She took the payout to shut up. She’s “using it for good”, but that’s as much bullshit as it was when she was with Bill.

I feel like I’m a moral person, but also that $8 billion is a lot of money

Thanks for the explanation. So it works similar to the system partition on windows.

Yeah, same bit. Just put everything on another drive/partition and then mount that on /home (so you get /home/user) and that’s it.

I somehow struggle a little to understand the role of distribution. When researching how to install Linux, it seemed like an important choice with lots of differences between the various distributions. Some are based on arch, some fedora or ubuntu. It seems like all need different types of packages to install software. And so on. A little ironic, that this is less a problem when running Windows executables through a compatibility layer like wine.

Distributions are essentially just a selection of the basic software required to make a system work. Things like, what version of the kernel you will start with, what init system (systemd is the current popular choice, but sysvinit is still widely used). Then there is the package manager, which is responsible for installing/updating all software on your system (you can install software without the package manager, but here there be dragons) and often a distro will include a Desktop Environment (which is, itself, another package of various software maintained by another group) like KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc and some default software packages (like, LibreOffice, Firefox, or Steam).

There’s a ton of little differences between distros in how they do things. Like one distro may release a full system update periodically and that update will have been in testing for months to ensure stability (Debian). While another strives to ensure the most current version of all software is available (Arch).

Often, groups will like how one system works, let’s say Arch, but want to try something else, like adding a graphical installer, and adding some additional software and they’ll create a new distro that is built on top of the work done by the Arch distro. This is why you see them described as Arch-based(EndeavourOS) or Fedora-based(Nobara).

That being said, there is no major differences between KDE Plasma that was installed on top of Mint and KDE Plasma installed on Arch. They may have different versions which are available in their respective package repositories, but it’s the same software. Mint may not be on the same Kernel version as Nobara but they’re all using some version of the same underlying Linux kernel code. Systemd is Systemd on Bazzite, Mint or Debian, etcetc.

I’m glossing over quite a bit and there are exceptions to almost everything I’ve said but I’m just trying to give you the broad strokes.

Part of the draw of Linux is the ability to swap all of these different components around as you will. Distros are simply popular configurations/design ideas that have a community built around them.

Blitz scaling is the dumbest thing in the world.

Invest all of your money to build a business with the goal of becoming a monopoly or fail spectacularly enough to pull down the whole economy so you’ll get a bailout.

Win - Win

It’s always funny, until that one day where it isn’t

PC-LOAD-LETTER, wtf does that mean?!

Yes, well Mr. Smartypants, did you consider that maybe Mr. Freeze and his family were living in Ferney-Voltaire instead of your ‘technically correct’ explanation?!

You can keep your steam library across distros. Games are usually Windows executables, which run through WINE so they’re completely independent of the distro.

A common recommendation is to make a partition for your home directory and another for your system directory (they can be on different disks too if that’s easier). That way, if you decide to try a different distro then you will still have all of your data/games/settings/etc. If you do this, then everything will move between distros because you only need to overwrite the information on the system partition.

If you just want to keep the Steam stuff, it is typically in ~/.local/share/steam (~/ means your home directory, if you didn’t know). If you move it into that same location on your new distro then Steam will see all of your installed games.

Wait until the people find out that the waste heat is contained in liquid hydrogen at 3 kelvin.

when I have to reboot anyway.

I do the same, then you have these days: “Ok, I’ll run a quick update before reboot… Updating qt-webengine?, nooooooo”

We can’t know for sure, but if I had to make some guesses:

It could have been something as simple as Nobara using GE-Proton instead of just defaulting to Steam’s proton. You could do the same thing on Mint, just by either manually downloading the zip from Github and extracting into Steam’s compatibilitytools.d/ directory (or, as most people do, use protonup-qt to install/manage proton versions).

Also, Mint uses a different Desktop Environment than Nobara. Mint has a custom DE called Cinnamon while Nobara uses the most popular DE, KDE Plasma. So there could be differences in how Cinnamon and Plasma implement Wayland that were causing hitching.

The Kernel also was recently(-ish) updated to include NTSYNC primitives which makes Wine’s not-emulation a bit smoother in some games. Different distros update their kernels at different times (I don’t know how nobara and mint do this, one could be behind the other)

I’m glad it worked for you, it’s frustrating to have to deal with poor performance and sometimes just rolling the dice on another distro will fix everything (and also, swapping distros when you’re learning is great experience!). Learning the process of tracking down problems will serve you better in the long run, even if it is frustrating. If you get lost or don’t know where to start, make a post in this community, no question is too dumb. At worst, some people will be assholes because it’s social media in 2026 but you’ll usually find someone to get you pointed in the right direction at least.

–progress=info2 could be a bit shorter imo

Exactly this.

Read about the Hawthorne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect and how people change their behaviors when they are being observed. Being free of observation is vital to being able to think your own thoughts without outside influence.

If the problem is with the usage framing the hypothetical adversary as a country’s law enforcement, pretend you live in a cyber North Korea and have a cellphone. The idea of an adversary is just a means of thinking about the problem. You want to build a system so that they can’t capture your flag (your flag being some digital information that you want private).

Whatever the opposite of TL;DR is:

It isn’t intended to be read as ‘do this to avoid law enforcement so you can do crimes’.

When thinking about security/privacy (same thing), you don’t know what kind of attack you may eventually have to defend against, maybe you have a partner who has decided to stalk you and so they screen read your PIN or a strong arm robbery where they’ll try to use your phone to access your bank.

Instead of trying to imagine every single possible scenario, you imagine one model scenario. In this model scenario, the adversary has every possible capability that is available and your goal is to keep your flag safe, or be able to pass a flag between two people without it being seen, or various other scenarios (which are themselves just model problems of types of system that you need to secure).

This hypothetical adversary, in order to have these capabilities in real life, would be the equivalent of a sovereign nation with unlimited funding and access to all technologies that are possible (and some that are only hypothetical). This description fits one country pretty well and so, as shorthand, people often just write ‘the feds’. I guess they could also write ‘Eve’ but that is a specific adversary in one kind of scenario and not the general Adversary.

It also will not accept new USB connections while the screen is locked.

I read the statement as ‘We’re going to stop announcing controversial changes and spend more money on propaganda firms who will fill your social media with fake users who have a bunch of stories about how trustworthy Microsoft is’

I was teaching a friend Linux, by ways of running through the manual Arch installation process and finally got to be on the other side of the ‘Ok, now that we’ve spent a ton of time doing this the hard way, here(endeavorOS) is how you use tools to do it in 3 seconds’.

It helps the sunflowers grow

Most of my games run fine on Linux Mint, but not all of them.

You’re not changing much when you’re changing distros, you may have slightly newer or older packages but we’re all running essentially the same Linux Kernel, Proton versions, etc.

You’d probably have less of a headache by trying to diagnose the games that don’t work than swapping OSs blindly and hoping that works.

If you were to swap, I’d look at something Arch-based. This way you’ll have access to the newest versions of everything (for good or ill).

^

For those looking to take the leap:

https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download/?ver=steamdeck

Write image to USB, Boot to USB, press install from inside the live environment.

If you’re using AMD hardware you will have better luck, but it is not guaranteed to work.

I like the home hardware seedbox idea.

You could probalby make it as simple as plug it in and scan the QR code on your phone to pair it to your account, give it your wifi password or ethernet cable and it’s sitting there donating a little bandwidth to the swarm and earning a ‘I’m seeding rn’-kind of badge (people love gamification and cosmetics).

Good brainstorming, was fun o7