For real though, good on ya. It takes a little getting used to, but is so worth it in the long run to not have to fight against the profit-driven whims of a megacorp. It's also so much more customizable if you want to put together a really specific workflow for yourself.
"A user-friendly distribution like Ubuntu can be an excellent choice for individuals wary of privacy and ethical issues surrounding AI," says Taylor. "It provides a robust and user-friendly environment that minimizes the tracking and data collection you’d typically encounter with macOS or Windows."
It's been quite a few years since I used desktop Ubuntu, but I remember the Unity DE back then being not so user-friendly, at least for someone coming from the Windows paradigm. I've heard (but could be misinformed) that it's gotten even more opinionated over the years. Something like Mint is likely to be a better option for a first-time user.
Also, I wish the article had mentioned Proton. It states that you may have to be willing to abandon certain games, but that's far from the reality these days. At least through Steam nearly everything works right out of the box just by enabling Proton.
You're a person of good taste! 7 days to die is the go-to co-op game in my friend group, and my wife and I are big fans of The Forest (still haven't gotten the sequel but I hear it's great).
As for bad early access games, I literally have a category in my Steam library called "mistakes" where they live so I can hide their shame.
It looks like that takes care of the worst of the initial bugs, at least those that I experienced. I'm really looking forward to seeing where this game develops from here, especially now that the developer is unexpectedly rich after just the first day of sales. It sounds like he already had a great track record of listening to his community during the pre-release alpha testing, so that's encouraging.
As an example, Mint is built on the Ubuntu base, Bunsen is built on Debian, etc. These are often called flavors as they're not considered distros but rather something built on top of a distro.
From my understanding, those would generally still be referred to as distros in their own right. I've always understood a flavour to be a variant of a specific distro. For example, kubuntu is the KDE flavour of Ubuntu.
Okay, this got me curious. From the wikipedia article on viruses:
Viruses are considered by some biologists to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, although they lack the key characteristics, such as cell structure, that are generally considered necessary criteria for defining life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as "organisms at the edge of life" and as replicators.
Yeah, for me (an elder millenial), I use them in the middle of a sentence in the form of a dramatic pause, or sometimes at the start of a sentence in specific cases. I'm not saying any of this is necessarily grammatically correct (or that the boomers are wrong for how they use them), but this is just what feels closest to regular speech to me.
Well, I'm old-adjacent and I literally don't think either of my grandpas so much as touched a cell phone or computer in their lives, but I get your point.
Yes! This is what I always associate with older folks texting or emailing. I use ellipses a fair bit for (my attempts at) comedic effect. Some older folks are using them on a whole different level, having this weird habit of ending sentences with them where most people would use a period or exclamation point. It can come off sounding very ominous.
"Bill is coming over."
Okay, cool. Have fun with Bill.
"Bill is coming over ..."
Grandpa, are you in trouble? What's Bill going to do???
Yes! You've got the spirit! This other guy with the audacity to think I hadn't already considered that. And before anyone says depth charges, those only work on submarines. Surface to surface missiles? Good luck - the plane is under the surface.
Yup! Where possible I try to get everything in x265 for this reason. It takes a little more processing power to transpose, but the difference in file size is worth it.
I've heard you'll take a quality hit to re-encode something from x264 to x265, however. If you care about that, it's better to just find a new source recorded with x265 or AV1 (if all your devices can run it).
I'm not very knowledgeable in that end of things, though, so I could be wrong.
Oh, absolutely. It's all but inevitable and we're not exactly spoiled for good options in our oligopoly-friendly country, but at least for the moment they're not Loblaws/Walmart.
Now that you mention it, I seem to recall reading something similar a few years back. I still think they'll inevitably break bad though - all it will take is some board and/or leadership turnover. We can at least enjoy the ride (and cheap hotdogs) in the meantime.
Or - hear me out here - they take over the downed AWACS but leave it in the sea. You can't use surface to air missiles on a plane below sea level. It's functionally indestructible, and I see no conceivable faults in my plan.
I fundamentally agree with you that publicly-traded corporations are inherently problematic due to the nature of their fiduciary duty to shareholders. That said, I think Costco is clearly the lesser of these particular evils. I have no doubt that given time they'll turn to shit, but thus far (to my understanding) they at least pay something resembling a living wage and have reasonably consumer-friendly policies.
Shopping local could (if even possible) be the more ethical option, but most people are struggling and small grocers simply don't have the margins to generally be affordable. I'm betting very few of them are able to pay their employees anything close to Costco either (if they even care to - plenty of small business owners are greedy in their own right).
Now if only I didn't have a panic attack every time I set foot in a Costco ...
I was going to ask, "Who the hell pays for cheats," but then I remembered that the mobile gaming industry is a thing. Sooo, I guess there's pretty well-established precedent for this sort of nonsense.
One of us! One of us! One of us!
For real though, good on ya. It takes a little getting used to, but is so worth it in the long run to not have to fight against the profit-driven whims of a megacorp. It's also so much more customizable if you want to put together a really specific workflow for yourself.