IMO the title of “worst computer tech company” is essentially a tie between MS and Google right now, with the two constantly one-upping the other back and forth on stupid ideas and corporate practices.

Advertising costs money to produce, and the vast majority of paid Linux distro users, such as Red Hat, SUSE, etc., are business/enterprise users, who usually wouldn’t rely on advertising through TV, YouTube, and so on to find enterprise computing solutions. It would be a disconnect between the ad platform and the primary target market.

This won’t last long. It’s too public now. Google will find a way to kill it and force their AI on you as much as possible.

Linus himself just seems to give off that “nice guy on camera, exact opposite behind the scenes” kind of vibe. I’ve seen him get a bit riled up on podcast videos and it really comes off like he’s holding back. Perhaps the employee’s story was all too believable from others who get that perception of him. So I could see how the defamation threat would be like him/the company to try to show “we’re really angry and could do more but we’re gonna hold our temper”.

Really, this seems to be the best way to spread Linux adoption to me. I would bet that Linux got at least a good few users from the Steam Deck coming with it pre-installed. Big way to show people that for most things the average user doesn’t need to go into the command line to use their system for what they need as well. Of course, continued improvement in the software included in the most popular distros would really boost Linux adoption as well. I’ve seen plenty of people say they’d make the switch - if only they could use MS Office or Adobe software on it. Alternatives like LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Kdenlive and the GIMP have come a LONG way since I first made the switch around 2009, but especially the Adobe software still outclasses the competition when it comes to features. MS Office isn’t as hard to let go of, especially since you can still use Office 365 Online on Linux and LibreOffice is closer to having all the OOTB features of MS Office than the other programs are to Adobe, but you have to convince people to give it a try first and a lot of employers still require MS Office for work.

I will also say, though, that it was only due to Windows Vista otherwise bricking my laptop back then that I even made the switch. I’d heard of this mysterious OS named Ubuntu so I thought I’d give it a try to save my laptop before I bought a new one, especially since I was living abroad at the time and didn’t want to deal with the hassle of buying a computer with a foreign language version of Windows on it. So I had a friend burn me a copy of Ubuntu 8.10, it worked like a charm, and I only ever since ran Windows at home when dual-booting for a couple years for gaming purposes before Proton became a thing. I didn’t even know Ubuntu was Linux until I’d installed it and started learning how to use it in earnest. Really showed me how even then Linux wasn’t so difficult to use for the average computer user.

Unfortunately, the free, decentralized nature of PeerTube actually makes it more difficult to be a legitimate YouTube successor. The main reason: monetization. Most of the big creators people watch on YouTube don’t just do their videos as a hobby, it’s a job where they make their living. Some of the biggest will make enough in stream donations or Patron pledges to not have to worry about ads or sponsorships, but there’s a huge “middle class” of content creators, you could call it, who live video ad check to video ad check with Patreon or stream donations being supplemental to the ad revenue. Drop that ad money, and those creators will have to either figure out how to quickly multiply their income from other sources or there would be an extremely sharp drop in both quantity and quality of videos. Expect a ton of much-beloved channels to die in the process. To be any sort of competitor at all while retaining its free, decentralized nature, you would need to have many, many times more instances than exist now, with a large percentage of them run by entities with enough resources to pay for both server costs of hosting and distributing large amounts of content and the cost to pay and support the creators on those instances who previously lived mainly on ad revenue or who want to monetize themselves on the platform. Centralized platforms for video take away many of these issues, or make them a ton easier to handle. They allow for easily setting up a subscription based service such as Nebula that the creators know they will be able to at least count on being steady. It may or may not be a lot, but it’s something guaranteed without the creators themselves also having to worry about paying out in server costs, which is still more in income than PeerTube can offer. What would a creator prefer, some guaranteed income with only their video production costs as overhead, or no guarantee of income while bearing both production and hosting costs?

EDIT: updated “FreeTube” to “PeerTube”. I absolutely recommend FreeTube, great YouTube client. PeerTube has some potential, but it will never properly compete with YouTube for the reasons I list above. In one word, money.

Getting packages from a spider web of repos then not untangling the web before upgrading from one LTS release to another. Ended up with an unfixable problem with essential packages and dependency versions and had to do a fresh reinstall instead. Fortunately I backed up my files first so I didn’t lose anything important.

I used it a few times. Essentially having a one-click scan was nice, but I could never get it to properly update the virus definitions. Now I just run clamd, freshclam and clamonacc at startup. Uses a ton of RAM but then I don’t have to worry about actually doing anything beyond that.

Until Breath of the Wild it was Ocarina of Time (I’m so original, I know /s), then BotW, and now Tears of the Kingdom improved on BotW in just about every conceivable way. I’m not much of a big completion type of gamer, despite really enjoying BotW I didn’t go for every shrine, but I definitely made the time and effort to do that in TotK. The only aspect of it I didn’t care for was that I didn’t really like going into the Depths and largely stayed above ground as much as I could (and screw Gloom Hands). Makes me excited to see where the series will go next.

