Mint is honestly your best bet. I installed it for my parents on their aging laptop and they’re allergic to the terminal and they’re getting on great with it. Requiring a password for administrative actions is generally a good thing for security but you could disable it (unfortunately the only way I know how is via the terminal!). I’m biased here because I’m a techy person but I’ve used Windows, macOS and Linux professionally for years and I always have to troubleshoot things. Windows, in my experience, has always been worse than the others because while Linux has very technical or terminal-based solutions a lot of the time, Windows official support generally tells you to “just reinstall or restore from a system restore point” which is such overkill for most problems. That or registry edits.

I think the act has merits, there’s just not enough exceptions. The wording is so vague it considers a Minecraft server used by a group of friends who know eachother in the real world as being the same as fucking Facebook.

So-called “security questions” like these are prohibited under various standards (there’s a NIST one that I can’t remember exactly, and OWASP ASVS) because they’ve always been really terrible at verifying it’s actually you answering them, and not just someone who happens to know the answer. Mother’s maiden name being the notorious example.

I love the argument about c having type safety with the little side-swipe at rust. “AcTuAlLy C does have type safety! You just have to jump through the following 50 hoops to get it!”. I’m an outsider to both C and Rust but it’s still funny.

Yeah this is basically the argument for universal basic income, on top of eliminating poverty.

I’m all for supporting low-to-middle incomes but it’s still a huge investment for those not in (or just outside) that bracket. I can’t spend 10k now to see the return in 20 years, assuming the rates stay decent. It’s not practical.

Ah yes, it’s the immigrants’ fault that education has been underfunded for years and teaching is such a woefully underpaid career. Definitely the immigrants’ fault. No no don’t look at the last 14 years of Tory rule that included austerity!

The ELI5 version is that developers can make a lot of assumptions about what a Windows pc means and what features are available. A while ago if you had videos as part of a game (for example a cutscene) it was actually played through Windows Media Player, which was virtually guaranteed to be present on the user’s computer. Sure you can play that video with other tools like VLC or Quicktime, but you couldn’t guarantee they were installed, so Windows Media Player was a safe bet. Nowadays that’s not how video is handled but the point remains for a few other things. For example if I need to load an image, maybe a background, I would look it up using the windows filesystem, so probably something like C:\Program Files\Steam\common\mygame\images\background.png. That’s not the same in the Linux or another os. Also the piece of software that handles loading images might be different, which means how we execute that load operation is probably different, and so our Windows-focused version of our game just doesn’t work.

Fortunately nowadays that’s a mostly solved problem with Steam investing a lot of time into Proton, what they call a “compatibility layer” that basically translates all of the windows-specific stuff to work in Linux. That’s a very simplified explanation but you get the idea. The games that still won’t run have kernel-level anticheat (Valorant, Helldivers 2) or are so dependent on things only available on Windows that even Proton can’t fix it. Some anti-cheat software doesn’t run properly so then you can’t go online, like Warhammer: Vermintide 2. That’s mostly a commercial decision rather than technical, they could make it work they just choose not to.

The fact Microsoft isn’t mentioned astounds me.

We have rules?

The self-contained electron app works better for most people I think.

I believe it’s 1% for access to the “entire post-open ecosystem”, rather than 1% per project which would be unreasonable. So you could use one or thousands of projects under the Post-open banner, but still pay 1%.

It will take years to develop the post-open ecosystem to be something worth spending that much on.

Yes I should have said “employed full-time” probably. This also doesn’t account for the self-employed who have to manage it themselves too rather than having their employer do it.

If you’re British and employed your employer is legally required to provide a private pension I believe. You also get a state pension if you’ve been paying national insurance (most people will get this taken out of pay cheques before you ever see the money, same as income tax). Some employers offer “matching contributions” up to a certain amount. For example if you decide you want to send £100 per month into your private pension, your employer will also do the same, so your pension gets £200. These contributions are tax free so it’s a tax-efficient way to save money when compared to privately investing where you’d have to invest from your income, which has already been taxed and then potentially have to pay capital gains tax on profits.

That works until all* games come with root level anti cheat. It was the same with micro transactions which people still defend despite being utter shit.

• Realistically this will never be 100% but it will be enough of the mass market AAA games like CoD etc to mean that if you functionally want to play a game made in the last X number of years you will need to accept this or stop playing games altogether. I think most people will continue to play games. Most people will continue to install root level anti cheat, knowingly or otherwise, and all of them will get fucked by an exploit of that software. They may never even know about it.

Helldivers 2 does the same thing. If this continues it will be extremely advisable to move any non-gaming use-cases to a different computer as you have no idea what the “anti-cheat” is doing with that level of authority over your computer.

Literally just bought what I believe to be last generation’s X13 on ebay for half the price of the new one. It’s been great so far, especially with the power efficiency of Ryzen CPUs. My one complaint is the soldered RAM, which judging by the new lineup is getting phased out, thankfully.

Again, this existed before AI. Typo squatting, supply chain attacks, automated package uploads, CI pipeline infection, they’re all known attack vectors. That’s not to say this isn’t a concern, just that it’s a known risk and the addition of “AI” doesn’t, to my eyes, increase that risk. If your SSH keys don’t require a password, you have taken the decision to make those keys less secure but more convenient to use. That’s pretty much always the tradeoff in security.

The risk here is slightly overblown or misrepresented. Just because a fork exists doesn’t mean that anyone has even read it, let alone run it on their system. For this to be a real threat they would have to publish packages with identical or similar names (ie typo-squatting) to public package repositories which this article didn’t have any information on but which is a known problem long before AI. The level of obfuscation and number of repos affected is impressive but ultimately unlikely to have widespread impact to anyone besides GitHub.

Personally I rename them to something meaningful and they get merged if there are no other references. PayPal is especially bad for completely meaningless rubbish in the payee field and they tend to be ad-hoc purchases so I don’t fiddle with them much. The category is the most relevant bit for me.