Dae

Tl;Dr, yes*

I find this discussion to be an exercise in frustration. There’s a lot of philosophical jargon that gets glazed over and nuances that often get ignored. I also think it’s an incredibly complex and complicated topic that we simply do not have enough information available to us to determine in a scientific manner.

For instance: what kind of “free will” are we talking about? Often it’s “Libertarian Free Will,” that is, absolute agency uninfluenced by any external factors. This much is disproven scientifically, as our brains run countless “subconscious” calculations in response to our environment to hasten decision making and is absolutely influenced by a myriad of factors, regardless of if you’re conciously aware of it or not.

However, I think that the above only “disproves” all notions of free will if you divorce your “subconscious” from the rest of your being. Which is where the complication and nuance comes in. What is the “self?” What part of you can you point to as being the “real you?”

From a Christian perspective, you might say the “self” is your soul, which is not yet proven by science, and thus the above has no bearing on, as it cannot take the soul into account. But from the opposite side of the spectrum, from a Buddhist perspective, there is no eternal, unchanging, independently existing “self.” And as such, the mind in its entirety, concious awarness or not, is just another part of your aggregates, and from that perspective it can be argued that a decision is no less your own just because it was not made in your conscious awareness.

With my ramblings aside, I am a Buddhist and so my opinion is that we do have free will, we’re just not always consciously aware of every decision we make. And while we cannot always directly control every decision we make, we can influence and “train” our autopilot reactions to make better decisions.

Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.

But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it’s very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.

It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.

I’m unsure if GTA V was ever Steamdeck Certified, but I imagine it might have to do with that. They may only offer this for games they said were certified and the devs broke it after the fact. I know Monster Hunter was.

Valve has consistently offered refunds in these scenarios. They’re offering them for GTA V, and they also offered refunds for Monster Hunter when Capcom decided to switch their DRM bullshit and broke it on the Steam Deck. I think Valve has done their part.

I’ve been saying this even before Bethesda went down the gutter. Everyone is pointing to their recent collosal failures like they wouldn’t still be disappointed even if ES6 was “perfect.”

I don’t think anybody can point out what, exactly, made Skyrim so fucking legendary. It was a buggy, unpolished mess of a game. Its lore was inconsistent. It had a villain and story that should have been deeply intriguing and interesting and yet it does Alduin a disservice and was, quite frankly, boring.

But somehow the game was fun. So fun that people spent an average 80 hours a week playing it, me included! And the only possible exploration is that Bethesda had passion, and then Skyrim inflated their egos. So I can see why people see their recent spree of lackluster-to-terrible games as a very valid reason for agreeing with Tod Howard, for once.

Set that aside, however. Let’s assume they “get it right.” Let’s assume it’s made with passion and recent history has humbled them. People will still be disappointed. Why? Because “it’s not Skyrim.” Just in the same way that hardcore ES fans hated Skyrim because “it’s not Morrowind.” Skyrim set the bar so astronomically high that it would take an absolute fucking miracle for them to, at bare minimum, meet expectation! And it would honestly be better that they didn’t, because then people would expect them to hit that milestone every, single time when the “secret ingredient” to Skyrim’s legendary success is so fucking aetherial nobody can say exactly what it is.

I’m a huge coffee drinker. Used to have a machine. It broke. Bend using an aeropress and French press for awhile and find that I really don’t miss the machine.

My comment wasn’t “Linux works perfectly in every single regard.” It was “Linux isn’t hard to use for the things that do work on it.” I’m well aware Linux isn’t right for every use-case, nor did I say it was, I said it wasn’t hard to use. Compatibility is a separate issue here.

My guy, there are entire countries controlled by Islamic Extremists where you’re lucky if all they do is kill you when they find out you’re LGBT, and it’s entirely for “theological reasons.”

I put this in quotes, because I’m not nor have I ever been a Muslim. But Islamic Extremists will kill gay people for supposed “theological reasons.”

It’s most definitely not just America doing it because “mah holy book says it’s wrong.”

It depends! You’ll get a lot of recommendations. And they’re probably good recommendations. But there are most certainly Distros out there that are very simple. I would suggest you don’t be afraid to Distro Hop until you find one that you really feel at home on.

If you’re looking for something that’s simple, out of the box, and out of your way, I’d avoid anything Arch based. Ubuntu or Debian based Distros will have the most documentation and therefore minimize the amount of time you spend looking for answers, however, Fedora based Distros, in my experience, are rock solid and sit comfortably between stable and the bleeding edge.

I don’t get all this “gaming on Linux is hard” non-sense. All I have to do is set a specific flag on Steam and click play. That’s it. One step, and 99% of my library just works, sometimes better than on Windows.

If it isn’t on Steam, I search for it on Lutris and Lutris installs it for me, and I click play. And more often than not, it just works.

Hell, the mother fuckers that make Final Fantasy XIV’s quick launcher made that shit a flatpak! And it’s so fucking seemless, not a soul would know that game isn’t a native Linux game!

Where’s the difficulty?

Linux culture is about freedom of choice and movement. Any project can be forked, tweaked, expanded, or outright overhauled by anybody with the know-how in order to meet specific use cases. And those use cases are often the same as other’s use cases. But in most cases, they are still rooted in the project they forked from. I.E, any guide that applies to Ubuntu is likely going to apply to Pop!_OS or Mint, since they’re based on Ubuntu. So there’s rarely a downside to niche distros, because you can have something that’s close enough to a popular distro but that caters to your unique needs and wants.

