While there is a huge amount of circular money happening because it’s all a financial scam, it is inflating share prices which are invested in by lots of institutions so when the bubble bursts and those shares are worthless a huge amount of wealth will be wiped out and the suffering will be very widespread hurting regular people.

The billionaires won’t be the ones queing for food. Hard to see much glee ahead unfortunately.

The stability of Arch/Cachy updates is not just about time between updates (more often is generally better) but also about accumulated old configs files with deprecated options that have been ignored and reading about breaking changes.

I updated 4 machines at the same time earlier this week (pacoloco for the win). One is a cachy/arch hybrid that started life as arch. The one with the oldest continually updated installation (it is a ship of theseus, I don’t believe it has any of the original hardware) couldn’t get to a graphical login and it took me a few minutes to replace an obsolete config file with a pacnew and get it back up.

This might have been a show stopper for someone coming from Windows or Mac. Perhaps even for some Linux users. But I am decades into this and it is how I like it. I ran slackware for years and Debian Sid. The loss of time to breakage from upgrades is absolutely trivial to me compared with the advantages of a well packaged and up to date system. If people aren’t into that there is no shame in using an immutable distro. The diversity of distros might be confusing but it is a huge advantage because there is something out there for everyone.

Most of the people who are going to leave for Linux right now were probably going to leave anyway once Linux provided what they needed (eg Proton support for most of their game library). Linux has always been a lot of fun for serious tinkerers. Curious types would already have at least tried linux in a vm or dual boot but were being held back my some app or game.

My family has grown up with Linux desktops and gaming and is very comfortable using Linux for boring normie stuff but they aren’t power users. They use what is installed and what is installed is Linux. But when they have Windows installed on their school computers they don’t seem to care. It does all the same things, just differently. One of my kids had several keys not working on his laptop keyboard and just put up with it for ages without telling anyone. Makes no sense. They are my only window into the Microsoft world and what I see is complacency. I think most people have a huge capacity to put up with annoyances before they will take action and power users and enterprise can disable a lot of the shittier features.

Microsoft can probably go a lot further extracting revenue from their users through dark patterns, additional paid services, marketing, sales of data etc. They are a for profit company in a time when it is not just normal but expected that companies will cannibalize their long term potential for short term profit taking. I suspect Windows 11 will get a lot worse but if you walk into a store to buy a new laptop its still going to be the only pre-installed option outside of Apple or Chromebooks for years to come.

We have three windows laptops in the house. All for use in schools which were always heavily pro-Microsoft here. I haven’t paid much attention to Windows 11. The last time I used Windows other than setting it up or fixing it for someone else was probably XP. All three users of those laptops come home from school/work, put them on a charger then head to a linux machine to play games, edit video etc. They know they have linux support and they have grown up with Linux. Not one of them has asked to upgrade their laptops to Linux yet.

Perhaps Microsoft isn’t annoying regular users as much as the tech press and tech users think they are. Remember people still use shit like Facebook not just willingly but in some cases enthusiastically. We are a diverse lot. Some people, probably the majority, will put up with the same shit every day and not think to change their environment. I don’t know whether it is too difficult or they are scared of change or they don’t realize it is possible or perhaps they simple aren’t bothered by the same things. Possibly all of the above.

Libreoffice puts my docs where I tell it and they get synced to my other machines. Don’t understand why people store docs on other people’s computers. The business world is full of dumbarses leading dumbarses. You can’t tell them though.

I shouldn’t call it abandonware. First thing I found was Plants vs Zombies came up under EA in one of my kids libraries - sort of thing that runs well on his under powered school laptop. Think I mixed it up with Bad Piggies and all those old Rovio mobile games that basically got abandoned as publishers moved to adware and pay to win crap.

When I think of EA titles I think of Sims and sports and battlefield - which we don’t really play. I found It Takes Two and a few really old titles like Mirrors’s Edge that nobody plays and I don’t think are installed anywhere. Wasn’t sure about their relationship with Crytek. Not going to go too crazy removing stuff but its a good reminder to have a think about game sandboxing.

Podman, docker etc are all linux namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, capablities etc underneath. You can get similar restrictions with systemd or flatpack/flatseal(bubblewrap) or firejail or other solutions. It could be built into Steam or wine or via flatpak. Podman/docker isn’t very friendly for gamers coming from windows but its good for more advanced users. Something like distrobox. Ideally focus all the effort on flatpak and make it great for everyone else.

