It isn’t any trouble. Rarely an upgraded service requires user intervention. This is usually documented and if not it is easy to search for a fix. I find arch faithfully follows upstream packages and provides a very pure linux experience. As much as I love the Debian community, their maintainers tend to add lots of patches, sometimes exposing huge security flaws. Most other distros are too small to be worthwhile or corporate controlled or change the experience too much.

People keep on saying stuff like this like these games are all people care about. Meanwhile Silksong sales crippled stores. Indy games and older games are hugely popular. I don’t know a single person who plays these games that don’t work. My kids friend group is playing on cobbled together hand me downs and half broken laptops and can’t play AAA titles.

They will sell millions of these things. People who demand a 5090 and Windows 11 to play games are the true niche. Everyone else is having too much fun to care.

NSW is ridiculously conservative and behind on so much. It took them (and Vic) 40 years to catch up with SA on container deposit. You still can’t ride a bike on a path there. Does all the entertainment still shut early?

Haven’t seen a plastic bread tag for over a year. The cardboard ones are not as sturdy but kids go through bread quickly and we have a lot of reusable clips.

Call me cynical but I suspect this will mainly shift load for the benefit of the network operators.

I wouldn’t be surprised if supply charges and non-free hours go up to offset any income loss for the electricity suppliers. Weatlhy home owners with solar pv, large power demands, and expensive appliances who can take advantage of free hours might be better off. People in rentals or poorer home owners might be worse off and it could be yet another wealth transfer.

No theft? Tell it to East Timor.

This OP account (randomname) along with a couple of others are foreign accounts which only post here to agitate against Russia, China and others.

Yes, I have noticed. I don’t mind the anti-Russia stuff. Fuck Putin. Our relationship with China is complicated and nuanced. While we need to prepare for hypothetical threats we also need to make the most out of our current relationship. I think promoting anti-Chinese sentiment plays into the hands of the supposedly Russian influenced racist neo-Nazi types the account is supposedly critical of and does nothing for the 1.3 million Australians with Chinese ancestry or other Australians of east asian descent.

Social media makes it too easy to do a huge influence operation and get unintended consequences. Polarized, angry societies that can’t engage with each other for the common good are a bad outcome.

Much earlier. The protocols of the elders of zion, a core conspiracy doc, dates back to 1903, Russian Empire, long before the Bolshevik revolution, the KGB or Putin. Russia has a lot of competence in the information space. It is a tool like any other and it is well documented that they use it to their strategic and economic advantage as any nation would. The western alliance have played similar games with propaganda and destabilization.

There are a huge number of people and groups in the anglosphere and Europe who are sympathetic to this propaganda and create plenty of it themselves. They would still be around and very dangerous to our liberal democracies with or without Russia’s involvement. Russia’s playbook in this is to fan fires that already exist. I suspect most of the real money and direction is from within.

Russia to some extent is a scapegoat for our own failings and highlighting their involvement an attempt to de-legitimize these movements by association. I think these groups are de-legitimized by their existence. I don’t need Russian involvement to hate a bunch of Nazis.

I believe there is evidence of Russian operators attempting to infiltrate marginalized groups and stir up discontent. If it turned out their operators were inflaming discontent in indigenous groups, amongst the poor, homeless, alt-health, environmentalists or whoever might have reason to distrust or dislike the current establishment I am not going to judge them like I am a Nazi.

I don’t like to touch on this one on social media but it is probably fair to say Israel and Iran are in a huge information war and Isreal is losing badly in Australia, UK etc because of the very bad optics of their actions. Does knowing that Iran is to some extent funding anti-Isreal debate delegitmize concerns about a Palestinian genocide? I don’t think so. So its complicated.

If they don’t buy from us they will buy from someone else. The main thing is to get our fair share and using it to build a better future for our kids. Which never happens and it doesn’t matter if the mines are owned by Chinese or as is more often the case US/UK. We should own all our countries resources and these companies should be extracting them under contract to the owners, not stealing the legacy for our future generations and evading payment of tax.

While there is a huge amount of circular money happening because it’s all a financial scam, it is inflating share prices which are invested in by lots of institutions so when the bubble bursts and those shares are worthless a huge amount of wealth will be wiped out and the suffering will be very widespread hurting regular people.

The billionaires won’t be the ones queing for food. Hard to see much glee ahead unfortunately.

I think it is because US bacon is streaked with huge amounts of fat that they render down until it goes crispy. Elsewhere bacon is often more meaty and less fatty and cooking the shit out of it doesn’t do anything for it.

Perhaps, but the fiber cleans that bacon sandwich out of your colon quicker.

Is the UK going to start putting cancer labels on Gin, Scotch Whisky, ale and cider? Because alcohol is not just a proven carcinogen but also toxic to a number of organs and a huge public health problem. It is a much, much larger health problem than bacon. The anti-meat lobby is extremely passionate about their cause. They have some strong arguments about the ethics of factory farming and the environmental impacts but it does make any proposal like this suspect because you just know that some of the proponents are more concerned about the ethics of meat eating than the health impacts.

