I’ve never been into tablets, are Surfaces as easy to install Linux on as a PC? Is there any bootloader unlocking or anything like on a phone, or is it more like secure boot on a PC?

I had installed Linux on an old Chromebook and it would always offer to wipe the hard drive on every boot, so now I’ve assumed that some hardware isn’t as Linux friendly as others. I think a lot has changed since I got my desktop and the last laptop that I installed Linux on.

And are the Linux touch screen interfaces any good? I tried a Fairphone that was running something Linux and the touch interface was lacking. (It was a great tiny laptop for using a terminal though).

And last random thought… I loved the 10” netbook form factor back in 2009 or so. I think tablets are a similar size, but the weight is in the “monitor” part, I preferred the bottom heavy laptop form factor. Are the Surfaces okay for that, or top heavy enough that they can fall over and can’t have the angle adjusted finely like a laptop?

I bought a 512 GB SanDisk one for $65 USD a few years ago. I don’t like Samsung software bloatware on their phones, but having 512 GB of storage for $65 feels pretty futuristic to me. I can’t believe more phone manufacturers don’t offer external SD card support… you’d think more consumers would demand it, given that the alternative is to pay a lot more, every time you get a new phone.

I’m basically able to keep like every photo I’ve taken for the last 10 years or so (though not at original resolution).

I was thinking this too, but consider some improvements:

• wireless printing seems to “just work” now. Besides having to painfully enter my wifi password with up and down arrows on my printer, it seems like my windows and Mac laptops are able to print to it wirelessly without any initial setup. (I use Linux on my desktop but haven’t tried printing from it yet). I think it even works from phones.
• cables: I don’t remember what type of cable printers used, but I remember the big keyboard cable, then the smaller purple and green PS/2 ones (I think keyboard and mouse were different?)… I vaguely remember multiple different peripheral cables, like FireWire? Giant parallel ports for things like scanners?

I hate that most printers don’t come with the USB (B?) cable that seemingly only printers need now, but I’m glad that it’s standard and that everything supports <strikethrough>USB-A</strikethrough> I mean USB-C (except my PC) now. Such a utopia.

I find that stove top popcorn is even less convenient (so less tempting to eat all the time), but much cheaper, and maybe tastier in some ways.

Get a ~500 g (1 lb or so?) bag of whole kernels for $3-ish, some oil that you use for cooking other stuff anyway, and salt. Heat the oil on the stove with a few kernels, then when those pop, briefly remove from heat and add more. Make sure the pot has a lid. Keep shaking it side to side to keep the popcorn from burning.

I find it adds just enough oil to taste good, but not so much that I’m eating something super awful for me. (And it’s much tastier than air popped). And I assume you could still add melted butter if you want an extra treat.

I want to get one of those movie theatre style things where the popcorn can fly out of the pot.

My problem may be related: how do you find people to follow? I wish I could just follow communities like on Lemmy. I’ve tried following hastags I’m interested in, but it seems like they aren’t always used.

I’ve instead searched for topics that I’m interested in, followed a bunch of people, then unfollowed the ones that post too much stuff I’m not interested in. But this seems like a pain.

I also don’t necessarily want to see everything that a single person posts.

Cool, thanks! This is what I was looking for. I’ve briefly tried playing with Nextcloud before, but this seems like another good option.

This is what I do for my own notes now, but could it work for students writing essays and that sort of thing? I suppose there must be some markdown to HTML/PDF/etc converters (also probably ODT or DOCX or whatever).

This is actually what I did when I was in school, and overall it was quite pleasant. There was some WYSIWYG LaTeX program too that I shared with some colleagues when we were working on a document together, I remember it working okay.

But I don’t see the average student, especially studying non technical stuff, to pick up LaTeX just for normal sort of essays. Even I am fairly rusty now. And honestly I don’t even know if I could have managed it during high school, where I had to write English essays and stuff with specific formatting for references. (I am grateful that my engineering education was less strict about that sort of thing).

I was hoping that someone would suggest a self hosted web document suite, I think “Nextcloud” is a popular one. Then it should work on any OS, and you don’t have to worry about syncing files. Even if you can pay to have someone else host an instance (not sure if this exists), and ideally a program that can keep a local backup synced to your PCs would be a big step in the right direction. Syncthing seems pretty great, though I haven’t used it much, and on iOS it doesn’t seem to be able to run in the background.

edit: I just read another comment that recommended OnlyOffice, this seems like another good option (source: this reply: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9415293). Aside: is there a proper way to link to a comment on lemmy that will go through your own homeserver?

What do you recommend? I love LibreOffice on Windows and Linux, and it still works well on macOS but the GUI seems weird on it, the buttons are really large. I still use it but my partner is put off by it.

I already basically get that half the time I boot into windows after an update. They say “let’s finish setting up your PC” and try to get you to pay for one drive, office, even game pass.

I’m so glad gaming on Linux has gotten to such a good state. I barely ever boot into windows now. (The “ad” on boot up is probably only once every few months, but that’s about as often as I boot into windows).

