I’m perfectly fine with Mint as a recommendation. It’s not what I would choose, but it does work for a large portion of people without issues.

I am very glad that I hardly ever see Manjaro recommended to new comers anymore though - that’s a curse/trap. There are so much better “Arch but easier” distros now that are rock solid.

We run Arch, BTW.™

Always a good idea to check the CO detectors, just in case.

Damn it, it’s been too long and I forgot the name of slow fall… I think that means you won the internet today.

Hope you’re quick on the levitate, cause we are going to summon you off a cliff.

Shit I miss Ventrilo… Setting up custom binds so I could talk shit about the raid leader directly to the other warlock in the group just by pressing a different “talk” button was amazing. And I can still here the push-to-talk notification sounds… When the guild moved to Discord, I died a little inside and didn’t even know it yet. Yea, we have a meme channel now, but at what cost??

Ah, that adds a lot of context. Sorry, the post just sounded like this was a “you” initiative.

Super weird that you upgraded your fiance’s computer to Linux, but not your own? What’s the driving factor here that led to using your partner as a lab rat?

I’m not a food doctor or whatever, so definitely check me… But it is my understanding that potato + dairy = basically everything you need to survive. So, my answer is potat soup.

Do you not think a VPN will affect response time?? I implore you re-read the paper you keep referring to because they spell it out pretty basically what they are doing - and finding a person’s actual physical location behind a VPN is not it.

I am not claiming a VPN is a perfect or complete solution… The modern web has an absolute ton of ways to track you even through a VPN, but CPV isn’t it.

Not really, because the only reason they have a location to test against is because the connection looks like it is coming from the vpn server location. They don’t have any other location data to test against, and even if they decided to then run the test against every possible location on the planet, they still have the issue that their data is heavily skewed by the fact your traffic is flowing through a vpn, so your latency is not going to be perfectly matching their test servers unless they force the test servers’ traffic through the same vpn server.

Nothing about this is setup to find your location on the other side of a vpn - it is basically testing if you are using a vpn or otherwise “spoofing” your location and returning a yes or a no.

They kind of have it backwards. They aren’t triangulating your location, they are taking the location your connection tells them you are and tests to see if that is correct or not by checking with known servers in an area around your claimed location. It can verify you are not where you say you are, but beyond that it can’t find you. At least, not the paper the person is mentioning - this “other method” they mention doesn’t appear to be linked to any paper or anything and might just be their personal theory, not sure.

The CPV paper was not doing what you are saying, defeating a VPN by finding your real location. It is basically the opposite - if you are using a VPN to claim you are in a place, it can verify that you are not in that place. It doesn’t find your location, it can only verify you aren’t in the area you claim to be.

I’ve spent uncomfortably long trying to figure out what “figma balls” means, or what the obvious answer is when I eventually ask “what’s figma”.

In this case they are clarifying that it isn’t just a handheld device OS, it is a full desktop OS.

Garuda is great. I tried Bazzite on my nvidia based laptop and had problems getting it to work well (to be fair to Bazzite, this was well over a year ago when Bazzite was very new on the scene - I have no idea if i’d have the same problems today). Replaced it with Garuda (which I had been running on my desktop) and it literally “just worked”. And, frankly, I’m a linux idiot. I basically just read the messages that pop up occasionally and do my best to do things like they say (for example, I try to remember to run updates before the system has to tell me “hey, it’s been a bit. Would be best if you would update me soon”).

Speaking of being an idiot… I don’t even know if I HAVE to download the “dragonized” version to get all the gaming bells and whistles just as easily, or if I can use their KDE plasma version that doesn’t have all the theming and still get the “gaming” tweaks? Since my system works, I don’t want to install a new version just to find out, but I feel like I could convince other people to try it more if they got the same functional experience without all the purple glowing stuff out of the box.

I’m honestly shocked that energy drinks are as unregulated as they are. Like, they don’t have warnings on the cans or anything. Way back when I was in high school, a friend on the golf team would drink 3 or 4 red bulls during a round of golf. By sophomore year of college, he had to quit the team (that he had a full ride scholarship to play on) because of heart problems caused by the energy drinks.

Like, it’s obviously not better for you than just breathing air. But it is also by all evidence better than smoking. But there has been a massive PR push to making vaping the absolute devil and just not mentioning smoking at all. It is anecdotal at best, but I can say that giving up cigarettes for a vape has made my breathing feel significantly better day-to-day. I have people actively smoking cigarettes tell me I need to quit vaping because “it’s so bad for you”.

Do I think that people that have never smoked should start vaping - absolutely not. Do I think people smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day would be generally healthier if they switched to vaping - absolutely yes.

SSD died that had windows 10 on it. During the re-installation process I got fed up with onedrive and skype popping up every reboot despite being told not to start with windows multiple times. Attempt to disable, the next round of windows update brings them back. I didn’t even have the absolute basics up and running before I lost all patience for it. Downloaded several distros, setup like 10 different USB sticks to boot them all. Cycled through them for a bit poking around and testing out. Landed on Garuda Linux kinda by chance, but it has been great. It was so refreshing to have a computer feel like it’s mine again.

FuriLabs was looking promising, but the new version of the phone is a downgrade in a lot of categories, and the old phone is not available anymore. Disappointing at the moment, hopefully more hardware options in future from them.