pretty dedicated to just defending this guy’s ideas and ideology, so you know exactly what you’re doing and why it’s wrong, and it’s a waste of time to talk to you.

His videos where he called empathy a sickness, said homosexuality is a disease, or the ones where he said that People of Color were less capable than white people? Or maybe you haven’t stumbled across him saying that Black people were better off under slavery. Idk, I might just be biased, as someone who he wanted to see eradicated from public life. Maybe if you have a friend who’s black or gay or trans, they might help you out with being able to spot plain and open bigotry that is apparently going right over your head.

1. A shitton of people have lived economic realities that don’t allow them to splurge on a phone at all, even if they’d really like digital freedom or privacy. See: half of the global smartphone market, where Android Go and KaiOS enabling cheap smartphones lead to millions of sales.

2. People who can and want to don’t even make the jump because the reality of owning a non-iOS/Android phone is that it requires sacrifices. I went to a concert last night that required me to have the Ticketmaster app to even get in. Everyone at that concert had to have either an iOS or Android phone, myself included. I’m testing Ubuntu Touch on a second phone, but if I make it my daily driver, I’m going to have to keep a second phone around for stuff like that. Ecosystems are too locked down now, and unfortunately you will have to either miss out on some things, or adapt hard-core.

3. The devices and software have to be there. Right now there are only a handful of truly modern devices thar you can load Ubuntu Touch or another Linux distro on, and they’re… not quite straightforward for non-techy people to get up and running. Which is, believe it or not, the vast majority of users.

2025 being the year of the alternative smartphone OS seems just about as likely as any other year being the year of the Linux desktop.

The comment alluded to Transracial identities as a (very cherry-picked and extreme) example. I do really, genuinely wonder whether we should uncritically accept the validity of people who identify as transracial, especially people who benefit from whiteness but self-identify as a member of a marginalized race. What is the instances stance on transracial identities? Another question- do you have racially marginalized mods, and how do they feel about the subject?

Oh Gods, I learned the hard way to never roll back a package unless you really know what you’re doing. And I learned that lesson way back in 2013 or 2014, when I’d only been using Linux for a year or two full-time. Now I’m on a rolling distro and have everything as purely the latest version, and if I come across some weird thing that involves rolling back a package to an older version, I will simply not do that and will look for other solutions instead. Sometimes it’s as simple as creating a symlink so that when a program looks for libWhatever2.1.5 it gets quietly redirected to libWhatever2.6.0

Why not a fifth or even just an tenth as popular as reddit? I get wanting it to be more active, especially for the niche communities to feel more active, but the last thing I want is to go to the “All” tab here and see anything remotely like /r/all on Reddit.

Ah, yes, the IQ benefits of letting machines think for you and blindly trusting what they spit out, while you atrophy your own critical thinking skills and lose the ability to have independent critical thought or produce any kind of useful analysis without said machines, so you develop a need to consume gallons of water and burn square acres of forest every time you need to do any kind of analysis or write anything of substance… yeah, those IQ benefits. Sure.

They still sold user data without being upfront about it until caught, and are still running a shady-ass business. They’re at the intersection of crypto, bigotry, and dishonesty.

Not using or advocating for Brave is pretty simple.

In this US, yes, we generally trust our tap water (although there have been notable incidents of water infrastructure failures, such as major lead contamination in Flint, MI), to the extent that if you get a drink in a restaurant here, 99% of the time it’s going to be mixed or made using tap water, with ice made from tap water.

Some folks will use a filter (Brita brand filter pitchers used to be popular at one time, with TV ads and everything) but that’s more for filtering out chemicals/toxins/minerals than anything else.

In rural places, every now and then the local government or water company (yes, a lot of places here have privatized water infrastructure which is not super great) will put out a ‘Boil Water Notice’ but this is generally considered outside of the norm, and you usually expect to see that kind of stuff resolve within a couple of days unless it’s a result of a major disaster (we were under a Boil Water notice for 2 weeks after hurricane Katrina in my area, the longest stretch I ever remember). Boil Water notices are usually a result of either a breach of the infrascture (a pipe collapsing and the water supply getting dirty), or a water supply failing its regular quality/safety tests. Our water (can’t speak for everywhere in the US, and don’t really know the specifics of how they do it) is chemically treated and filtered before it goes into the tap, and the supply mechanisms are usually regularly tested to make sure they’re within safe standards.

All of that being said, I know people who refuse to drink tap water, mostly because it tends to have a distinct taste from treatment and from having minerals in it, but also because they’ve heard horror stories like in Flint. Two things: those folks normally drink bottled water, which is usually just bottled-up tap water from some other place; and I usually see those folks gladly drinking fountain drinks/tea/etc at a restaurant, which is made with un-boiled tap water and served on tap-ice.

TL;DR - the tap water in the US is generally considered safe to drink, in most places, with notable exceptions, and for now (our mostly-privatized infrastructure is getting worse and worse, and very public failures have started to appear in not only water infrastructure, but everywhere)

absolutely! I mostly only play older games for this reason. I absolutely love some of my old N64 and GBA games because I can clear them in a day or two. Even the older RPGs like LoZ:OoT seem a lot smaller than the open-world stuff out there today, and I actually like that I can learn the entire world and know almost everything about them. They’re finite and I think that’s a plus. Eventually, I’m either gonna get bored and move on, or I’m gonna clear a game. The first feels like defeat, like I did something wrong. The latter feels refreshing and mints the game as a nostalgic memory in my mind; I still look back at the day I finished Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with such bittersweetness; I was sad that it was over, but really proud and happy to have reached the conclusion. And I think you miss that with infinite content, and open worlds. And I also did miss things in my first playthrough of LoZ:OoT but it only took me a couple more (years apart, so nostalgia definitely washed over me every time!) playthroughs to catch them.

I think open-world games can be really fun: games like Minecraft are great examples of that, but the emphasis there isn’t on a story being told to you, but on you creating whatever you want. You’re not as scared to miss things because you have all the time in the world to explore and not everything is gonna be up your alley (some people don’t even “beat” the game, or even go to the Nether or End). But I don’t think I’d like a Minecraft where you have a definite Legend of Zelda-style story scattered out across the infinitely-generated landscape. That’s just not for me.