I understand that things have changed a bit since I first moved over to Linux - moving from Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu ‘Warty Warthog’ was such a revelation in overall user-friendliness and usability, back in the day. But upgrading my graphics card from an NVidia one to an AMD was a similar change. I might have only just installed the base operating system and a desktop environment and haven’t got around to a web browser yet, but I’ve already got full hardware accelerated graphics - that’s crazy.

Most distros now make the NVidia drivers a complete non-issue, I think? My 6600XT is requiring just a few too many compromises on new games, so I’ll need something new too, sooner or later. I used to hold off on graphics cards updates until I could get something twice as good so that it was a noticeable upgrade, but I could buy a pretty decent second-hand car for all the ones which are ‘twice as good’ now.

An upgrade from a 1050 Ti shouldn’t be such a problem. Well done on keeping it alive so long - I had a GeForce GTX 970 that would have been a similar age, but it let out its magic smoke years ago.

‘Ty chuju jebany’, nice.

Our Polish taxi driver does a very solid line in ‘kurwa’ every other word, but it’s always nice to expand your horizons.

Indeed - most Java IDEs have FernFlower built in, so it’s dead easy.

Decompiled Java is surprisingly close to the original, especially compared to eg. decompiled C++; good luck with that. You get all the class, function and variable names back on the original line numbers.

What you do not get back is any comments. So you can see what and how, but not why. Admittedly, most comments are kind of useless and do not explain ‘why’ very well, but for weird-but-critical code they can be essential.

Indeed - I’ve seen more people recommend Hannah Montana Linux (apt-based) than any of those for newcomers recently.

You are entirely right that a Linux distribution is really just its package manager, the default packages installed, and some remote repositories which may (or may not) have had some customisation applied, which will have been pulled and built from a source repository somewhere. All that’s really needed to swap between eg. Arch, Manjaro or Cachy is to update the repo files and issue a package manager update command, although I’d probably like to verify my backups and get a stiff drink first.

The House of Linux is built out of bricks, and the bricks aren’t that scary - you can take them to bits and look at them if you like, they’re usually zipped-up folders of text files and the binaries you’d get from compiling them yourself. But if that’s not what you’re used to, then yeah - 🤯 .

In all seriousness, I wish that most distros had art half as good as what Void Linux has - got some really gifted people, there.

Strangely enough, “Windows always fucking up my dual boot setup” is what caused me to drop Windows for good about a decade ago. And Linux gaming has come on absolutely leaps and bounds since then.

True, but network effects are important to that.

There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.

There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.

Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.

Listen, there’s dozens of Linux users on Void, Slackware and Gentoo. Dozens! Especially the ones wanting to run the latest games. Can’t just leave all of them out.

Strangely, the search page for ProtonDB shows the ‘proton rating’ for games which have a ‘native but abandoned / broken’ native Linux build, whereas the actual page for the game just shows ‘native’ and I can’t see the button to show the rest of the information. I’m sure it used to be there; they’ve started hiding a lot of stuff in favour of making the ‘steam deck’ results more prominent. But in some cases, ‘proton rating even with a native Linux build’ is quite important.

eg. Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising.

• search page shows ‘gold’
• actual page says ‘native’, but ‘loads of rendering issues, really slow, broken on multi-monitor setup, use proton instead’.

Mark of the Ninja: Remastered:

• search page says ‘platinum’
• actual page says ‘native’, but ‘frequent deadlocking issues makes game unplayable, use proton instead’.

That’s fascinating stuff, thanks!

Moved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.

Biggest problem was all his ‘documents’, which were office365 web links rather than ‘actual documents’. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.

Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He’d done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn’t recommend that for beginners.

Speaking as someone with a chemical engineering degree and twenty years in industry:

• we have some really complicated computer programs and simulations for all the important stuff, then we add ten percent for safety and round it up to the next standard size. We don’t buy 292 mm pipe, we just use 300 mm, because that’s what’s on the shelves.

• you need to be able to decide quickly whether results you’re seeing are sensible, usually to order-of-magnitude, and whether eg. it will take an hour to fill a tank, or a week. We usually don’t care whether it’s 55 minutes or 56. You need to be able to do those sums in your head, though.

3 is more than accurate enough as an engineering approximation for pi. In fact, 5 is close enough, and much easier to work with.

Aww, sweet looking puss. Good work on taking her in.

Was kind of hoping that your other cats would be called Ryuk and L, but that might be asking for trouble.

Aww, man alive. Most perfect desktop environment I’ve seen in years, and then it’s a full OS rather than just a DE. Had been looking in the ArchWiki for how to install it and everything.

There’s no committee that approves words being added to the English language. Anything that’s understood by the group that uses it is a real word. We make up new words and change the definition of old ones all the time; dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.

That doesn’t stop the concept of ‘agentic AI’ being a pile of bullshit being peddled by snake-oil salesmen, of course, but you don’t have to be Shakespeare to be permitted to make up new words.

SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!

The sound and the video would get out of sync if you left it on long enough, like 24 hours or so, for added confusion.

I think it’s in the nature of capital cities that they tend to attract quite a lot of people who want to try “life in the city” for a while and then move on? I’ve a few friends who moved down to London to see if they could make it in the music industry, which they did not, and then moved on to somewhere else with a less insane cost of living, after a decade or so. I’d observe that, while there’s quite a lot of Brits in London, there’s a massive shortage of Londoners. When people have kids, they generally want a bigger house somewhere with a decent school nearby, which in many cases means moving to the outskirts, or to a different city altogether.

That’s very much to London’s benefit, though. They have everything that you can imagine; specialist shops of every variety, and opportunities in every industry. However, I don’t think ‘London weighting’ of wages is really sufficient. Even if the wages are eg. 20% more for doing the ‘same job’ as the rest of the UK, you aren’t going to get a lot for that, and a lot of people in entry-level jobs are going to be living in big shared houses and struggling to scrape by, until they find the experience/inclination to leave. That’s a tale as old as time, tho, and probably to the benefit of the city - without a massive turnover of people, wages would probably need to be even higher.

Diversity is strength. If you don’t like that, then a bustling metropolitan capital city is not for you, and London is no exception. They’ve a nice bridge for the racists to throw themselves off; cry while you do, dickheads.

Centrally managed repositories help a lot, here. Linux users tend not to download random software off of sketchy websites; it’s all installed and kept up to date via the package manager.

Yes, Linux malware and viruses exist, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The usual reason for installing Linux virus scanners is because you’re hosting a file/email server, and you want to keep infected files away from Windows users, tho.

Isn’t the default installation of Ubuntu to BTRFS? In which case, you should have an @ subvolume with Ubuntu that’s mounted to /, and an @home subvolume that’s mounted to /home.

Make a new subvolume, install a new operating system into it, and choose that subvolume in the bootloader, should be able to have Ubuntu and ‘your favourite OS’ (I use Arch btw) living side-by-side with the same home directory.

Good name, though - I like it.