Dave.

There used to be a place at a local shopping center that was all glass and mirrors and was staffed by very serious young Asian men in sharp suits.

They sold - and only sold - boutique toffee apples.

I have MX Linux on a 14 year old Dell Laptop.

Works great because it’s got a lightweight desktop, and it has a tool (a GUI tool even!) that seamlessly merges the last available Nvidia 340 drivers for my GPU into the latest kernel. Parked at the desktop with no desktop apps running, it uses about 800MB of ram, leaving 15 GB left for whatever I need to run. Which I have found is plenty for my use case, I’ve never seen swap in use.

The MX tools are good, like everyone else has been saying here. They take away a lot of the fiddly business associated with the average “sysadmin” things that an end user needs to do.

That’s a phase change triggered by a seed crystal (generated from a physical shock from the ‘clicker’) where the transition from liquid to solid phases returns the latent heat that was previously added to turn it from solid to liquid.

There is no phase change in this material, it remains a solid and changes temperature depending on how much pressure is applied to it.

Our monkey-brain has put millions of years of evolution into a vision system designed to pick up 3d cues from our environment so we can use our fine motor skills to manipulate small objects. It’s a fantastic piece of wetware that uses shading and colours to pick up 3d hints about the objects we deal with daily and - once you’re a few years old - it’s completely automatic and requires no effort to use.

And then we remove all the 3D cues and skeuomorphic hints from our computer systems so that now the previously subconscious “monkey-click-button” process is now a foreground task where cognitive energy is burned up to identify the correct UI element to manipulate.

I should be able to shift the mouse pointer and click a UI element out of the corner of my eye. I shouldn’t be required to look at and then parse a ‘flat’ UI to determine if this element is a button or just a panel with text. GUI elements should map to recognisable physical objects wherever possible, and where they are more abstract (eg wifi icons) they should be clearly distinguishable from others in the icon set. You’re burning up cognitive energy needlessly otherwise, and that’s why I dislike the monochromatic new age UI/icon sets.

How

the FUCK

can a single datacentre cost

TWENTY SEVEN BILLION

dollars?

In litres and MJ because SI units make it easy:

Approximately 34 megajoules per litre for petrol/gasoline.

50 litres filling up in 4 minutes = 1.25 litres/second pumping rate. lol don’t do calculations before coffee, let’s just say you’ve got a hi-flow pump doing 1l/sec.

1 litre/second x 34MJ per litre = 34 MJ/second.

1 watt = 1 joule per second, so:

An average fill up runs at about 34 megawatts.

I’d not recommend it to anyone who can’t tell the difference between “wifi” and “internet”.

You still get all the same free stuff.
They’re charging for some new additional features.

This is standard enshittification.

1. Introduce a new premium tier, with “cool shit”, whatever that might be. Free tier still allows you to do all the stuff you did before.

2. Wait a period of time, about 6 to 12 months usually, to get the users used to the fact that the free tier is still the same as usual. Tinker with the premium tier a little to make it sound like awesome shit is happening there and everyone should get on it.

3. Degrade the free tier, usually by adding “sponsored content” i.e. ads, or dropping features so that genuinely useful stuff only becomes available in premium tier. Pitch this as “maintaining quality for our increasing user base” or some bullshit.

4. Ratchet up pricing for the premium tier, reduce/enshittify features in the free tier.

5. Repeat from step 3 until your userbase migrates to the Next Hot Thing and your product sinks into irrelevancy.

There is no need to mindlessly update this application, it’s been stable and full of enough actual features for some time now.

Get the 8.1.6 apk from uptodown.com. it’s the last update before enshittification occurred.

And then find the app in your installed app list in Google Play and untick “install updates automatically” in the three dot menu.

It’s not a sign of AI, but when every second post manages to slip the “not x, not y, just z” phrase into their wording, you get pretty over it, pretty quickly.

Ditto for posts that worm in the phrase “just physics”. No, it’s not “just physics”. Physics is complicated, and I wish AI slop would stop handwaving away a decent explanation with that phrase.

Title case capitalization.

Perhaps they’re talking about junction temperatures, but even then specialist components can only do 175 degrees C briefly.

Why

Monoculture isn’t great.

Having and maintaining other options is good for if/when things go bad.

Try Mint Mate, the desktop environment is lighter than Cinnamon. When I was running systems from that era, Mate was much speedier than KDE / Gnome 3.

After that it’s just looking at what’s running after boot up and deciding whether you need it or not. As long as it’s not hogging precious RAM/CPU don’t worry about disabling it.

Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of…

Not introducing, RE - introducing, just like how you could before. Alllllll the way back to Windows95, UNTIL YOU MESSED WITH IT.

Basically the whole post is “blah blah blah we screwed around with things so much blah blah blah we messed up file explorer blah blah blah we’re working at putting some minor things back and walking back forced updates a little and cramming AI into everything because that’s what we really want to do.”

laughs in country with public healthcare

Yeah you guys should really sort that out.

Oh, you know, only about 80 billion.

Could have given 10 bucks to everyone on earth, would’ve had more impact.

My department just gives them a PDF explaining with cool graphics how Linux can save more money, how more secure it is, how we can avoid the constant force fed bug filled updates that MSFT pushes, how we can customize it exactly to our and users needs, we can actually own our own keys… The goes on and on.

No, because there is no simple point and click group policy/active directory equivalent in Linux that allows a group of 5 IT techs to manage 2000 desktops. And if you get your shit together and actually use the tools that Microsoft provides, you don’t get surprise updates, you can image PCs via a gui over network booting, you get bitlocker keys backed up in your domain etc etc etc etc etc.

All the things that allow a business to manage hardware and software with the minimum amount of expensive employees, Microsoft provides it, for money of course. That money is offset by the reduction in IT guys needed to look after everything.

It’s that simple. CorporateLand won’t touch Linux on the workstation until that’s possible.

I’m not sure, but if cake is being served, count me in.

Anyone completely switching off windows needs a bulletproof system

A solid 90 percent of home users just need a browser, email, and access to some kind of app store or repository where they can click on the big colourful icon and get a program they want.

Any modern distro can provide that, it doesn’t have to be the particular one that you’ve got an obsession about.