That’s true, though most of the results for Linux Mint slow boot show people finding it anomalous and try to help fix it, where as with Bazzite, most of the comments say that’s normal and they experience it too. The consensus I’ve seen suggests that Fedora Atomic boots slower than other distros, and thus Bazzite inherits that slow boot as well.

I’m not trying to suggest that Bazzite sucks or anything, it provides some very unique advantages such as the Deck mode, but at least in my experience, Fedora based immutable distros are slower on my hardware. If it’s not on yours, then I’m glad to hear that, but it its been very repeatable on my end.

Yeah I dunno about all that.

That’s been my experience across a couple different computers, one of which was a bit weak, and the other a very capable gaming laptop, both of which just felt sluggish compared to normal distros. This appears to be a fairly common observation of Bazzite, from what I’ve seen.

Bazzite isn’t limited, there are just different ways to do things.

I mostly agree, but I’d say it generally requires more research to accomplish certain things, and documentation for achieving those things on bazzite is far more limited compared to mainstream distros. I think Bazzite excels for people either doing simple things, such as just couch gaming, or desktop gaming + browser use and if everything is available by Flathub. It’s also good for people who are more experienced or willing to tinker.

But IMHO, at least currently, immutable distros aren’t ideal for the average user who might do more than gaming, or have older printers than need a driver from the manufacturer, or who may install things that aren’t in flatpaks (like a musician using Reaper). I think for now (because I do think immutable distros will be the mainstream in the future), normal newbie distros like Mint are still ideal since they cover the most use-cases and have the most documentation and application support.

No prob! :)

I’d normally suggest installing it on a separate empty drive to test it out, but I know it can be a real bear to access those to swap em out on a laptop.

In your case though, I think as long as you can get a Live version of Mint to boot successfully from a USB stick (like there’s no flickering issues at the desktop and everything renders correctly), that’s usually a pretty good sign everything will be fine after you install the Nvidia driver on a full install (not to say you 100% won’t encounter any issues, it’s still possible, but hopefully not!)

I tried looking it up myself just now, but I’m not really able to find anything that would indicate you’d have a bad time on Mint with your 5070 TI. There was one guy on the Nvidia forum that said he was having a bunch of problems, but turned out his BIOS was the culprit. Another person who reported a problem on the mint forums discovered that his card was outputting to his secondary monitor which happened to be off.

Support for the 5070ti was added in the 6.1 Linux kernel, while the latest version of Mint defaults to 6.12 now. You should be able to install it and then install the latest 580 Nvidia driver from the Driver Installer tool and be off to the races without any real trouble, at least from what I read.

System 76 (Linux laptop maker) now ships a laptop with a 5070 Ti, so I’d be quite surprised if you encountered significant issues.

Then I would suggest the standard Linux Mint Cinnamon, which as I said makes it extremely easy to install the Nvidia driver.

Off the top of my head,

• installing applications that aren’t available in in flatpaks requires you to use distrobox to install them (not a huge issue if you’re familiar with the terminal).
• printer drivers are very difficult to install if your printer isn’t supported out if the box, as they cannot be installed in a distrobox container.
• changing user groups or permissions, such as to enable ssh or ftp abilities, is more difficult (it wouldn’t retain the setting after rebooting, didn’t research how it can be achieved).
• not a limitation, but it’s much slower in many ways compared to normal distros. It takes a long time for it to finish installing, booting is slower, updating is slower, etc.

There may be more limitations, but those are the ones I personally encountered.

I wouldn’t recommend CachyOS to newbies, as it’s based on Arch, which brings with it a much higher learning curve and maintenance abilities to properly use. For all of that, it gives very, very minor performance gains in gaming compared to standard distros.

Bazzite is more viable for a newbie, but the immutable base can be limiting depending on their needs, and may require them to learn how to use distrobox, which is quite advanced for a newbie.

I’d recommend new users stick with Linux Mint unless they have a multimonitor setup with differing refresh rates, or very new hardware that requires a newer kernel to function well, in which case Fedora may be a better option.

Linux Mint is a fantastic place to start (I would say the best place, personally). It’s especially good if you use an Nvidia card, as it makes the driver install trivial with the built-in driver installer tool.

If you don’t use an Nvidia card, I’d personally recommend going with the Linux Mint Debian Edition.

If you really want to freak Microsoft out, switch to Linux. Nothing terrifies them more than the moment you decide to leave.

Glad you found it helpful! Though for people new to this, depending on their tech savvyness, less info might be more.

