LMDE (Mint Cinnamon)

Nice! I was thinking about buying a deck, I'll wait for the new one, thanks for the news!

On our company PCs we have both Edge and Chrome, after the latest Windows update a few days ago, every time I try to set Chrome as default browser, a window pops up saying something on the lines of "are you sure? please try out the fabulous Edge first, you might change your mind".

That annoys me to no end, first we are in EU, where Microsoft has been fined in the past for not allowing a browser choice, second, we're talking about Windows ENTERPRISE !!, keep that shit out of it, policies on PCs are decided at enterprise level, you can't spam users about it.

Appending reddit to google search has become the only way to get meaningful search results, without it it's a shitshow of clickbait garbage, I can't imagine what it will become if it's not allowed anymore to index reddit data.

I understand companies not wanting data to be scraped for AI training for free, it's not only reddit according to the article, also news sites, I think it's a legit concern.

I believe at this point governments should wake up and regulate the matter of AI training globally, leaving it to individual companies will only damage users all over the world.

Ah ok.

I simply assumed it wouldn’t work because that’s the case with like 99% of steam games

That's because the vast majority of games implement DRM unfortunately, BG3 does not, Witcher doesn't either, any game that does not have any DRM can be played fine outside of Steam, tho there are not many.

DRMs are not Steam doing, it's game devs.

You can do that with the gog version.

You can do that with Steam too, I know because I'm doing it. I have dual boot, I use Windows very rarely (I play on Linux) so Steam is not installed on it at all, I copied BG3 on it to try out mods because Mod Manager doesn't work on wine for me.

I can assure you the game works perfectly fine without Steam.

With the steam version it’ll try to launch / connect to the local installed steam at startup

As you sure you're using the right exe? bg3_dx11.exe and not some launcher?

Doesn't that depend on game devs?

I mean, I can copy Baldur's Gate on a PC where there's no Steam at all and play it just fine, because the game itself doesn't have any restrictions. If other games have DRMs I don't think it's Steam fault.

If you want to be totally free from DRMs you need to check GOG, if a game is there, it doesn't have DRM, so neither the Steam version will.

Amazing job as always!

This is about Windows, why did you post it here?

If I use ubuntu I’m somehow forced to use them.

Yes, that's why I stopped using it years ago (among other reasons).

Users are not out of options, they don't need to check the origin of the apps themselves, it's enough to ask other users what distros don't do the things they don't like and use those.

The solution is using a distro that has support for containers (flatpaks preferably) but doesn't force them on you, so far I haven't found a single use case in which they're truly needed on desktop so apt update still does everything for me.

There's some software that I compile myself (emulators), it cannot be upgraded with a packet manager but that has always been the case.

I use Linux MX but there are other distros with the same approach. It also makes it really easy to see if you're installing them because flatpak is a separated repository from non-container apps (I think it's also updated by the package manager but I haven't tried so far).

Do I basically just start off installing one distro on the full hard drive and then when I go to install the others, just choose the “run alongside” option? or would I have to manually partition things out?

If you install one distro on full hard drive you won't have room anymore for the rest, if you want multiple operating systems on your machine you need to partition manually with some planning ahead on how to allocate the space.

Any thing to worry about with conflicts between different types of distros

They don't interfere with each other, they don't even "see" each other once you booted into one, they only share the boot manager.

That being said, what you intend to do was the only way to learn many years ago when computers weren't as powerful as they are today (I did learn that way), but today ANY PC can manage virtual machines, they are much more practical and can save you a lot of time when you mess things up, because whatever you do is confined within the VM and doesn't affect your PC as a whole.

Install Virtualbox, have a look at how it works and use that to do all experiments you want, you can even learn to multiboot inside a single VM, without the risk of messing up your system.

None of the forcibly removed mods I spoke with have worked with or plan to work with replacement mods to pass on knowledge gained through years of experience.

None of them should. Let reddit deal with the consequences of their actions, trying to fix it for them would be telling them it's ok to treat free labor as shit (as they did).

I too had the "graphics too old" error on WoW out of nowhere a couple of weeks ago, after playing it on Linux just fine for years, no idea what changed on their part. Blizzard never supported Linux AFAIK but their games usually work nonetheless.

My PC was really too old tho, almost 10 years, it still worked fine but graphics drivers weren't update anymore and that created a lot of problems in different games unfortunately, not only WoW (BG3 for example was full of graphics bugs - pretty unplayable, even if the PC could run it at medium settings).

I was already planning on building a new one and now it's done, just reinstalled WoW with Lutris and it works, I used the battle.net script here: https://lutris.net/games/world-of-warcraft/.

That's disgusting! You made the right thing, sorry you admins and mods have to put up with that shit, I hope instance owners that are being attacked are reporting it to local authorities.

That's ok, making mistakes is the best way to learn, we all made them :)

LTS is your problem, it has too old stuff (kernel, drivers) for the sake of stability, never good for games, especially new ones.

If you want to stick with Ubuntu, you need the normal one, or change distro as you said, Fedora is good, Linux Mint is also really good and based on Ubuntu, if you want something more similar to what you're used to.

Subscribing to what you want to see instead of banning what you don't want to see (unless it's specific users) has always been the best use of reddit (lemmy too), it baffles me so many people act like they don't know how reddit always worked, don't we all come from there?

Thank you for this post, I appreciate a lot your well balanced approach and I fully agree with it, kudos to you especially considering you've been personally "hit".

Bad apples exist in every instance, defederating from them without actual proof of the entire instance (or most of it) being bad, is detrimental to the fediverse IMO.

I will trust your judgement, if the time comes to actually defederate I will know it truly is a last resort, as it should be, thanks to what you've written here.

Just created an account here, hello everyone :)