Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There’s so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.

That is a fair point. But then again, I don’t even remember the last time I was in a store that had honest prices.

This is one of those things that makes me feel the slightest bit more agitated and cynical towards people and society. We all know it’s manipulative, and that should be enough reason not to do it. So why does everyone who runs a business do it? Like yeah it does work, but is it really worth subtly eroding your own customer’s trust in you? There’s an invisible cost of goodwill here.

If the hardware can ever be shrunk enough to make even a semi-pocketable x86 handheld, I would be happy if Valve were ever to release a “Steam Deck Mini” or something.

Or maybe their new efforts with ARM support point toward a future of a much more portable Steam-on-Linux-on-ARM device.

Came in to say this. Linux on ARM is getting so close to daily driver ready.

I know it would have the same issues as the Unreal Engine - all the training, engine building, and systems integration it’d take to get a game released, but I think it’d be cool if Bethesda were to make an Elder Scrolls game on their ID Tech engine. That codebase is pretty celebrated.

Mint is literally a slightly modified Ubuntu.

I don’t, to be perfectly honest the builtin controls are the only part I don’t like. Too heavy, too bulky, terrible dpad, and for me it’s so uncomfortable to use the LR bumpers that I almost always remap them to the back paddles.

Or just use flatpak or Appimage.

Is the Snap backend available and open-source? If not, then it’s antithetical to software freedom because Canonical is trying to close their users into a walled garden in the ways that Apple and Google are with their app stores.

There are plenty of software packaging systems that work just as well or better than Snap, and promote software freedom (Flatpak, Appimage, or even just traditional package managers). By using and promoting Snap over these, you are working against the growth of digital rights.

It’s impossible to have a fully free system?

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

But more to your point, it’s a false dichotomy. Even before the latest changes to the Debian install media, for years it was maybe unintuitive but still easy enough to just choose the “nonfree” install iso. That one would automatically include all the proprietary bits that are necessary for a fully functional Linux system.

But now those nonfree parts are in the Debian install by default, so there really is just nothing that you get from Ubuntu that can’t just as easily work in Debian - especially since everyone is moving toward flatpaks, and appimages anyway.

This.

But you’re also promoting Ubuntu’s continued use, when Snaps are just one example of Canonical being antithetical to free software values. Mint is all the benefits of Ubuntu without that garbage, so why not that?

Snap should be reason enough that everyone should abandon Ubuntu, especially when Mint is right there. The last thing we need is to make Linux more like Android+Google Play.

The last straw with consoles for me was when they all started charging money regularly just to play online multiplayer games.

My Steam Deck makes for a better console-like experience than any of the major consoles, and more. I have zero interest in going back to Sony or especially Nintendo’s scams.

In western civilization everything is low risk until we’ve come too far to avert calamity. Before the 2008 financial crisis, every institution that played a role would have you believe everything was great, right up until everything was falling apart.

With global warming we always had, and still struggle against entirely too many people, and lying institutional vested interests, downplaying or disbelieving how serious of a global catastrophe climate change is forming into.

The only reason h5n1 is “low risk” at the current time is because it’s not yet a human-to-human calamity that is already too far underway to put a stop to. We all saw how badly we all collectively handled covid.

We are now at mammal to mammal transmission, and humans are also mammals. The only actual difference between low risk, and full on pandemic, at this point, is patient zero.

You should really go back to the article and read the whole thing, as well as others that are linked to in it. Because in this one the WHO describes it as an enormous concern, because it is.

https://www.sciencealert.com/who-warns-growing-spread-of-bird-flu-to-humans-is-enormous-concern

Right, the difference in immune benefit is so crystal clear for everyone who makes the switch, not even considering the other myriad benefits like heart health, diabetes reversal/mitigation, weight loss, and mental health benefits.

Eating the flesh of an animal is not good for anyone. It’s not good for the animal who was abused their whole life and murdered. It’s not good for the environment. It’s not good for all the beings who get sick from pathogens because of it. And it’s not even good for the human animal who consumes the other animal’s flesh.

No, no it would not be beneficial. That would be the opposite of beneficial (unless it’s plant-based steak).

If anyone wants help going vegan, I’d be happy to help. Even if it’s infeasible to get enough people in the world to stop eating animals fast enough to avert the next pandemic, there is evidence that people who eat plant-based have better outcomes from getting sick, as well as just getting sick less in general. Not to mention getting animal products out of your homes reduces one of the vectors through which pathogens can spread. So at the very least you’d be giving yourself your own best chance (just keep in mind it’s no replacement for vaccinations!)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=047C-mMQpSE