I was going to proudly mention we don’t have any EA titles on our families steam libraries, thinking of their biggest names.

But then I found some abandonware like title in one of my kids libraries. So now I need to do more digging (oops, found more). Ofcourse all our machines run Linux (do I need to mention the distro? I feel I do but you can probably guess) so kernel mode access isn’t likely. But I think I need to pay more attention to sandboxing and isolating games.

So late stage communism is the same as late stage capitalism. Toilet paper for me but not for thee.

Software enables new revenue streams. Manufacturers can lock out features and force people to pay subscriptions. The industry wants to normalize that so they get bigger margins and a source of revenue that extends long after the initial sale. Motor vehicle as a service.

I like controls that don’t distract from driving. Computers without any internet connection aren’t a problem. I don’t mind all the buttons and switches being connected to a micro-controller. It saves a lot of wiring and complexity. While I don’t like screens I can see how they are useful for some people. Ideally you can use a vehicle offline and with the screens off.

I grew up before mobile phones so I know I have the skills to function without one. There isn’t much I would miss. I am ok without social media, maps, chat apps etc.

Its the odd little things that I don’t do very often that could get annoying. Stuff like translating a label in a foreign language. There isn’t really an easy way to do that without a smart phone.

Not sure I actually want a linux phone. Not sure I want a smart phone at all anymore.

I think digital convergence probably went as far as it needed then kept going. Not sure how we went from nokia candybars and palm pilots to having a an always on camera, microphone, location and wifi sensor controlled by foreign advertising companies in our pockets but I think I am over it.

Americans are dumb cunts.

I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, “humanity towards others” etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn’t really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don’t get why people would use it.

Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don’t do this bullshit.

Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn’t have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

Paying to get access to data and eyeballs. Social media is about mass surveillance and influence. The customers pay the service for access to the stupid people. Always have.

Niri is very promising on a ultrawide. Not so good on a 3:2 laptop. I maintain a config to experiment with it but it’s a big commitment to change not just your desktop environment but your whole workflow and then to have different environments on devices with different screen aspect ratios.

It looks like it will be handled by third party verification services in Australia. You will likely provide some form of ID with age which is likely to be government id and the service will check it then inform the social media company you pass. The legislation doesn’t allow direct government involvement in running the verification service and the verification companies have to conform to privacy laws.

It is certainly a flawed system. If kids want to access things they will and there is potential for abuse. However when considering harm mitigation you need to look at the whole population.

A lot of the more extreme libertarian views on the Internet originate in the US where their “freedoms” of speech and firearms have obviously just been a distraction while they were robbed blind. They couldn’t even protect their school kids from mass shootings because they put ideology and theoretical bullshit ahead of morality, empathy and the survival of their families. I used to buy into the Internet libertarian stuff in a huge way in the days of IRC and Usenet before the mega rich tech bros moved in and turned the Internet into a shitshow of scams, mass-surveillance and brain washing. Still a big proponent of free software and agree with a lot of stuff from the EFF but the oligarchs ruined it. Now I want to burn it down. Anything to keep these nonses away from our kids is good with me.

The idea in Australia is to place the responsibility on the social media companies.

The government isnt filtering traffic or enforcing behaviour. It is fining companies if they don’t implement a form of age verification that is compliant with privacy laws.

We can’t even make these companies pay tax and obey other laws so I am not very optimistic but at least it raises awareness of the problem.

Our family does a reasonable amount of editing in kdenlive every week (youtube, education etc). A decade or so ago practically every video editor on linux felt incredibly unstable. I remember trying to do stuff in Cinelerra. Now shit just works. There are a couple of things in the workflow that still need other tools but kdenlive has been fairly solid. It could do with some minor usability tweaks to make it friendlier to people coming from other editors and for beginners. Also I wish the gpu acceleration (movit) was stable enough to be enabled in MLT in kdenlive builds. Focussing on stability makes sense though.

a lot less CGI than I was expecting.

Less CGI is just invisible CGI Hollywood consistently lies about the amount of visual effects used. If it is done well, as it mostly is in a movie like this, it isn’t too distracting so I don’t know why they lie about it.