Debian. Because it’s the best about “Just Works” (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.

BUT I’m also not a “numbers go up” geek. I don’t give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that’s just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).

If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.

(/soapbox)

My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don’t play the latest games anyway, I’m a PatientGamer, and I don’t do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.

It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don’t have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).

It all works fine, but one day I’ll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs

The cool thing about Arch is that with some learning, time and effort, you can make it function just like Ubuntu

… And Canonical…

I’m a 30-something woman myself. I’ve been gaming longer than I’ve had a phone. Here’s my two cents:

You’re already into videogames. Fuck what the haters say about mobile gaming not being “”“true”“” gaming (whatever the heck that means), they’re just sour they can’t game whenever wherever without investing a ton of time. Then again, maybe I’m just mad because I’ve recently invested a ton of time into Youtube’s playables.

If you want to get into PC or console gaming, I recommend starting off with popular E rated games in the genres you already know you like. Generally these games are more complex than mobile games, but this type will usually introduce difficulty curves to gradually transition you into their mechanics and complexity and teach you to be a master without having to look up training online.

If you want to branch out, start with genre-bending/-blending games. I’m personally a fan of puzzle-platformers, as those are my two favorite genres; while I’m not big on card games, they recently had an explosion in popularity, so there’s a blend of just about every genre you could want.

false dichotomy. Sometimes people justifiably dislike something for reasons beyond elitism (e.g. Canonical is a for-profit corporation that muddies the waters of FOSS), but it’s also not just playful bants.

Also, as with every opinionated topic: do your own research and think critically. Don’t hate Ubuntu until you have tried it and have investigated those who maintain it. Don’t praise it until you do so either.

I don’t care if you come to a different conclusion than me, as long as you didn’t just function on the “wisdom of the crowd”

When does Debian update a package? And how does it decide when to?

These both can be answered in depth at Debian’s releases page, but the short answer is:

Debian developers work in a repo called “unstable” or “sid,” and you can get those packages if you so desire. They will be the most up to date, but also the most likely to introduce breaking changes.

When the devs decide these packages are “stable enough,” (breaking changes are highly unlikely) they get moved into “testing” (the release candidate repo) where users can do QA for the community. Testing is the repo for the next version of debian.

When the release cycle hits the ~1.5 year mark, debian maintainers introduce a series of incremental “freezes,” whereby new versions of packages will slowly stop being accepted into the testing repo. You can see a table that explains each freeze milestone for Trixie (Debian 13) here.

After all the freezes have gone into effect, Debian migrates the current Testing version (currently Trixie, Debian 13) into the new Stable, and downgrades the current stable version to old-stable. Then the cycle begins again

As for upgrades to packages in the stable/old-stable repos: see the other comments here. The gist is that they will not accept any changes other than security patches and minor bug fixes, except for business critical software that cannot just be patched (e.g. firefox).

I keep finding tracks to love on each album, but Controlling Crowds has too many, so I just recommend the entire thing.

Also Axiom is killer too, but that might just be because I’m a sucker for narrative concept albums

Robert Glasper - Black Radio

Sungazer - Perihelion

Unexpect - Fables of the Sleepless Empire

Frank Zappa - Civilization Phase III

Will Wood - “In case I make it,”

The Algorithm - Brute Force

Devin Townsend - Empath

Miles Davis - Bltches Brew

Oneohtrix point Never - R + 7

Panopticon - Autumn Eternal

King Capisce - Memento Mori

Cynic - Kindly Bent to Free Us

Archive - Controlling Crowds The Complete Edition Parts I-IV

Intronaut - The Direction of Last Things

SHT GHST - 1: The Creation

Dan Deacon - America

Opeth - Ghost Reveries

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians

those still require root, they just don’t explicitly say so. They still pop up with a password prompt

Jump ship. If you can make do without windows, do so. It takes away so much of the frustration, and you just learn to let it go when devs won’t make linux-compatible binaries: after all, it’s basically them telling you they need to be able to spy on you, so why use their app?

The point of security isn’t just protecting yourself from the threats you’re aware of. Maybe there’s a compromise in your distro’s password hashing, maybe your password sucks, maybe there’s a kernel compromise. Maybe the torrent client isn’t a direct route to root, but one step in a convoluted chain of attack. Maybe there are “zero days” that are only called such because the clear web hasn’t been made aware yet, but they’re floating around on the dark web already. Maybe your passwords get leaked by a flaw in Lemmy’s security.

