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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • Windows Registry

    I had recurring issues with registering Bluetooth devices, where they would pair initially but refuse to connect again after a reboot. I couldn’t remove the device from saved connections, and registry edits wouldn’t save or persist. I’d have to completely uninstall the driver, change the registry, and reinstall the drivers, with restarts between each step, to get it to work for 1-2 days.

    Now, having to troubleshoot isn’t what turned me away from Windows to Linux. I knew I would run into that plenty on Linux as well, but I came to hate the registry. If I was going to have to go through all this trouble to get things to work, I might as well do it on a system I had more control over. I had worked with different distros on VMs and dual booting before, so when I built a new system, I just skipped Windows entirely.


  • I agree with not overly fanboying, but “they might stop support” can literally happen with any platform. If AMD stops open source support, they’re in the same boat as NVIDIA but with a leg up from having all the history an experience from the time with support.

    Your favorite distro could go out of support and have the project closed tomorrow, just like Windows 10 reaching EoL. Except someone else can fork that distro and pick up the mantle to continue the project.

    That game that you really want to play on Linux might suddenly choose to implement an anti-cheat or DRM that isn’t compatible with Linux, or a different game might choose to remove that block and it suddenly opens up for the Linux community.



  • So, right in that meta-analysis, it was showing that all but one study they reviewed indicated that content warnings increased avoidance, and that in cases of avoidance anticipatory anxiety was slightly raised. Which makes sense, that’s what anxiety is. The analysis also showed that non-avoidance with a content warning did not improve anxiety responses through time to emotionally and mentally prepare for the content, compared to exposure without a content warning.

    So… it gives people the choice to not engage, and offers a better outcome if you choose to not engage. Yeah, there’s more anxiety than if you didn’t come across the content warning (or content) at all, but it offers choice.

    I think the how and when content warnings are used needs to be further refined and more uniformly applied, but this meta-analysis does not conclude “content warnings are a bane to society”.



  • That’s a little unfair, because enjoyment of something doesn’t necessitate it being experienced from beginning to end in a linear progression. Something like the seasonal(?) content on No Man’s Sky often requiring a save file being restarted and not needed the main story to be completed to finish the new objectives. Or, something like Path of Exile, where each season progresses from a fresh start at level 1, with no progress carried over.

    Progress gets rest on those about as frequently, it not more so, than the resets in Star Citizen, except those games are also feature complete with a full story involved.

    Maybe something like Ark, then, with the creation of new servers. No real story being progressed through, but a multi-player sandbox environment. Again, though, that’s a feature complete game where all the systems (mostly) work.

    I guess where I’m going is that you can certainly look at individual elements of the game and compare those to similar systems in other games. And if expectations are of it being a sandbox you can mess around in and experience some cool systems, it will deliver. But it is not a finished game that has persistent player driven progress. It is not a game with a story path you can follow (though, I don’t think it claims to be once fully released, either). It is buggy at times and suffers server issues as the small changes and interactions build up over time, making an instance unstable and eventually kicking everyone logged in.

    “Demo” might be the closest description, but that doesn’t quite capture the experience of playing it. It falls very short of being a full game. It also is something that other games just don’t capture the same feeling of.

    Again, I’m not trying to convince anyone to spend any money towards it, but absolutely give the free fly events a chance.





  • “Complicated descriptions”? Is there a lamp on one side, or a closet door? Just use that as a frame of reference, I wouldn’t call that a complicated description. Or, if you usually have the same bigs-poon, little-spoon orientation, you can describe which shoulder you’re laying on. But I still think using features of the room is the simplest way. “I’m laying on the closet side.”


  • But for those people that want to try something with the laptop they were just going to throw out anyway, or now they have two desktops after buying an upgrade, and they are willing to tinker with something new, why not? The issues you came across with Mint seem to have a very minor impact to me in the context of running a web browser, word processing, and video streaming. A later comment seemed to place PopOS in the same category. For a casual user, who isn’t needing to install a bunch of different apps, isn’t that fine?


  • Not disagreeing with the distros that were explored here, but wouldn’t the point of something like this also coincide with trying to find the best distro to recommend to newcomers? And that would benefit from having a wider spread of distros investigated.

    That isn’t OPs responsibility, but it is a little unfair to say that Linux as a whole isn’t ready when such a narrow view was investigated. SteamOS, for example, for someone who only wants a PC to play games. How is Bazzite holding up for a beginner? Or PopOS, compared to Mint, for first time users?

    Not to mention issues experienced on Mint that are similar to issues in Windows 11. Windows 11 has intermittent issues while updating, can mess up driver installations, and sometimes needs access to PowerShell, command line, or third party apps and software to fix what is broken. Someone only familiar with Windows may simply accept those things as broken and move on, but on Linux it is perceived as a deal breaker.