Hold shit that’s dark.

In fairness the BBC is constantly mentioning climate change in it’s reporting of this summer.

Well the other side of that is managing software with hundreds (if not thousands) of person-years of development over it’s lifetime is also hard. There is a sunken cost fallacy with X11, and X11 was constantly extended to be what people needed it to be rather than the best design for the problems arising.

Having said that, I’m not sure Wayland is the ideal solution. X11 doesn’t get in the way of solutions to problems, while Wayland really does. We needed a new and modern display server, but the Wayland project has decided to make that quite restricted - I personally think the security model is too far in the other direction from X11.

I use Micro in the terminal - it offers good desktop integration with keys similar to DEs like ctrl+v and ctrl+c, rather than being terminal centred (e.g. Ctrl+C is usually the standard interrupt/abort key in the terminal). So it’s nice if you’re mainly in a desktop but pop in to a terminal occasionally and have the DE muscle memory.

I use Kate outside the terminal.

But honestly, which text editor you use depends on what you use it for and how often. Vim is very powerful and allows very fast use & productivity if you learn it properly and probably very useful if you spend a lot of time in the terminal or TTY, but Nano is more straight forward and easy for a lot of basic terminal based work.

Ok:

• Pay off the 900 bucks
• Set up a savings account and a standing order for $100 a month from your current account into your savings account
• Don’t touch the savings account. If Next september is 2027 - you’ll have $1200 and started a saving habit

I found this article very interesting; the author is shorting on Oracle and makes that clear. But they give a convincing and cogent argument about the severity of the AI bubble and where it’s going, with links to interesting news stories and opinion pieces throughout.

The circular flow of cash between AI companies, and the Enron style revenue inflation is laid out in a clear way. It’s scary that such crazy behaviour is going on in the markets, and it seems the markets are catching on.

I am worried about Russia and it’s behaviour, but I totally disagree with this narrative across Europe about spending more on defence.

We spend plenty as it is, we just need to reorganise things and integrate our armies and navies. So many resources can be freed up by removing pointless duplication and redundancy, without spending more money at the expense of other parts of our economies.

It won’t happen because nationalism is a disease that infects almost all European countries.

What we need in the UK is electoral reform. We have the same problems all of Europe has, but in the UK they’re massively exacerbated by not having proportional representation. Germany and France have big problems with right wing crazies too - AfD and Marine Le Pen for example. But these countries have proportional representation that at least helps keeps the crazies at bay. For now at least.

The big difference is that in the UK, under “First Past the Post” voting, our version of Trump-light - Boris Johnson - got absolute power with just 43% of the vote. And there is a very real risk someone far worse - Nigel Farrage - can too.

But lets also not kid ourselves European countries are doing well. Germany has a pretty weak government having switched to Merz recently from Scholz, and yet another fractious grand coalition. And France’s parliament is currently totally dysfunctional, split 1/3 each between Left, Right and Centrist blocks, with Macron a lame duck and a very worrying presidential election coming up. Poland and Hungary are two countries that have just pulled back from dark precipices, but still have experienced autocratic populist regimes that have gutted their civil society and it’s a difficult road to rebuild them. Italy is in the hands of a right wing populist right now, and that seems to have been normalised.

The constant narrative seems to be only the UK is in a mess and it’s because they left the EU. I’d say, look more closely at national politics in many European countries and it’s clear Brexit is just a symptom of a malaise many countries are experiencing. Citizens in many European countries are unhappy, and that is reflected in the parties that are vying for power.

This article is a little over the top. 1.3m got settled status. So far, about 100 according to the article have been told there was a mistake in their application.

There may well be more, but of course any system is going to have an error rate and on face value given we’re 6 years post withdrawal (and it’s 5 years when people can convert to permanent residency) the error rate seems low? That may change - this may be the start of a scandal around government incompetence which would be unsurprising given how the Tories ran the government and brexit. But what really matters is not the letters going out saying there was a mistake; it’s what the government then does about it. Do they behave humanely? Or do they behave cruelly?

The problem with any story around the UK and Brexit is that it is always seen through the lens of being Pro or Anti EU. Instead this is a bog standard story of government mistakes and bureaucracy, and how it deals with them.

hehe, true. I’d just buy a used one off ebay. It doesn’t have to be a good drive really as it’s not going to have critical data on it. People don’t want them because the drives are old and could fail, but for this would literally just be windows and an online game so I’d take the risk of the inconvenience of having to replace it in a year. Any data lost can just be re-downloaded onto a new drive. E.g. I found a bunch of second hand SSDs for £30-£40 on a quick search now. Wouldn’t touch them for data storage but for this - why not?

