Absoutely. It takes like 5 seconds to get a real photo.

But I have considerable downvotes on my original comment. Maybe bots. Maybe AI bros who need to see the light and that their tech is based on the death of IP law.

Exactly, makes no sense to me

Really cool article. Except this bit:

The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT.

Fucking why? Could have saved time and energy with traditional search. Leave the slop out, please.

A bigger issue is that the Steam Deck touchpads don’t work without Steam being open

This is interesting, because the touchpads on the Steam Controller do work without Steam being open, at least on Linux, though without cursor acceleration. I wonder why the touchpads on the Deck were handled differently.

Not true about Proton. It’s Steam DRM that requires Steam running in the bg, same as on Windows.

Totally. Linux is (in part) about choice. If you like Mint, use Mint.

I’ve been a Linux user for 5+ years and played with a bunch of different distros. I have Arch (btw) on a laptop that I don’t have to depend on. But my gaming rig is still running Pop. Why? Because I like it and it’s stable. A bonus that it’s now bundled with Cosmic, because I like Cosmic too.

But at the end of the day, it’s true that you can kind of do anything with any distro. The package manager is one obvious difference. I do like Pacman (from Arch) more than apt on Debian derivatives, but like, it’s just a package manager. Not worth changing a comfortable system over.

Don’t listen to people who say you can’t run a “beginner distro” until the end of time. If you like it, you like it.

Definitely makes a lot of sense to use a VM for it. Though there is something fun about having a spare laptop and just playing on bare metal.

I strongly dislike how the zone is getting flooded with “now it’s not X, but Y” in terms of distro recommendations.

Not knowing what a distro is and where to start is one of the main issues with people who may want to switch to Linux but don’t know how to do it. If Mint getting called out as a good place to start allows them to switch, then they should install Mint. If Ubuntu is all they have heard of, and it makes them try the switch, then they should install Ubuntu. Tbh, the only really dangerous approach is starting with something like Arch which, despite fantastic documentation, is probably more likely to turn new users away.

Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. Someone who starts from either Mint or Ubuntu or whatever can distro hop later. Let’s not muddy the waters even more for our would-be Windows refugees.

It’s just more barebones than lots of other options, and distro hopping tends to be about exploration. There isn’t a whole lot to explore on Debian, because its purpose is stability and simplicity.

You find tons of Debian-derived distros exactly for this reason. They build on that stable core but add bells and whistles. Distros usually are defined by which bells and whistles they include by default.

I’m running Mint currently

I’m wondering if there is a lot of benefit to going more barebones

Not really. On the scale at which homelabs operate, I doubt you’ll see any difference at all – except what might be the significant time sink to set everything up again.

I’m not having any issues with my current setup

I’d put this firmly in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” category. Mint is already a distro which is ultimately a Debian derivative. It operates more like Debian as opposed to, say, Fedora or Arch. While it can be enticing to explore the many options of Linux, the benefit isn’t clear here.

Now, distro hopping on a nonproduction system? Something where you don’t care what’s on it and you just want to experiment? That’s one of the best parts of being a Linux user. But at least do that first before even approaching breaking something that isn’t broken.

It sounds more like you want to have fun distro hopping, and believe me: I can tell you from experience that distro hopping isn’t fun if you have to rely on that machine.

Bots?

That would be reported.

Friends don’t let friends be root.

Just to clarify: the “much smoother” is subjective and might be an oversimplification, but the “not using Gnome” part is correct.

Personally I don’t use any Gnome extensions and have much preferred Cosmic to the old Pop Shell. YMMV.

Linux user here. What’s a friend?

DE completely depends on your workflow. The way you do things directly impacts what DEs you’ll like and which ones you won’t.

I’m with you on KDE: I respect it and it clearly seems to be one of the most feature-rich DEs, but I’ve had trouble actually using it regularly.

I have been using Cosmic DE for the last 6 months or so. I love it because it seamlessly blends tiled and non-tiled workspaces in an effective way. Part of me really enjoys the simplicity of things like i3, but part of me just wants floating windows. It fully depends on what I’m working on and sometimes just my mood, so for me, the seamless blending in Cosmic has felt perfect.

But how important is DE? Tbh I think it is the most important part of a setup, because you interact with it more than any other piece of the system.

I’m really tired of seeing this idiot quoted.

Yeah, no argument there. But I would argue companies do that kind of thing already for various reasons (many having to do with taxes).

Overall, I don’t think it’s a good argument against regulation to say “let’s regulate less because people will cheat”. People will always cheat.

Really need to start calculating settlements like this as a function of profits. Otherwise this is just factored in as a business cost and does not actually apply as a consequence.

$135 million may seem like a lot to regular people, but it’s not for Google. If we are letting these tacit monopolies stay in place, then the kid gloves at least need to come off when they’re being dealt with. Scale up consequences so they are appropriate for the size of the corporation.

To me, it can be hard to pin down what makes a movie “great” because the criteria change from genre to genre, and much of it is more of a subjective whole than an amalgamation of objective parts.

But, there is one metric my family uses to decide, unequivocally, if a movie was “bad” or not: if you watched it and it doesn’t lead to conversation, it was a bad movie. That means it didn’t spark any curiosity or need for discussion or even stand out in any way. Minimally, it wasn’t worth thinking about once it was over. I don’t mean short comments like “this effect was neat” or “I liked the part where…”, but substantive discussion of 5+ minutes.

By extension, movies that lead to discussions must be good, simply because there was “something about it” that spurred discussion. The specifics of that x-factor don’t really matter by this metric.

One thing I find interesting about this approach is that movies that many agree are objectively bad can lead to discussion if they are also unique or even just uniquely bad. And this approach says such movies are actually good, and I do agree with that.

The ones that end up consistently bad are big franchise films that are always same-samey, or other low-effort films that are mostly derivative.

Tbh I have no real complaints. I would eventually like some keyboard shortcuts for moving entire workspaces around without the mouse, but what is there is quite intuitive and I find myself not leaving the keyboard to navigate. The defaults are similar to i3 shortcuts.

I like that they work in tiling and non-tiling mode, and each workspace can be set to either mode at whim.

No issues with stability (which was a problem for me in earlier builds).

I don’t use any of the Cosmic utils, though (text editor, terminal, etc). They seem fine but ymmv.

Edit: actually just thought of one thing… If you move a window from a non-tiling workspace to a tiling one, it stays in non-tiling mode. This leads to a mixed mode workspace and I don’t like that. But it’s easily fixed with mode toggle and only a minor annoyance – ideally I want it to switch to whatever mode the workspace is in.