How is “installing Linux” not easy? Download Ubuntu and run it. They make it easy.

You mean Arch? You mean something where you have to build it yourself and use the command line? That’s not necessary to run Linux. Or to say you ran Linux. Sure, it might be more efficient, or it might be better at some things. But I have to ask where your goal post is if you say installing Linux is not easy. Ubuntu makes it easy and I imagine most of them do as well.

Or maybe I’ve just been using computers so long I take what I know for granted. I dunno, it’s easy for me.

I was a Mac user for maybe two months when a beta came out. With ease, I created a new partition, downloaded the beta, and ran a beta (of macOS Sonoma) in the partition. I dual booted on a MacBook Air, my first Mac, which I’d only had a couple months. Okay now granted, Mac is easy mode most of the time, but they made it real easy. Though I fully understand “the average user” wouldn’t know where to start, let alone have the thought that that could be done.

So, maybe I am the weird one. But it’s just normal to me. Just how I am.

A lot of tech has gotten better.

I mean, except Windows. Obviously.

Or I should say Microsoft. I booted up my Xbox yesterday to play Cyberpunk and was greeted with a full-screen ad for Borderlands 4.

Removed by mod

I doubt it’ll go anywhere, and I’m not sure it should.

Do we want tougher moderation on social media? Does social media need to be policed?

Most social networks have report tools. They also have blocks.

If someone is rude to you online — honestly, happens all the time. People have a bad day or whatever. I’ve said something, not even meaning to, that set someone off and they’ve stalked me across communities. Even in the last few weeks I’ve been on Lemmy. But, if someone is consistently negative toward you, you can block them. You can also ignore them. You could even call them out on their bullshit and then ignore them, and that’s what I did. Maybe it wasn’t the best course of action, this guy’s probably got a girlfriend or maybe a kid he’s beating up when he doesn’t get his way with people online. But I have no control over that. What I do have control over is how I feel when people talk to me any kind of way. The way they act could be because of any number of things. The way they were raised, the way they’ve been treated, maybe they burned their hand cooking and they’re just mad at the world right this second and they say something rude. I got no control over any of that whatsoever. What I do have control over is how their words make me feel and how I react.

Maybe that’s something kids can’t just pick up, but maybe it’s something they should learn. Bullies aren’t going to go away. People aren’t going to stop having bad days. But if they’re taking it out on people through social media, they aren’t a physical threat to you — they can be safely ignored.

Adding a bunch of extra moderators and safety features and all that won’t change things. It won’t make people behave better. We can’t make them do that. We can try. Maybe AI can be used to detect hostile posts and tell people they can’t use the network for an hour, tell them to go touch grass or something… but they’ll just hop on over to another network and do the same shit there. And there will be so many false positives. So I think we should just ignore hostility. On something like this, you can downvote it. If it’s the same person, the network may even show you that you’ve downvoted this person multiple times, and you can then decide to block them. But maybe they’re helping someone in another community. Block them and move on. It’s faster and it works better.

I host with Plex. It doesn’t pay attention to my carefully crafted tags, it uses its own. I still do the work with Mp3Tag. But I do m4a. Better quality than mp3 and better licensing. My files are a little bigger than 320k mp3 and sound almost lossless.

My what is literally commenting? My phone? My computer?

And yes, I’m aware a lot of highly technical people use Linux. This whole “next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop” is silly. We can talk for days about what highly specialised platforms use Linux. It doesn’t matter until Boomers are using it and not questioning. Which they have been for years since Android is mobile Linux.

Desktop anything is down, statistically, worldwide. I’ve been using computers for over 40 years. When I started, only nerds and geeks used them. The cool kids only used them when they had to, in computer/typing class… which was an elective when I was in school. It was never required. At some point, computers became cool. Then smartphones came out, and all of a sudden everyone’s running Linux (Android) or UNIX (iOS), only they don’t know it. They don’t need to know it. And now computers are suddenly not cool anymore, because it’s all about smartphones these days.