I believe it is largely a retention problem. Major political parties are thoroughly captured by the private school lobby and the religious enterprises that run them. It’s almost like they are running the public system down to help out their mates.

The stability of Arch/Cachy updates is not just about time between updates (more often is generally better) but also about accumulated old configs files with deprecated options that have been ignored and reading about breaking changes.

I updated 4 machines at the same time earlier this week (pacoloco for the win). One is a cachy/arch hybrid that started life as arch. The one with the oldest continually updated installation (it is a ship of theseus, I don’t believe it has any of the original hardware) couldn’t get to a graphical login and it took me a few minutes to replace an obsolete config file with a pacnew and get it back up.

This might have been a show stopper for someone coming from Windows or Mac. Perhaps even for some Linux users. But I am decades into this and it is how I like it. I ran slackware for years and Debian Sid. The loss of time to breakage from upgrades is absolutely trivial to me compared with the advantages of a well packaged and up to date system. If people aren’t into that there is no shame in using an immutable distro. The diversity of distros might be confusing but it is a huge advantage because there is something out there for everyone.

Most of the people who are going to leave for Linux right now were probably going to leave anyway once Linux provided what they needed (eg Proton support for most of their game library). Linux has always been a lot of fun for serious tinkerers. Curious types would already have at least tried linux in a vm or dual boot but were being held back my some app or game.

My family has grown up with Linux desktops and gaming and is very comfortable using Linux for boring normie stuff but they aren’t power users. They use what is installed and what is installed is Linux. But when they have Windows installed on their school computers they don’t seem to care. It does all the same things, just differently. One of my kids had several keys not working on his laptop keyboard and just put up with it for ages without telling anyone. Makes no sense. They are my only window into the Microsoft world and what I see is complacency. I think most people have a huge capacity to put up with annoyances before they will take action and power users and enterprise can disable a lot of the shittier features.

Microsoft can probably go a lot further extracting revenue from their users through dark patterns, additional paid services, marketing, sales of data etc. They are a for profit company in a time when it is not just normal but expected that companies will cannibalize their long term potential for short term profit taking. I suspect Windows 11 will get a lot worse but if you walk into a store to buy a new laptop its still going to be the only pre-installed option outside of Apple or Chromebooks for years to come.

We have three windows laptops in the house. All for use in schools which were always heavily pro-Microsoft here. I haven’t paid much attention to Windows 11. The last time I used Windows other than setting it up or fixing it for someone else was probably XP. All three users of those laptops come home from school/work, put them on a charger then head to a linux machine to play games, edit video etc. They know they have linux support and they have grown up with Linux. Not one of them has asked to upgrade their laptops to Linux yet.

Perhaps Microsoft isn’t annoying regular users as much as the tech press and tech users think they are. Remember people still use shit like Facebook not just willingly but in some cases enthusiastically. We are a diverse lot. Some people, probably the majority, will put up with the same shit every day and not think to change their environment. I don’t know whether it is too difficult or they are scared of change or they don’t realize it is possible or perhaps they simple aren’t bothered by the same things. Possibly all of the above.

Libreoffice puts my docs where I tell it and they get synced to my other machines. Don’t understand why people store docs on other people’s computers. The business world is full of dumbarses leading dumbarses. You can’t tell them though.

I wish you were wrong. Occasionally societies hit huge decision points when something outrageous happens and they have an opportunity to rise together and overcome adversity and become their better selves. And the world looks on with awe and respect.

The US had this opportunity after Columbine. And every month or so after for decades. After each outrage to parents and society so horrible you think surely they will act now. But they never do.

That is how you know they don’t have what it takes to stand up to authoritarians. If they did they would have done what any decent society would have done years ago. They don’t have it sadly. They are waiting for Superman or Captain America to save them. Mythological heroes are the only sort they have now.

Discover socialism. Not commie tanky left authoritarian bullshit. Just the moderate basic human decency stuff.

Old fashioned people caring about each other. Workers supporting each other. Vets supporting each other. Women supporting each other. Families supporting each other. Neighborhoods supporting each other. Inclusivity. Opportunity. Holding out a hand to the less fortunate. Redistributing wealth so people can have dignity and hope.

Start with taking back schools as safe places from gun massacres. If you can’t do that you can’t do shit. It’s a basic litmus test for a functional society. Take back streets for pedestrians. Take prisons and hospitals away from corporations. Get rid of tipping in favour of a fair living wage. Take a fucking holiday occasionally. It won’t kill you.

The problem is Americans are kept ignorant about what is possible. In place of knowledge all they have is lies. What is the point of change if you don’t even know what you want. You will just end up with more of the same.

They have to make sure it is safe for the police to go in.