Libra00

I’ve tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.

PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren’t being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn’t work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can’t even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn’t matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn’t work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.

In case it matters, my specs are: Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I’ve only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that’s ~4-5 years old.

That’s not it at all. You don’t think accountants who juggle numbers and Excel formulas all day couldn’t learn? Lawyers whose entire job involves absorbing and filtering vast amounts of information? Doctors who diagnose machines that are far more complex than computers (people)? Of course they could; I worked around these people in IT for 20 years, I can tell you that despite how stupid these folks seem around computers they feel the same way about your capabilities in their field of expertise, only they don’t have the arrogance to assume that everyone should learn to be a mechanical engineer or dentist in order to understand their job.

What they are is too busy doing other shit that they care more about. They don’t have the time or interest to be farting around with a computer to do anything more than the absolute minimum requirements needed to do the shit they actually care about. Human society functions because people specialize, and people who don’t specialize in making computers go just don’t care enough about them as anything other than as a tool and maybe an occasional source of entertainment to waste their time learning. Just like you don’t waste your time learning about how to run a nuclear power plant.

And I say this as someone who used to love tinkering with computers, turned it into a career, and slowly grew to hate it (never turn your hobby into a career if you want to keep that hobby.) I too no longer care about optimizing or fiddling or tweaking, I just want the magic box to work so I can do the stuff I care about (writing, gaming, etc.)

I actually think there’s some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don’t always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it’s not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don’t have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that’s not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it’s just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than ‘lol buy an AMD GPU’, so the odds are pretty good that I’m not the only person in history that that has happened for. I’ve never had problems like this on windows, I’ve never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don’t have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.

I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it’s not just ‘press button, receive OS’ like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it’s not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.

You ever notice how it sometimes helps to read the whole sentence to understand what some part of it means in context?

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is.

There’s a comma after that second VPN so obviously it’s related to what follows, which is the part where I describe exactly how a VPN is a VPN: in terms of getting a different IP address. This is twice now you’ve gone way out on a limb here trying to back the play of some fucking troll who didn’t bother to explain themselves and I’m not sure if that’s where you want to be. Picking through my comment and taking bits out of context to feed back to me as ‘evidence’ to back up your pedantry and assumption that the rest of the text of that same comment shows you to be wrong about is not a good look. If you’re going to nitpick my shit to death then you should at least try to read the whole thing and understand how each of the parts relate to each other first, otherwise people might mistake you for some fucking troll too (albeit a clearly slightly more intelligent one since you can actually elucidate what your issue is with what I said, regardless of whether or not it’s remotely accurate.)

Then you are not a decent human being? :P

Meh, fair enough.

If that’s the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:

The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.)

I admit I didn’t include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?

Oh, my bad, I didn’t even notice the ‘no thanks’ button. Thanks.

Neat, I’ll check that out, thanks!

Edit: Ugh, it looks like all of the book clubs that are tagged as ‘sci-fi’ are actually ‘sci-fi/fantasy’ (or sometimes sci-fi/fantasy/historical/romance, which makes no sense) which is not what I’m looking for. Do you happen to know of any that are pure sci-fi? Preferably ones that focus on big-idea sci-fi like Greg Egan or Peter Watts?

No one gets thanks for being a decent human being, it’s sort of the standard that everyone is expected to hold to.

No doubt, but as a mechanism of applying pressure to get them to stop invading Ukraine, I think you’ll have to agree that it’s failed miserably. That’s what I (and most people) mean by ‘working’: accomplishing the intended aim. Huge problems or not, the war continues unabated. Why do you imagine doing more of the same would be any more effective?

lol, k, I definitely respect the opinion of someone who drops a half-assed comment like that without bothering to offer what they believe to be the correct information.

They could. But you and I both know they won’t because most people don’t care about anything beyond ‘make the magic box work so I can do my job / play my game / etc.’

I think they would. I tried Linux again for the first time in 10+ years and kept running into issues like my sound would randomly die or change to headset, when I tried to update the video driver it hard- locked the system, etc. I just installed Ubuntu the other day and whenever it boots the monitor just goes into standby with no signal. It’s been nothing but trouble, and I have pretty normal hardware. Most people aren’t going to know or care how to deal with those problems. As far as Linux has come, it’s still not ready for widespread adoption by most people on the ‘it just works’ front.

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is. The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.) I’m not familiar enough with either service to be able to speak to that, but everyone else seems to be talking about features, prices, politics, etc when none of those directly address your questions.

Link just takes me to a website that says ‘Enter your email.’

Respectfully: No.

Sorry, Fable? I’m not familiar with that.

Don’t. Even if it’s not a cult (it totally is) it’s a scam designed to extract money from people. If you just want to give up a significant portion of your money and feel like you belong you’re welcome to buy a shitload of weed and come hang out with my friends and I.

Why? Primary sanctions didn’t. The US and Europe effectively crashed out of Russia’s economy for the most part; they lost access to Western banking, Western businesses abandoned Russia in droves, and the oil and gas sales to Europe that Russia is heavily dependent upon have been significantly reduced. Yet they seem to be doing fine, so what’s left?

Also, why on earth would China walk away from trade with Russia? It’s pretty clear the US-led world order of trade is falling apart and China hasn’t been the one begging for trade deals over here, they seem fine to just write us off and go on about their business elsewhere in the world, I doubt they would have any compunction about doing the same to Europe if it came to that (which I doubt it will.)

LOL, indeed. I grew up in Oklahoma so I recognize that twang. :P I worked for years to get rid of my southern accent.