An average user doesn’t really need to know exactly how Lemmy/piefed work to actually use it effectively, and depending on how interested they are in learning how things work, the longer explanation I gave may be off-putting to some people, or make it seem too complex.

As an example; I’m not sure most people actually know how email works at all on a technical level, they just know that if they log into their Gmail and put the right address for the person they’re trying to reach, everything works. They may not even understand that the @whatever.com part means their email is being sent to a totally different server (if it’s not also Gmail) being hosted by different corporations somewhere else in the world, or how exactly an email is shuffled across all the different ISP’s, cabling, repeaters, etc. Explaining the details of all those things would make email seem horribly complex and off-putting to many. Without any of the that knowledge, as long as they know just the steps to accomplish what they want, all is well.

With Lemmy or Piefed, an equivalent could be just sending them a link to a known reliable general instance (Piefed.social would be a good choice) and telling them to create an account there and to use it just like they would reddit. For the most part, that’s all anyone really needs to know to have a pretty good experience. They may wonder why different users have different domain names at the end of their name, and if they ask you could explain further, but they’ll still be able to navigate around, comment, find communities and all the rest without knowing, which should lessen the feeling that it’s complicated.

Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all entirely different and unique attempts at creating a self-hostable software package for a reddit-like website. In the same way that Reddit was trying to be like Digg, but with it’s own codebase starting from scratch.

Despite using different codebases, Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all compatible with each other, like if you could leave comments on reddit threads from your Digg account while on Digg.

The reason they can talk to each other is they were all built with one thing in common: at the core of them is something called the ActivityPub Protocol, which in simple terms means the way they send messages, make posts, etc, are all using one standard, so they can all understand each other, like speaking the same language. An upvote from lemmy is understood as an upvote by Piefed, same for comments, posts, etc.

A similar thing on the web that functions just like that is E-mail. No matter what email provider you use, you can send an email to any other email provider, and it all just works because at the core, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail, Proton Mail, etc, they all use the standardized E-mail Protocol.

Just like with email, where you can’t log into a Gmail account from the Yahoo Mail log-in page, you also can’t log into a lemmy account from a Piefed login page.

But if you’re familiar with how you can use an E-Mail client, like Thunderbird or Outlook Express to log into almost any email account regardless of where it’s hosted, so to with lemmy/piefed mobile apps, which only act as a front-end like Thunderbird.

Each lemmy/piefed instance is like it’s own email provider (instance just means server, a server is a computer that hosts the software and makes it available on the internet for us to find). So lemmy.world is like Gmail, but piefed.social is an entirely different provider, equivalent to Yahoo mail. You could access either from a mobile app, which acts as a client, but if you went to them with a web browser, you’d have to go to lemmy.world directly if that’s where your account was, similar to how you would have to for email.

All of these servers are ‘federated’ with each other, which basically means once they establish a connection, they will continually offer new data to each other automatically. So Lemmy.world will always send out to piefed.social any new posts, comments, or upvotes that occur on lemmy.world, as well as pass forward any posts, comments, or upvotes that any lemmy.world user makes on a community hosted on piefed.social.

Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are open-source, which means they are developed collaboratively online for anyone to see or participate in (if you’re familiar with how Linux is developed, it is very similar to that).

As for who develops these softwares, you can see who has contributed to them on their respective development platforms.

• Lemmy is mainly developed by Dessalines and Nutomic on Github.
• Piefed is mainly developed by Rimu (and others) on Codeberg
• Mbin is developed on Github

But as for the instances themselves, they are owned by the individuals who run the physical servers that each instance runs on.

There are still active cinema and TV show communities, the ones from lemm.ee mostly moved over to piefed.social.

• !movies@piefed.social
• !television@piefed.social
• !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social
• !trailers@lemmy.blahaj.zone

but at the moment - until further support - GNU Taler is for tech savvy people whereas WERO is in the middle of a broader rollout even at merchants.

I fear that without more Bank adoption and dog-fooding of GNU Taler, it may not ever get that additional support, as it is diverted in favor of the ‘good enough’ solution of Wero. I can’t say I’d mind having Wero in addition to Taler as an option.

For exchanges, yes. For merchants, no.

After looking around a bit more, I found this link here, which seems to suggest a KYC implementation is still in progress, since existing services don’t meet their criteria.

Merchants can’t take possession of the funds, the exchange determines when the money is sent.

The Wire deadline as you mentioned later limits how long they can keep the money, and if they are purposefully delaying, they could be investigated by an oversight body or go unused compared to an exchange that does not.

but given that shortening it makes the refund UX worse I’m not sure it’s ideal. It’s weird to have this be a tradeoff anyway.