So it’s not a push for Linux (the kernel, Linux is a kernel, not an OS, Android, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora Core, Mint, Ubuntu and others are distributions that bundle the Linux kernel with other stuff), it’s a push for Linux on the desktop. But even that’s not good enough, it’s gotta be the command line. And Boomers are never gonna use the command line. Neither are kids. It’s a moving target that will never be reached. The original idea? Give Linux a market share? We did that 15 years ago. The only reason Windows has any market share left is some schools and businesses and governments use them. *nix has been the majority for over a decade now. But it’s never been “the year of Linux on the desktop.” *nix has been in the palm of everyone’s hands since 2007 (iPhone; Android was 2008, so close enough for Linux specifically). And 2008 was 17 years ago. Next year, there will be kids old enough to vote (in the US) who, for their entire lives, have existed in a world where *nix dominated.

Ah, I knew someone would misread that. What I meant as “a fucking joke” was that it made a mockery of everything I thought I knew about Windows.

Can regular users even use Red Hat anymore? Fedora Core is the open source spinoff. I loved using Red Hat in the 90s and I never warmed up to Fedora Core.

On iPhone, absolutely. On Mac, I’m not sure. I know I can use the disk manager to make a new partition, install whatever OS on it I want — though, my Macs are both ARM64, so I’m quite limited there — and boot to it. I’m not sure if it’s fair to say “the bootloader is unlocked” though. Since it’s Apple’s bootloader. I don’t know if I can change it. Like on Android, when I used to mess with custom firmware ~10 years ago, we’d replace the garbage Android bootloader with TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project) and that would give us the option to make backups and to flash custom forks of Android (e.g. CyanogenMod, AOKP, etc.). And some of those bootloaders were locked down pretty tight (like HTC’s) where some were wide open (like Samsung, before Knox was a thing).

Install??

Mac guy, and I remember trying Linux inside Windows and installing it while using it. For someone with 30 years of experience with Windows, Linux was a fucking joke — as in the mockery it made of everything I knew about Windows. It felt like magic. It’s not very deep though — people need to realize Linux is still very much a project. macOS is a complete product, but it’s not free and it’s tied to proprietary hardware. Still, these days I see the choice between macOS and Linux. Windows doesn’t even make the ballot for me.

He looked at where AI was six months prior and made a wild speculation that, given the data, seemed plausible, if a little outlandish. I’m not mad.

One day that prediction may come true, and there may come another day, later, where we agree that the time between when he said it would happen and the time it actually did happen is not significant enough to mention.

Are you aware that Post It has an app? IIRC it’s totally free on phones. I don’t know about Windows sync but it’s worth looking into for phones.

Kinda, sorta, not really.

So on Reddit, the people who run the iPhone subs have iPhone 17, iPhone 18, iPhone 19, and so on registered and they’re squatting on them until they become useful. Or Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout 5, Fallout 6… Now what some people have done is add a word. Like you have the “Cyberpunk” sub and “Low Sodium Cyberpunk.” That works. Or like you have Atheism, and you have RealAtheism. So you can put a word on it, or something like that. But you’ll never be able to be the “original” because a small group of people control those.

Now with Lemmy, those same people will just make those communities on the biggest Lemmy instance, but they won’t do it on all of them. I use Divisions by Zero, which leans a little further left than some of the others, it’s more of a fringe instance I guess? They’re probably not gonna target that. So if someone made a community and tried to divert views to their videos for profit like I said in my example, I could make a community with the exact same name on this instance. The other community probably wouldn’t let me advertise it there. I could do it once and get banned and maybe get a couple people to join both, at least, but I could promote it on neutral ground, and people could decide who they want to support. Because of federation, even if you aren’t on db0, you can still subscribe to a community hosted on it. Like this community is on lemmy.world and I’m subscribed to it and freely commenting on it (at least until/if lemmy.world decides to defederate the instance I’m on — they have that right and ability. But I could make an account on their instance or one that is federated with them. And that’s kosher as far as I know, as long as I myself am following the rules of the instances I post on.

macOS is “certified UNIX,” whatever that means. And I think Linux is a spinoff/knockoff of UNIX? I’m not clear on the history. I could find out if I were too concerned. But with as closely related as they are (Windows is the odd one out here, pretty much everything else out there is *nix), there’s a lot of stuff one does that the other doesn’t. Like Proton on Linux for running Windows games.