You don’t know how much you don’t know, so you should be implementing as much good security practices as you can. It’s called the “Swiss Cheese” model of security: you layer enough so that the holes in one layer are blocked by a different layer.

Plus, keeping strong security measures in place for something that’s almost always internet connected is a good idea regardless of how cautious you think you’re being. It’s why modern web-browsers are basically their own VM inside your pc anymore, and it’s why torrent clients shouldn’t have access to anything besides the download/upload folders and whatever minimal set of network perms they need.

Beyond The Black Rainbow - A psychedelic loveletter to the 80s, about a dying cult and its first and last victims.

Anything by David Lynch, but particularly Mullholland Drive and Twin Peaks.

Mullholland Drive is a dream logic trip through Los Angeles as a small town actress finds work and love and heartbreak and murder in the big city while the world becomes increasingly incomprehensible and nightmarishly surreal; it also includes one of the best acted, directed, shot and scored scenes in all of horror.

Twin Peaks is the story of a small town deep in the forests of Washington, struggling to solve the murder of a high schooler, an FBI agent arrives and proceeds to explore esoteric and supernatural causes; part drama, part cosmic horror.

image editing

imagemagick for basic transformations/compression/conversions, CLI (locally hosted) AI for the shops

Funny you should say that, because…

https://vim-adventures.com/

Real wizards use ed

I know it’s not new, but I’ve been seeing a lot more “suggested” (read: sponsored) places along my routes these days. Either businesses are just now discovering the feature, or they lowered the barrier for entry. Either way, it’s annoying as fuck to have ads pop up that I have to avoid when moving the map around to navigate

When I think of exquisite sound design, two of my favorite movies spring to mind: Stalker (1979) and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The former has such a subtle soundtrack that it’s almost like it’s not there, but without it so much of the atmosphere of a movie that is heavily atmospheric would be lost.

The latter is just a perfect western with a perfect western soundtrack. The theme is well known, but L’estasi Dell’oro gives me chills every time it starts playing.

real. Geinoh Yamashirogumi elevated that movie beyond “weird mindfuck anime” to an immersive experience.

On the same note, Ghost in the Shell’s soundtrack is also a masterwork, though it doesn’t have a single stand out track like Kaneda’s Theme

Debian Testing has a lot more current packages, and is generally fairly stable. Debian Unstable is rolling release, and mostly a misnomer (but it is subject to massive changes at a moment’s notice).

Fedora is like Debian Testing: a good middleground between current and stable.

I hear lots of good things about Nix, but I still haven’t tried it. It seems to be the perfect blend of non-breaking and most up-to-date.

I’ll just add to: don’t believe everything you hear. Distrowars result in rhetoric that’s way blown out of proportion. Arch isn’t breaking down more often than a cybertruck, and Debian isn’t so old that it yearns for the performance of Windows Vista.

Arch breaks, so does anything that tries to push updates at the drop of a hat; it’s unlikely to brick your pc, and you’ll just need to reconfigure some settings.

Debian is stable as its primary goal, this means the numbers don’t look as big on paper; for that you should be playing cookie clicker, instead of micromanaging the worlds’ most powerful web browser.

Try things out for yourself and see what fits, anyone who says otherwise is just trying to program you into joining their culture war

I’ll have to give starship a try, seems like a cool way to handle customizing the prompt

as to the “omz is bloat and slows down your shell”:

1. How slow? Because I’ve never noticed. Are we talking about waiting for 15 seconds when I should only have to wait for 1, or are we talking theory and the difference between 0.5 vs 0.08 seconds in benchmarks?

Because I’ve never been inconvenienced by the speed of my shell nor terminal emulator, despite having tried all kinds of setups. Turns out that “blazing fast” gpu accelerated terminal really didn’t make much of a difference on human timescales. Now I’m at the point where I appreciate the features over the performance.

2. In reply to Brody’s point, I’m inclined to say “yes, and…?”

OMZ automates a lot. Sure, I could follow his way of manulaly sourcing dozens of individual shellscripts and making my own aliases and have a zshrc 1200 lines long… Or I could just let omz handle it.

Yes it’s mostly just a plugin manager, and…? Yes it automates a process I could do manually, and… ? Yes, it uses bindings that I didn’t personally write, and… ?

Fuck off with the clickbait “You’re living your life wrong, do this lifehack instead!!!” (and the lifehack is to reinvent the wheel) bullshit

Here’s a fun real lifehack: try things out for yourself, don’t just listen to and parrot other people’s opinions, don’t be afraid to go against the grain. Way more fun and fulfilling that way!