Message me on matrix in #alexgames:matrix.org if anyone wants to try playing a multiplayer game together :)

(I’m not actually very good at chess or go)

thanks, how did you do this? Did you just download it and add a background yourself (and upload via lemmy) or is there some cool markdown/lemmy trick?

I was going to say that I was on my phone and couldn’t do that, but I guess I probably could have. (edit: also I forgot that Lemmy even supports image uploading, let alone that I could link to it) I mostly just wanted to see if Lemmy supported the embedded image markdown syntax of ![description](URL to image). (It does!) I found online that some markdown variants support adding CSS at the end of the image, but it doesn’t look like lemmy supports them.

Pictures are worth a lot of words:

Edit: unfortunately this is unreadable on my Lemmy client due to its transparent background and my dark mode. If there’s some way to add a white background by editing the markdown in my comment then I’d love to hear about it.

I hadn’t heard of it, here’s wikipedia:

GNU Taler is a free software-based microtransaction and electronic payment system.[3][4] Unlike most other decentralized payment systems, GNU Taler does not use a blockchain.[5] A blind signature is used to protect the privacy of users as it prevents the exchange from knowing which coin it signed for which customer.[5]

Looks like this is the official website: https://taler.net/en/index.html

It seems interesting. I’ll have to read more about how it works.

You may know this, but my understanding is that they randomly stop either to do another delivery on a different app, or to get gas/etc. (edit: I don’t think this justifies it to the customer, hence why I’ve stopped using these apps. I do have some sympathy for the driver, I have heard that the companies incentivize them to maintain a streak and take fewer breaks between drives, and somehow it seems like long unnecessary pauses aren’t penalized (perhaps because they’re hard to distinguish from traffic))

I haven’t used delivery apps in a while due to cold food and outrageous prices.

Must be this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_van_attack

The attack is characterized as misogynist terrorism because it was motivated by revenge for perceived sexual and social rejection by women. At the time of his arrest, Minassian described himself as an incel to the police and in prior social media postings, and described the attack as the continuation of an “incel rebellion”, started by the late Elliot Rodger.[11]

Sorry for the mobile Wikipedia link.

Ah, the comparison to Epic helps me understand a bit… maybe. Are they simply worried about PS5 “winning” and Xbox disappearing? I don’t worry that Steam will ever disappear because of Epic and don’t care if they get games (in fact I have an epic account just to claim the free games, but I don’t really play them because they don’t support Linux). But if Steam did disappear in favour of Epic, I would be pissed. I wouldn’t care if there’s a merger or rebranding as long as Linux support and my existing library is maintained.

Even still… worst case, they buy a PS5, and get all the same games and more? A friend of mine switched from Xbox to PS and thought it was pretty good. I do prefer the Xbox thumbstick placement over PS5, though. I guess they’d also lose their Xbox friends/following/achievements/etc. Though surely it would, at worst, be merged into PS.

But still, even if you’re worried about this backfiring and Xbox disappearing… it seems worth the risk, to me. Presumably there are some good PS exclusives that could come to Xbox?

I’m really trying hard to figure out how this isn’t just fanboy whining and I’m coming up short. I’m interested in other ideas!

I couldn’t understand why this would be anything besides good news, but I guess they’re worried that the hardware won’t get as much focus?

(I’m out of the loop, I play PC games now and haven’t bought a console since the Xbox 360 back in… 2008 or so? I forget)

“It’s so easy to see Xbox is killing its hardware and putting a stake in the heart of it by doing this,” he said. “And there’s no going back… it’s dead.”

He later tweeted: “Xbox could have killed Game Pass, say buy our exclusives and focus on our hardware and that’s 100 percent the better idea [than to] SAY LETS KILL EXCLUSIVES AND put Halo on PS5. The outrage would be half of this and guess what you might be back to having a healthy business.”

It still seems like an over reaction to me. Exclusives have always seemed bad. I’m just glad games are getting released on PC, though I haven’t played many AAA games in a while.

I may have missed it, but does he (or anyone else) have recommendations for options to simply pay for content and get high quality DRM free files (edit: I mean legally)?

And how much of a pain in the ass is it to buy DVD box sets and rip them? Presumably that’s legal for personal use? Is that the only way? :(

I have some additional frustrations with Netflix:

• they have removed some shows that I like
• if you travel to another country, you can’t always watch the same shows— even if you downloaded them within the app
• they completely remove some episodes: the episode of community where they play Dungeons and Dragons, and (other streaming services) remove the Michael Jackson Simpsons episode.
• extremely user hostile way to browse content. They always move your list around and show the same show in multiple places
• I absolutely hate how all these streaming services auto play to the next episode. You can often change this behaviour. But my partner sometimes casts it to our TV and the damn app (Disney+ in this case, I think) changes the interface just as you get to the credits. I want to sit in peace and let the credits play, and discuss the episode. But it tries to shove another one down your throat, presumably to “maximize engagement”. (I get it for content that you’re binging or are re watching. But this is horrible if you’re just watching an episode during dinner and don’t want to have to scramble to stop the autoplay as soon as it ends)