So, have you bitched at your state rep about it yet?

toggle dials (? dunno if that’s the correct term)

“Rotary switch”

I mean, yeah, if you were trying to get a game to run using bare WINE in like <2010 or something, you were gonna be troubleshooting it for a while (and might still fail just because the functionality hadn’t actually caught up yet). By 2017, though, DirectX etc. support had improved drastically (Valve’s first attempt at SteamOS was already a few years old by then), so the main issue was figuring out the right configuration (which version of Windows to mimic, installing supporting libraries, etc.) and tools like PlayOnLinux and Lutris went a long way towards crowdsourcing and automating that.

And on top of that, pretty much all the platforms, even all the way down to this one, are censored in at least one increasingly-relevant way.

I could be wrong (I haven’t really paid attention lately), but I think the state of Linux on “smart” TVs is considerably more dire than the state of Android phones. At least with the latter, projects like LineageOS and GrapheneOS are a thing, whereas I know of zero third-party community firmware projects for TVs.

In 2017? Well, that’s an interesting question. On one hand, it definitely wasn’t as easy as it is now. On the other hand, I was motivated to ditch Windows and willing to make the gaming sacrifices necessary to make that happen. The last version of Windows I used was 7, and I was determined that 10 would never touch this machine – or any computer of mine going forward, for that matter. I also was done putting up with 7, given that Microsoft was starting to backport 10’s spyware and forced-upgrade BS to it by then.

It’s been a while, so I’m fuzzy on the details of what I was playing between 2017 and 2018 (when Proton came out). I think I just limited myself to the subset of my Steam games that had native Linux versions (e.g. TF2 and other Valve first-party games, Don’t Starve, Cities Skylines, etc.), supplemented with PlayOnLinux for Star Trek Online, which, being an MMO I was already committed to, was pretty much the only exception I made. Otherwise, my attitude became “if the developer can’t be bothered to support my OS, that’s their loss, not mine, and I don’t need their shitty Windows-only game anyway.”

After Proton came out and I flipped that switch to “enable Steam Play for all other titles”, I think the majority of my Steam games “Just Worked” – yes, even back at that initial release – and the ones that didn’t became compatible pretty rapidly over the next couple of years. With one exception, I don’t think I’ve had trouble getting a game working since the start of the pandemic, if not earlier. At this point, I’ve softened my “I won’t buy a new game if it doesn’t natively support Linux stance” and instead simply expect every game I buy to work. And they have!

(That one exception was Star Trek Online, which I had continued running via PlayOnLinux because (a) why mess with a working config, and (b) the Steam version of STO wants to permanently link your STO account to your Steam account, which I didn’t want to do. One day, though, they updated the launcher or something and it quit working. I eventually gave up trying to fix it in PlayOnLinux and decided to use Proton for it instead. But I still didn’t want to link my accounts, so I had to jump through these weird hoops where I installed the Steam version, but didn’t log in or play it, and instead re-imported it as a non-Steam game pointing at the executable for the Steam version and then fiddled with the compatibility settings to find a version of Proton that worked. That’s still the configuration I’m using for it to this day.)

Shut the fuck up, DWS! Nobody wants to hear you stating the fucking obvious in a desperate attempt to distract us from the fact that your corrupt mismanagement of the DNC was part of what got us into this catastrophe!

Yes, it’s a damn shame that Linus is weak on property rights.

Because that’s what this actually is, by the way: violating the device owner’s property rights in order to prioritize the manufacturer’s temporary monopoly privilege over the software – which was only created for the sole and express purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts” in the first place – above them.

There’s also the issue that Harris and the Democrats spent the last four years repudiating the idea that there was anything insecure about our elections systems, and being the big-tent party that favors process over outcome and desperately clings to democratic norms and the status quo, it seems to me that she’d likely be very loathe to call them into question now.

And even if she were so inclined, she already conceded (and pretty quickly, at that). Does she even have standing to demand a recount now? And even if she should still have standing, would SCOTUS agree?

FWIW, personally, these statistical anomalies seem compelling enough to me that I agree we should go ahead and double-check. I’m not holding out much hope that it will happen, though.

It should be a thing because most (all?) “smart TVs” run some variety of Linux, which, as Free Software, is supposed to guarantee the device owner’s right to modify the software running on the thing. However, in most (all?) cases, the practical ability to do that has been destroyed by subverting encryption functions against the owner in a process called Tivoization.

In other words:

1. No, it isn’t really a thing,
2. It’s wrong for it not to be a thing, and
3. You should be pissed off about it.

Also, I would describe it more as “taken for granted” than “underrated.”

His opponent also failed to outperform Trump – in other words, there were fewer total votes cast for that race than there were for President, i.e. some people just voted for President and left the rest of the ballot blank. As for percentages, Sanders was within a percent of Harris, which sounds like statistical noise to me.

On top of that, what matters to this conversation is how people in states Trump won would behave, not how people in Vermont would behave. Vermont is less unequal and less impoverished than most other US states, so there’s plenty of reason to think that his platform would be even more popular in places other than Vermont, if those voters had the chance to actually hear about it.

“Make this” evokes hardware projects for these. I have many ideas for those that I can’t really pursue myself, as I’m not a hardware guy and don’t have the resources for it.

Care to list a few? I’m not a “hardware guy” either, by training, but I happen to be fixating on microcontroller projects & KiCAD at the moment.

Concentration camps might be a bit hyperbolic

It is not. Calling them “death camps” would be hyperbolic because Trump hasn’t started talking about a “final solution” (yet), but “concentration camp” is very much a factually-accurate synonym for the sorts of mass detention facilities necessary to implement deportations at the scale Trump has been proposing.

So basically, everybody switched from expensive UNIX™ to cheap “unix”-in-all-but-trademark-certification once it became feasible, and otherwise nothing has changed in 30 years.

Okay, I need you to understand something: not voting in a primary is not the same thing as not voting in the general election. That goes double for the kinds of people who are pissed off at the two-party system in general.

Do you realize how fundamentally stupid it is to respond to the argument “Bernie was capable of winning the general election precisely because he would appeal to the kinds of people who don’t vote in Democratic primaries” by saying “but if he can’t even win the primary how could he win the general election?”

Kubuntu, because when I got my Vega 56 GPU on release day (August 14, 2017), I had to download the proprietary driver straight from AMD to get it working, and Ubuntu was the only distro supported by both it and Steam at the time. (Otherwise, I would’ve picked Debian or Mint.)

I don’t love Ubuntu (especially how they push Snap), but I can’t be bothered with the hassle of reinstalling my OS.

But it’s not the Democratic Party’s right to do so. Calling people stupid instead of trying to win their vote is dereliction of duty.

The Democrats have kowtowed to corporate donors (and the likes of AIPAC) to the point that they are failing to do their job, and they need to be held accountable for that.

No, damn it! Quit being willfully obtuse. Why can’t you acknowledge the fact that damn near a third of the country is so disaffected by both parties’ refusal to meet their needs that they’d given up on voting at all? That’s the demographic – people clamoring for change, any change, because the status quo has failed them – that fake-populist Trump appealed to for his margin of victory, and that real-populist Bernie could’ve appealed to even better.

My hunch is that they’re in denial, still trying to treat the situation as “business as usual,” and will make for very surprised corpses when Trump’s thugs put them up against the wall.