Eyedust

Because doubling down on idiocy has always worked in the past.

I agree. Too much handholding for me, imo. However, if I had a Steamdeck I might use it just for simplicity sake. If I wanted an immutable distro for my desktop I’d choose NixOS, tbh, but that’s on the opposite end of the complexity spectrum from Bazzite.

This. I mained Arch for 2 years and still can’t be completely trusted with sudo. Moved to Nobara, would recommend as well. Its a bit more advanced, but you don’t have to touch the command line if you don’t want to and setup is right there step-by-step when you first boot.

I did try Bazzite first. I just couldn’t get used to living the Flatpak life. I know you can force install native packages, but at that point why wouldn’t I just use Nobara, lol.

NixOS is well worth a try. If you know lua and json, its not too hard to pick up nixlang. I know neither and it only took me a few weeks to learn it. But once you get the hang of it, you can make a Linux reproducible on other systems. I made everything modular. GPU drivers for my old laptop? Imported nix module. Neovim? Imported nix module.

Yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve also deleted SCSI on my first Windows PC, lol. I still haven’t learned my lesson and mess with things I can’t handle. I was notorious for destroying my mother’s computers growing up. Then I learned to fix the things I broke.

As of right now, I use Audacious. Its my absolute favorite music client and all completely modular. You head to the plugins section and add what you want. It doesn’t even close to system tray without a plugin, so super customizable. If you can’t tell, I love modular things, lol.

For a quick music shuffle list with a really sleek design, Amberol is a really close second. Especially if you use GNOME, since its designed by default in the GNOME style. I use KDE, so I stick with Audacious, but I did enjoy my time with MPD on XFCE using a plugin designed for that DE. If I went back to Hyprland, I’d probably use MPD.

Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of firewire, but back in the day it was actually pretty nice. 1.5A @ 30v was pretty nuts back then. I had a PC filled with pirated music I got from LAN parties in high school. No idea where that music went… probably destroyed in a Windows reinstall.

lol! I took a Linux class a long time ago and learned on Damn Small Linux. I came back to it years later with Pop!_OS then moved to Arch where I stayed for 2 years. Went to NixOS for a while.

But I never gave Fedora the time it deserved, so as an afterthought I tried it after I messed up my Arch system (yeeted my .local folder by accident). Went with Nobara for the ease of setup for gaming. I didn’t think I’d stay here, but its just too good.

Haven’t gotten around to it just yet, but I did tag all the music with the proper metadata. I can’t rip anything off my iPod 1st and 2nd gens from my collection yet, but they’re stuffed full of music. I just need the proper firewire, but they seem to be more expensive than the units…

I need to order the music by genre folders now. Today I just got the EddieVPN client for Nobara working. I didn’t realize it was as easy as going to the Eddie site and getting the RPM; I’ve been too spoiled with the Arch AUR having everything I need in one place.

I’m almost there, though. I’ll have the music up soon.

I’m going to try and do this… but I have like 14 iPod classics worth of music to genre… Time to break out the old MusicBrainz Picard, I guess, just to make sure all the metadata is right. I have some wild stuff, too, like German Beatles songs and weird classical piano I’ve never heard of.

I was a little leery of how Soulseek works, so I backed out last second. I’ve never been trustful of the whole folder sharing thing, even on LAN. I’m going to go for it, though. The world should hear the weird stuff and the good songs I’ve ripped off old iPods.

Local library worker here. Can confirm we don’t track connections, we only tally how many use our wifi if we can figure it out. Basically the tally just includes whoever brings out their phone in the library.

Just be aware that the state can supply your library with free internet, and I’m not sure how that’s set up. I personally don’t like connecting to random open wifi, official or no.

Friend saw ‘convenience’ and that was it. No more reading, only fists. I thought I was quite neutral. Yes, convenience. I have been known to use a local LLM based on recipes to give me ideas what I could make based on my pantry.

I have a lovely recipe for absolutely delicious chocolate-chip cookies that use pancake mix.

True, true. In this context I mean the LLM craze. The GPU era of AI.

Agreed. Probably where it should have stayed in the first place. Not that its not interesting, just that the scope of AI has widened beyond what it should have.

I’m a hybrid user. I love to use the keyboard, but sometimes I just want to go in a GUI and click click done. It depends on what I need at the time. I love TUIs the most.

Need to move a handful of files over somewhere? Forget dragging a reticle and dropping them all five subdirectories away, I’m going to boot up Midnight Commander, Zoxide over to where I need to go, select and move.