I’d just get a cheap small second hard drive for your PC, install windows on it, dual boot set up (keep linux as the primary drive and Grub will have Windows as an option) and use it to play Fortnite. Windows will pester about activating but if you’re just using it to play Fortnite so ignore it.

I Linux main, but kept my old Windows drive and install in case I ever need it. Haven’t used it in ages, but it’s pretty harmless to have an old drive sitting in my PC. I don’t even mount the drive in Linux, it’s just there if I need it.

Librewolf, Waterfox and GNU IceCat are all Firefox forks.

For what you’re asking for, GNU IceCat is probably the best fit - the project syncs up with Firefox ESR but removes all proprietary stuff and maintains it’s own extensions. It has some privacy improvements too but is otherwise set up as a standard browser. It’s basically Ungoogled Chromium for Firefox. The downside is the project doesn’t release project binaries; you have to look for binaries in your distro (and many don’t provide them) or use GNU Guix - the package manager from the GNU project (which can be installed on any system; it’s a bit like NIX). Or build them yourself from Github. Details are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

Librewolf and Waterfox are both excellent but by default are very privacy focused and locked down, so you may need to make config changes to get them back to a more “standard” default browser set up (sacrificing the privacy benefits in the process).

Personally I use Firefox; I understand what you’re saying but the steps you talk about are at first install and that’s not something I do often so can tolerate it.

EDIT: Just checked, IceCat isn’t in OpenSuSE’s default repos (disappointingly) but I did find it in Fedora’s repos (both standard and it’s Flatpak store). So it’s a bit hit and miss. Guix is universal but it’s a bit of a bloaty way to do it if you only want one item from it’s repos. Fedora Flatpaks can of course be installed on pretty much any X86/AMD64 system by adding registry.fedoraproject.org as a flatpak remote (alongside Flathub).

Sadly we’re now at the “I told you so” phase of global warming and much sooner than expected. Now it’s a case of how bad are things going to get.

We still haven’t even peaked in terms of global emissions per year, let alone meaningfully reduced them. Then even after reducing from the peak, we really need to get to net 0, which seems impossible right now.

I personally prefer OpenSuSE, but Fedora is reasonably close second.

One reason OpenSuSE wins out for me is admittedly just because it’s not a US based project or related to a US based company like RedHat. Not that SuSE is “good” as a sponsor company; it’s just based in Germany and owned by a Swedish investment company, which edges out based in the US and owned by a mega corp like IBM. I know both OpenSuSE and Fedora are mostly independent, but both are under some control of their main corporate sponsors. So I prefer European.

Maybe that’s silly, but I have lost a lot of trust in the US legal system, project governance and their ability to exist without interference by the US state.

Honestly if you’re returning a door stop for a refund after using it for a year, it’s actually tragic and speaks volumes about student debt.

Wow the internet really is just bots talking to bots. Even your off brand TV stick is just a bot farm.

Are your windows drives mounted in linux? If so comment them out in fstab or nofail them as a minimum, although it wouldn’t normally manifest as a root drive error (unless you’ve set up a strange mount point for the windows drives outside /mnt on root or even in home folder? or do you have them listed above your root drive in fstab so they are trying to mount first and that fails?).

Also you said elsewhere your linux drives can be “seen” in windows. Just to be clear, you’ve not mounted the drives in Windows right using a tool like Ext2Fsd? Because if so, go into windows and unmount the drive.

And have you disabled fastboot? Not just rebooted but disabled fastboot completely?

It’s a decent size. Only 13m tall and 15m diameter, and it can heat 5,000 homes for a week in winter or a month in summer. Very impressive, and can imagine something that compact working in urban environments too. For example, in the basement of a new apartment block.

It’s kind of a straw-man argument as no one is forcing anyone to use Linux. But using cross platform FOSS to avoid lock-in IS a good idea, and it does make transitioning to Linux easier (or indeed many other OSs - FOSS or not).

But Linux’s success on the desktop has been organic. It’s a combination of platform maturity, ease of use, the breaking of windows USP in gaming, privacy and data concerns, and on the other side the enshitification of Windows, and even MacOS. The only “forcing” is arguably Microsoft & Apple pushing it’s users away from their own platforms by their behaviour.