Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can’t be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)

Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.

I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure

I hope this is effort is a miserable failure … because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.

Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they’ll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)

It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they’ll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware…)

Gotta find out if it’s copyrighted, you know?

I’d say yes, but, you don’t have a right to appropriate someone else’s art as your own.

By all means, copy and distribute. Even modify and make derivatives. But no plagiarism, please. Don’t take something that someone else made and then claim to have made it yourself without giving them due credit.

The launcher looks like a standard box on the back of a large truck.

Looks a bit longer/taller than typical? So I’m guessing these hypersonic missiles are some real looooooong bois. But otherwise, yeah.

Some things on Ubuntu are much more updated than standard Debian, including the kernel.

Okay, but…

Recently, my girlfriend (who I successfully migrated to Kubuntu) was complaining about ads on youtube, so I wanted to install Brave for her, since that works well as a chromium-based browser but still doesn’t show ads. (I’ve had issues trying to play youtube on Firefox with adblocker, probably because Google’s trying to discourage anything other than Chrome.)

Brave was available in the app store, and installed as a Snap. And it was fine. It installed fine, it works fine, no issues. Maybe it’s not the most efficient way to do things, and there certainly are issues with the snap system. But … it’s not the devil, and it’s not the end of the world.

Given the kind of incompetent fuckwits they’ve been hiring, that’s not surprising at all, really.

I’m not sure if other people want to read the pedantic truth anyways. I’m glad you filled this void.

Glad my pedantry could be of service, lol!

The instructions for installing on ubuntu only work because of ubuntu’s popularity.

True, but this is still a very real effect with real-world benefits.

(And I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s just Ubuntu’s popularity. More like, due to Debian and Debian derivatives’ popularity, of which Ubuntu is one. Since there are so many popular distros out there that are Debian-based where Debian-style install instructions will work (and quite a few people running Debian itself), it makes sense to give Debian-style install instructions first.)

Also if you can copy-paste commands, you can also just follow build instructions.

In my experience, not so much.

Because even if you follow the instructions exactly, you’ll always run into some problem due to your build environment not being quite identical to the developer’s build environment, some library being half a version number off, and then cmake fails with a cryptic error message. So then you downgrade that library to the older version and try again, and this time it fails with a different cryptic error message that you can’t make any sense of at all this time, or the compiler quits because it says the code is formatted improperly on line 1437 and now you’re left wondering whether it’s an issue with your compiler or whether you should go in and edit the source code yourself to try and fix that supposed formatting error…

I don’t know… I’ve tried this approach a few times – usually as a desperate last resort – and it never seems to actually work. In theory, it should. In practice … good fucking luck.

ALL of them essentially.

The estimate I’ve found puts it at about 500,000 homeless people in the US.

With $500 billion, you could give each and every homeless person in the US $1 million. Easily enough to buy a house in almost every housing market.

And they will be right to do so. The Dems are fully complicit in enabling this.

Tends to spend the winter in there, when she’s able to sneak in.

I trapped a mouse in my trash can and killed it. And then I fed the dead mouse to a feral cat that sometimes lives in my basement.

it is more about arch’s philosy being your system may not boot next update

Yeah … no thanks. I’ll be okay with slightly outdated versions of various packages, as long as they still work.

ubuntu: pacman -S name is not harder than apt install name.

Eh, it’s a teensy bit harder, since you have to remember what -S means, rather than the easy to remember and plain English ‘install’. But, yeah, not much of a difference.

And try to install something on ubuntu if it’s not in the official package repos.

1: Go to that something’s website.

2: look for their download/install instructions page, scroll to Linux instructions if necessary.

3: Install instructions for Debian/Ubuntu are usually the first one listed, and typically just consist of a few commands you can copy and paste over without modifying.

It isn’t particularly difficult in most cases.

Don’t drink out of it.

Give it to your landlord as payment-in-kind for several months’ worth of rent. Maybe your landlord will drink out of it.

To be fair, I doubt people understood statistics much better back in the day, either.

We don’t label anything else that can kill dogs. Just don’t give human food to your dog

Might maybe be a good idea to start. (And cats as well, as the other most common housepet.)

And as for ‘just don’t give it to them’ … well, sometimes dogs get into things they’re not supposed to. It might be good to have things that are dangerous to dogs labeled so that you quickly and easily know which foods need to be extra protected to make extra-sure your dog can’t get into them.

(Then again, I expect a lot of corporate resistance to this. Because stupid people will see the ‘this may be dangerous to dogs’ label and think, “Wow, if it’s bad for dogs, it must be bad for me as well!” and they won’t buy it. Or they won’t buy it because they don’t want anything dangerous to their precious pooch to even be in the house at all. So forcing companies to have that label will probably result in reduced sales for those companies. Which means reduced profits, which means they’ll fight hard against any requirement to label their products this way.)

It’s absolutely disgusting and shouldn’t be called anything other than ‘trash’.

I tried it once, and never got past one little sip. Definitely in my top 5 of ‘worst things I’ve ever put in my mouth’.

That’s the tricky part, innit?

A few good options:

A) Set up your backup/restore procedures immediately after setting up your fresh new system. And then immediately test them to see if you can successfully restore, before you’ve done anything important on the new system that you can’t afford to lose. If the restoration completely fails, no biggie. You just have to start over on setting up your fresh new system.

B) Attempt to restore your backup to a different system, not your primary one. You’ll need a second set of hardware to do that, but if you’ve got the hardware lying around, it’s a great way to test your restore procedure. If you’re upgrading your hardware anyway, it could be a good time to do this test – use your backup restoration procedure to move your data to the new hardware. (As an extra bonus, this doesn’t require any downtime on the primary system.)

C) Simulate a complete hard drive failure and replacement by replacing your primary system’s drive(s) with a blank new one. If the backup restoration fails, you should (fingers crossed) be able to just plug the old hard drive back in and everything will go back to how it was before your test.

D) Have multiple backups and multiple restore plans, and just hope to fuck that at least one of them actually works during your testing.

Option A can only be done if you’re proactive about it and do it at the right time.

Options B and C require extra hardware, but are probably the best choice if you have the hardware or can afford it.

And Option D will always have at least a tiny amount of risk associated with it.