A mass amount of files? Gonna mv those puppies.

Need to move that one piddly file to the next folder down? I’m going to open Dolphin, do a quick move, and call it a day.

However, for anything programming or note-taking, Vim is love. Qutebrowser or Vimium extensions so I can Vim-ify my browser. Vim everything. We don’t need to bring a mouse into that equation.

If I had to make a guess, I say it probably will. The convenience of AI is probably here to stay, but the craze of replacing everything with AI will go out the door.

AI will become exactly what it should have been in the first place: an assistant. Not your friend, not your doctor, not your therapist, not a replacement for artists/authors/programmers, and not inside every piece of tech post 2025. It has a place. That place is over-embellished right now, not to mention unsustainable.

Don’t forget Lutris. It may take a bit more tinkering than Steam, but if you have loose games or use multiple games launchers, Lutris can combine them all into one neat and tidy launcher.

Yup, you’d be surprised what you can accomplish with 10gb of VRAM and a 12b model. Hell, my profile pic (which isn’t very good, tbf) was made on that 10gb VRAM card using localhosted stable diffusion. I hate big corp AI, but I absolutely love open market and open source local models. Gonna be a shame when they start to police them.

To OP: The problem is that they’re looking for keywords. With the amount of people under surveillance these days, they don’t give a rat’s ass if you went to your favorite coffee roasting site, they want to find the stuff they don’t want you to do.

Piracy? You’re on a list. Any cleaning chemical that can be related to the construction of explosives? You’re on a list. These lists will then tack on more keywords that pertain to that list. For example, the explosives list will then search for matching components bought within a close span of time that would indicate you’re making them. Even searching for ways to enforce your privacy just makes them more interested.

So then you put out a bunch of fake data. This data happens to say you viewed a page pertaining that matching component. Whelp, that list just got hotter and now there are even more eyes on you and they’re being slightly more attentive this time. Its a bad idea. The only way you’re getting out of surveillance, at least online, is to never go online.

In reality, they probably won’t even do anything about the above. What they really want is money. Money for your info; money to sell more things to you. They want the average home to be filled with advertisements tailored from your information. Because those adverts make those companies money, which they then use to buy more information to monetize your existence. Its the largest pyramid scheme known to humanity, and we’re the unpaid grunts.

The moment the world became connected through telephones, cable TV, and then internet this scheme was already in motion way beforehand. Let’s be honest, smartphones were the motherload. A TV, phone, and computer you always keep on you? They were salivating that day.

Fonts are a big one and can be a very descriptive fingerprint.

There are applications out there that muddle your installed fonts by making it look like you have a ton of fonts you don’t actually have.

But yes, they can see what fonts you have and can tell your OS and other computers you may have used if you’ve downloaded the same third party fonts for all of them.

If one of those computers was known to be yours at one time, then even if you lock away your identity later on another PC your fonts can give you away.

I mean, it is tempting to buy a replica Amulet of Mara and go to bars with it proudly on. Anyone that understood the meaning would possibly be within compatibility range.

Sleep/hibernate has been a pretty big problem for a while. As for the gpu, have you checked out NixOS? There’s ways to enforce your integrated card to handle everything and change states for certain apps to the discreet card.

It takes a bit to learn, but nixlang is pretty simple. I’ve heard it referred to as “JSON with functions”. It also has the largest package repository of any OS and is atomic, so its hard as hell to break. You can even make separate, containerized dev environments with flakes.

I have heard about the IoT version. I’d have to look more into it, but I doubt I’m going back now that I’ve learned so much about Linux. I can troubleshoot most of Arch without touching the docs or asking online now, so it really defeats the purpose of switching back.

I also enjoy putting in a little effort to get things working. That’s the thing about Linux. Most people that daily drive it get a dopamine release from tinkering with it and fixing things, and I’m one of those people.

I know there has been a big “its for everyone” push these days, but its really not. So I’m glad the IoT version exists for those that want or need it.

Rufus is great and I still keep a copy around, but I haven’t gone back since I found Ventoy. You just run Ventoy on your stick, and then drag and drop any and all bootable ISOs into it. When you boot it, you get a list of all the ISOs to work with.

The only caveat is that you absolutely have to eject the USB, or else Ventoy probably will corrupt. That’s a small price to pay to have Arch, Mint, Fedora, NixOS, and Win11 all on one OS ISO toolkit drive, plus I always eject my drives as a rule of thumb. Then all I have to do is update them every couple months.