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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s one of those cases where you either add support yourself (provided you have the time, know-how - which most already don’t - and commitment) or wait until hopefully someone else does. Or - like me - you curse and go back to X11 until something gives you enouhh confidence to try Wayland again. I think I read somewhere on this platform that there will be (or was?) some Nvidia driver update that should help with Wayland support, but I haven’t looked into it.

    I don’t have much experience with laptop hardware. I did have one elderly laptop running Ubuntu, though it probably would have been served better with something more lightweight (I just didn’t know much about anything at the time). But that wasn’t doing anything intensive, just some Uni exercises. I think a simple neural network was the most challenging thing it ever had to handle.



  • I imagine the answer is “what’s the real world?”

    I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.

    They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.

    At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.

    It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”

    Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.

    If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.

    For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.

    I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:

    Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.

    The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.

    Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.



  • Sure, but the common consensus seems to be that you shouldn’t be annoyed at the constant updates when that’s an explicit feature of that system. Maybe that’s just a misreading, but I assume the expected reaction would be “Not now” rather than “Not again”.

    (I’m not taking a position, as I’ve never worked with a rolling distro and can’t really comment on either stance, just trying to navigate the confusion here)



  • I’m far from OG, unless you count my dad’s SUSE that I “used” as a child for a while. I fondly remember SuperTux. But I didn’t really interact with the system much beyond starting games or a browser.

    Later (about six years ago, I think) I started dual-booting Ubuntu as a side piece for productive stuff while gaming on Windows. Gradually tried gaming on Linux too, then made the jump to Linux (Ubuntu) exclusive late 2021.

    Since a recent PC upgrade, I’ve used an additional disk to try Nobara and am happy with it so far. I’ve now got a spare disk and more time to try new distros, so I plan to explore the distroverse some more, but all in all I’d consider myself more of a newcomer or at best a resident than an OG.


  • I had the opposite once, years ago: I don’t know the cause anymore, but somehow Windows disappeared from my grub.

    By the time I had finally secured all my data with the intent to make that absence permanent, it did reappear (again, no idea why), but I was committed. Steamrolled the entire drive with a new Ubuntu install and haven’t used Windows privately since.

    I did need to use tools that don’t run on Linux (even with wine - believe me, I tried) for uni and used a windows VM, my work laptop is Windows because I need the same tools and get no say in it anyway, but haven’t had a direct Windows install on my system since 2022.

    My private OS of choice is by now Nobara, though I also intend to use an obsolete SSD to try more distros with.










  • He could take a bit of a gamble, do some Linux as a comparison and see if that draws viewers too, maybe some attention from those that are curious about Linux but not enough to actually delve into the topic themselves (or deterred by the reputation of Linux being complicated).

    Choosing a suitable distribution might be a challenge, particularly because some distro elitists will inevitably come to dunk on his choice and he might not want the comment section to be clogged by distro wars (particularly if the majority of viewers, as you suggested, are Windows users and will find that off-putting).


  • To expand: I feel like it should be emphasised more that current “AI” models are, at best, hallucinating.

    Their output may look real enough and for some purposes they may be perfectly suitable, but ultimately, they have no concept of the semantic objects related to the words they learn and the semantic relationships between those objects. Without that, they can’t possibly guarantee that the implied semantic connection of the combination of words they produce aligns with the actual relationships.

    You can use a LLM to help translate bullet points into text of a given tone (like abstracts for theses that sound scientific), but you’ll still have to check the factuality and consistency of those texts. When using them to write texts about something you already know, that’s doable and can save you some work. But using it like in the OP to aggregate and present “new” facts without supervision is dangerous, because you can’t actually verify what you don’t already know.

    But “Copilot can scrape your data to give you some pointers and spare some of the tedium of finding it yourself, but you shouldn’t take it for gospel truth” doesn’t quite sell as nicely as “Microsoft Copilot leverages the power of AI to boost productivity, unlock creativity, and helps you understand information better”.