I can’t say I disagree entirely, and I would hope that such oddities would be improved in the future.

Fees differ per country […]

Cheers for the info and link, that does make it quite cheap, I must say.

Based on that, Wero is objectively an improvement over the credit card monopoly or paypal. However I fear that if it wins out this payment war, it will end up being the only option, and I very much doubt that it will ever implement the privacy features from GNU Taler that I consider absolutely paramount for a future digital payment system to not be abused in the future. We’re already seeing how governments are pushing for less online privacy with the constant Chat Control legislation, which we’re only narrowly avoiding, and with far right parties across Europe gaining more and more of the vote, I very much think it prudent to advocate for privacy respecting technologies wherever possible, even at the expensive of some convenience.

the anonymous aspect might sound nice but KYC laws prevent merchants from accepting it

GNU Taler’s documentation already covers KYC laws.

This means a store has to wait 2 weeks at minimum before they get their money (modern payment methods are instant or next-day, 2 weeks is exceptionally long). That’s a massive dealbreaker.

They would only need to wait 2 weeks if they specifically want to be able to reverse a charge, but AFAIK a merchant can take possession of the money much earlier, and can still send a refund to a buyer’s Taler wallet at any time as a separate transaction.

It also means exchanges can make tons of money by keeping the transferred funds in their account and collecting interest on it.

I’m not sure how that’s a problem specifically? Why does it matter if they gain a little interest on it on the time that they have it until the merchant exchanges their tokens for the money? Is that worse than the fees associated with Wero?

The European Payments Initiative (EPI), which developed Wero, has indeed promised that the new payment method will not be more expensive than iDEAL for the first two years. However, it’s unclear what exactly this means. In any case, the rate will increase after two years, creating uncertainty about what the exact costs will be. And even if the per-transaction fee remains the same, the extra procedures around chargebacks will still cause a significant cost increase for businesses.

I’m assuming that source is financially biased against Wero’s success, but I couldn’t find anything else about Wero’s fees except from Wero themselves, which was very vague:

Our pricing is clear and merchant-friendly: a small percentage fee with built-in caps, so you stay in control of costs - whether you’re processing €5 or €5,000. One model that works for businesses of all sizes.

If you have a more clear source, let me know.

It’s also quite funny to me that Taler claims to be immune to chargeback fraud, when it doesn’t offer chargebacks in the first place. Makes it easy, don’t it?

That is a legitimate downside of Taler. Personally I think the trade-off is worth it for the increased privacy, since corporations and states will inevitably use your purchase history against you at some point in the future if fascists take power once again.

GNU Taler does the same job that Wero is attempting (replacing Paypal, Mastercard, etc), only better and anonymous. We should be pushing for a long-term solution that can’t be abused, and GNU Taler is that solution.

You‘re missing the point that Android and iOS are still the predominant platforms and realistically won’t go away anytime soon.

Android and iOS have both made it clear that they will only become further enshittified and consumer hostile. We should be advocating for non-corporate opensource replacements for them as well to truly take back our computing freedom and privacy, in same way that we should advocate for GNU Taler to free us from any corporate control over our payment systems, and give us a genuine cash-like anonymity that cannot be abused by states or corporations.

Per wikipedia:

Wero is managed by banks via their mobile apps. This creates a dependency on iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) systems. Consequently, Wero exchanges its reliance on payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, for a reliance on two Big Tech giants—Apple and Google, with the new dependency focusing on online availability and distribution through their application stores.

Needing to rely on two pro-fascist tech companies seems like a particularly bad idea. Wero also does not appear to be anonymous.

A better alternative to Wero is GNU Taler, which is a properly open standard that is a true anonymous digital cash, and offers real independence from tech-bro corporations.

We have a community that discusses GNU Taler over at !money@slrpnk.net

Also @PracticalFail@feddit.org

The most effective non-violent action we can take is joining your local mutual aid groups, reading Full Spectrum Resistance for more details, and ultimately preparing and organizing for a General Strike.

The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.

If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), please consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike).

• 🌍 US/Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)

And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.

• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

Yeah, it’s a damn shame since Chomsky’s works are what initially sent me down the path to Anarchism, but there’s just too much there to give much benefit of the doubt.

Mike Rowe is directly funded by the Koch brothers, he’s genuinely a paid right-wing propagandist spreading anti-union propaganda, and the idea that hard work and ignoring or removing OSHA safety regulations is a path to the American Dream.