But yeah, the Jellyfin server works fine on macOS, but the apps are kinda hard to get working. Like it doesn’t auto detect your server and it’s not immediately clear what you need to put in to connect them. And the server app doesn’t just volunteer this information freely. So it’s not the kind of thing you can help people set up and share with them. Plex… is. Like seriously, I can say “just register for Plex and give me your account name or email.” I add you to my shared users. Bam, you got all my content. It’s that easy, and moving forward, anything put up as an alternative to Plex should be at least that easy.

Try? Had the record, the tape, and the CD three times (kept breaking it). Love that song.

Plex is still fine for me. I have Apple stuff (Mac, iPhone, Apple TV) so my options are basically Plex and Infuse, and Infuse is fine, but expensive to own. Or you pay $10 a year which is more than fair, I suppose. But Infuse can’t be used outside your network, and it doesn’t sync show progress with Plex. Used entirely on its own without Plex is how it’s meant to be used (as a server and client as opposed to client to a Plex server, though that way works too, albeit with weird limitations). But Infuse still can’t be streamed outside your network.

Jellyfin exists on Apple stuff but it’s not very good. The server seems fine, but the client takes a lot more to set up and it’s not as straightforward as Plex. And you have to jump through more hoops to use it outside your network.

Because they want to stop people from using ad blockers.

I hate to say it, but I don’t think Wikipedia is as neutral or as open as it claims to be. Some of the article comments talk about there definitely being some bias against anonymous editors, even if they’re correct.

I’m not sure if it was in that article or in another comment section, but someone said after Elon Musk did the Nazi salute at Trump’s event, an anonymous user mentioned it and there was a big controversy. And a registered user took it down and berated them for it, and another registered user came along an added the salute info back in and it was fine. Or something like that.

I definitely still think Wikipedia is a net good. But it seems to me any time you have a centralised source of information, a small group of people will fight to control the narrative so they can spin it any which way they want. For example, on Reddit, my favorite band’s unofficial subreddit is run by a guy who bans any fan cams of the events — unless they’re his. So obviously he does fan cams so he can make ad money on YouTube, but he uses Reddit to block those of others to direct the traffic to his. I think Fandom (the shitty wiki site with all the ads) run a lot of gaming communities, again, to drive ad revenue. Lot of that shit going on. I mean, if they tried that on Lemmy, someone could just open a community on another instance and the users could then decide who they want to support.

Is Wikipedia susceptible to that kind of influence? Of course it is. And I worry about it being taken over by the wrong people. I don’t think that has happened yet, but I’ve seen it happen on other sites.

To be clear, we should definitely support Wikipedia against the alt right, but we should also be cautious that they, and other bad actors, don’t destroy its credibility from within. Yes, the alt right has their own Wikipedia (Conservapedia or something like that) but that’s not good enough, they want ours to be theirs, too.

Is it paywalled in some countries? I saw the article when it first went up and it was paywalled then — The Verge restricts new articles to paid subscribers. But after an hour or two it went free to read and the link is fine now. At least from my machine in my location — can’t speak for others and the Archive link is definitely welcome.

As a grown adult, I don’t care what people think about phone brands or multi billion/trillion companies when compared with more of the same. But it’s like sports teams. It doesn’t mean much but it can be fun with friendly rivalries. People who take it seriously though? Not to be taken serious.

I use one because I value privacy. I also have an Android phone from 2019 I like more for a few reasons. I like both. I also like both Xbox and Nintendo. And I don’t hate PlayStation. I don’t use Windows, I use Macs, but at work I’m unofficial IT, people come to the Mac user for help with Windows 10/11 because I know that too, it’s just not what I use at home. I still have like 30 years of experience with Windows. I also have a favorite (gridiron) football team. And I’ll tell you why they suck but I’ll never stop rooting for them. (Don’t have a favorite (association) football club.)

I think tribalism is for people who use things to identify themselves. When you stop doing that, tribalism starts to look dumb.