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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • A lot of Broadcom cards are supported, so you either have a missing driver/firmware blob or some really bad luck.

    Historically, phone line modems were very often unsupported (some people may remember the term “winmodem”), but hardly anyone uses them anymore, so the problem has effectively gone away. Older consumer-grade printers that didn’t speak Postscript, ditto. I own a very old TV capture card of the analog type that has never been supported, but probably won’t work with modern Windows either.

    Modern hardware is more likely to be supported unless it’s too niche to attract developers, or too bleeding-edge for its protocol to have been reverse-engineered yet.









  • Whether it’s a failure or not depends on whether they’re living in yurts by choice because it’s their traditional way of living, or they’re doing it because it’s cheap and they can’t afford anything else. (There are probably also some sanitation issues—I don’t think most yurts have running water, so public infrastructure would have to make up the difference there.) And you do need some minimal qualifications for assessing that: talking to the people living in the yurts would be a good start.





  • Author admits smartphones are ubiquitous, and doesn’t at all consider, in a hypothetical situation where everyone unanimously agreed to stop using them, where all this e-waste will go?

    Pretty much every single smartphone in use right now will be ewaste 20 years from now, and most of them will be within 10. So we have that disposal problem already regardless. Hypothetically, if everyone were to get rid of their phones, we’d at least stop creating even more future ewaste.




  • Gentoo is quite happy to allow you to copy your world file and config files from one system to another, then just issue emerge --emptytree world and take a couple of days’ vacation somewhere while the system rebuilds itself as specified. That’s been an option for as long as I’ve been using it, so at least 20 years. Other than the speed, the only issue is that you have to know where to find all the config files, of which there may be many distributed across /etc and ~ (and maybe other places if you’re really unlucky).

    (Figuring out how to word the emerge command so that it downloads as many binary packages as possible to shorten the wait is left to the interest of the reader.)