Not to mention that I prefer using my own bag(s) when I can, and whenever I go up to a manned checkout especially with a bagger and hand them my bag to use, at least half the time they start to panic as if they haven’t seen this before, and then they’re eager to start using the plastic bags after my bag is barely half full. This is even in stores that sell their own reusable checkout bags. At the self checkout, I can use my own bag worry-free and fill it however full I want, and if I overfill it, that’s my problem and not on the store, so they don’t have to worry either.

When it was just Netflix and Hulu, it was great for consumers because having a couple streaming services could easily replace the need for cable TV for most people (unless you wanted to watch live sports) and the entertainment companies could still profit from licensing their content to the streaming services. But that wasn’t enough for the entertainment companies, and they all thought they could get in on the streaming game with their own platforms, only to discover that keeping a streaming service running and keeping subscribers is expensive for both the company and the consumer, and consumers only have so much time and disposable income they can spend on those services. So the market has become oversaturated with a million streaming services all carrying limited libraries of content that make it tough for any consumer to feel it’s worth it to pay for any of them except when one or two certain shows on each have a new season. This leaves most services running at a loss after expenses of keeping servers up and trying to make content to bring in and keep those subscribers, which many fail to do. The current state of it is unsustainable and I think in the end it’s eventually going to return to a model where only a few will survive, probably the larger ones owned by the entertainment companies themselves who have deep enough pockets from their other ventures to keep their services alfoat during off-peak times. A LOT of content is going to become lost media as that purge of services happens.

As we saw in the two days the former policy was in place, there are/were not.

Also, Twitch is meant to be a gaming-centric streaming platform, not OnlyFans 2.0. There are a million other sites on the internet to find porn, let Twitch be what it’s supposed to be.

Of the four I’ll take Bezos. Elon says controversial stuff but most of his businesses are legit. He owns Twitter now but he didn’t create that monster. Altman opened up a can of worms with AI but I do believe he initially had some good intentions with it. I don’t even know who Peter Thiel is. Bezos is just an evil corporate suit and Amazon will do anything for money.

The main logo choice is fine, no complaints there, but the choices for the others just seem so disjointed from each other (not to mention they basically just chose the old Leap logo again, but in yellow). I really liked the idea of having some sort of unifying design element across the logos to indicate they are all OpenSUSE products. There were some decent concepts with that idea floating around.

I’m one of those who miss the headphone jack on mine. Half the time I can’t get my wireless earbuds to work right (and I didn’t completely cheap out on them), and I had to buy an expensive Bluetooth radio thing to connect it to my car radio because my car is too old to have that built in. An aux cord through the jack on my old phone worked just fine, even better, than that stupid thing.

It’s a difference between definitions of “city” and “middle of nowhere” between the US and Europe. The US is a massive place. Part of the reason the US appears to have such a crappy infrastructure is that when, say, mobile carriers want to improve it to upgrade something to 5G, they have to do so for the entire country, with many US states having an area the size of whole European countries. Texas itself is the size of Germany. That is a much bigger undertaking than improving it for a single European country or even a block of countries like western or central Europe. Things are so spread out here that “remote” can mean REALLY remote in some areas. Distances between reasonably sized cities in the US can be much larger than in Europe, and the US has more people in those more rural areas than some think, especially in states in the middle of the country. Local ISPs for internet in those areas can be good depending on the area, but a lot of people in the really rural areas would still be better and more easily served by a service like Starlink.

Yeah, good luck with that. Social media has been so compartmentalized, not just by community but by platform, that pretty much whatever platform you’re on has turned into one giant echo chamber. The Fediverse is not immune to this and pretty much any instance of size has become essentially a bunch of left-wing echo chambers that all connect to each other and downvote, ban or defederate anything even centrist. This is not to say that right-wing or centrist instances can’t exist in theory, but the current heavily and aggressively leftist state of it leads people who would make such instances to believe the Fediverse is far left by nature. The right does have places like Truth Social and Ruqqus where they do the exact same thing on their end. Frankly it’s still one thing that the “mainstream” places like Facebook, X/Twitter and Reddit do better, moderate effectively to at least put up an appearance of or attempt at neutrality, even if the communities that pop up within them are anything but neutral.

This just in, the sky is blue and the Pope is Catholic.

Unfortunately sounds like par for the course for the internet. I’ve come to believe that the internet has its good uses for things like commerce and general information streaming, but by and large it’s bringing out the worst in humanity far more than the best. Or it’s all run by ultra-horny psychopathic teenagers pretending to be adults yet living on a philosophy of “I’m 13 and this is deep” logic.

Regardless of feelings on that subject, there’s also the creep factor of people making these without the subjects’ knowledge or consent, which is bad enough, but then these could be used in many other harmful ways beyond one’s own… gratification. Any damage “revenge porn” can do, which I would guess most people would say is wrong, this can do as well.