For me, for example, I use Nobara. It’s rather niche and in most cases, it either works beautifully for you, or it doesn’t work at all, honestly. But it’s based on Fedora, so any guide for Fedora is likely to apply to Nobara. I get all the benefits of being on Fedora with tweaks and patches that make my gaming experience much more stable. And quite frankly, Nobara has made my rig run the best it ever has.

Todoist. It’s nothing to do with “productivity” per se, but that is a benefit I’ve reaped.

Instead of having to remember what feels like 100 things all the time and doing 2 of them, I just remember the app. And it’s a hell of a lot less stressful. The sub-task function also helps simplify larger things and makes them simpler to tackle. It’s a game changer as an AuDHD individual.

I would vastly prefer that gas cars be phased out. But I believe that this is a bit different:

Cigarettes don’t offer any benefit beyond making you “feel good.” And you don’t need cigarettes to feel good, and, in fact, literally any other option is better for both you, and everyone around you, save for harder drugs.

Gasoline cars, while poisonous to the world around us, also offer us far greater benefits: supplies and logistics, we can carry goods further, wider, and faster than we ever could without them. And because of that, without them, sure we’d pollute a lot less, but then we’d have a far harder time carrying critical resources to more remote parts of the world where trains and planes can’t reach, and people would starve or lack critical medicine.

As it stands, EVs are not a reliable substitute. They’re getting there, I want them to get there, but I disagree with the notion that cars should be made illegal as things currently stand. I don’t think it’s nearly as cut and dry as cigarettes are. I can only hope to live long enough to see a world where gas powered cars could be outlawed without leaving hundreds of millions of people high and dry.

Surprised to see no one has said cigarettes yet. Not only are you poisoning yourself, it’s harmful to everyone else around you that has to inhale that shit.

I’m a Pluralistic individual. I believe everyone has a reason to believe. But I think the way someone believes is very telling about that person’s personal values.

Ergo, I don’t care what a person’s religious beliefs are, I care what that person’s values are. I believe that is a much more honest approach that doesn’t needlessly alienate anyone or stoke petty, tribalistic behavior.

You write like you just came here to be angry at people who’ve made a personal decision to leave Windows like it affects you, and that’s gonna help neither you nor us.

At no point in my comment did I say you “write a single command.” I’m saying basic, every day things that I do are point and click. I want a new program? I open my distro’s app store, which is a GUI, and click download on the app I want. I want to play a game I have? I click play on Steam or Lutris. You know. With a mouse. No typing involved, my guy.

It also sounds to me like you’ve run into some real fucking assholes when you needed help. And unfortunately, they’re out there. But that isn’t all of us. I hope one day your negative first impression of our community changes, but it never will if you keep engaging in bad faith like this. So please stop.

I don’t mean superficially. Linux Mint was very similar in feel to the Windows 7 days. Just thinking about it makes me nostalgic.

I mean in the way that sometimes you gotta run something in WINE, or trying to mod a game only to run into how different the file structure is. Back end things that make you go “Oh, this really isn’t Windows.”

And it’s not. But that’s okay. It doesn’t need to be. It shouldn’t be. We moved to Linux before it’s not Windows. It’s a little frustrating at first, but taking the time to learn how it works was worth it. I’ve never looked back.

I swapped away from Windows about a year and a half ago. The last straw was them sticking ads in the OS. And from everything I’ve heard, they continue to boil the frog; they continue to add more and more telemetry and unasked for “features” and bloat the system more and more and more with every update. Even my own parents are growing tired of Windows; it’s a clunky, poorly optimized operating system that’s positively frustrating to use.

I will concede that not everything that runs on Windows will run on Linux. It’s true. But I severely disagree that Windows is “easier to use.” Of course, when you grow up on Windows, Linux has a learning curve. It’s different OS. But once I got past that? Nah, Linux is far easier and more intuitive in most cases.

Installing programs? Open your software manager and click a button.

Playing video games? Open Steam or Lutris and click a button. Occasionally you might need to tweak things, but you have to do the same on Windows sometimes, especially for older games!

I could go on but those are the biggest two examples that come to mind immediately.

As to another point you made, I personally gave up almost nothing. Destiny 2 and League of Legends don’t work, but I quit league before fgsh added Vanguard and neither of these games want me. That isn’t my fault, and it isn’t a short coming in Linux’s fault, it’s the devs being assholes.

In spite of this, I do acknowledge some people would have to give up more than me, and for some people that’s too much, and that’s valid! I hope one day they truly get a choice.

I think a good amount of it is also “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Twitter users have been taking abuse after abuse. Like many others have stated, they use Twitter to follow specific people. If those people aren’t on other platforms, then they’re going to stay. But after a certain point, the cost becomes too high. Now the platform is rebranded and now it looks as alien as it’s begun to feel. I think that’s why so many are once again leaving. Before they could just ignore everything else going on and try to move on with their day. Not there’s a big, fat X reminding them of how much they’re starting to/already hate the platform now.

I understand your frustration entirely. And for the most part, I agree with it. But for music producers, especially if they’re indie, they have no choice. Content creators trying to make a living off of their art rely on putting themselves out there on the biggest platforms to maximize the amount of exposure they’re going to get. The importance of social media with millions upon millions of users for an indie artist cannot be understated. It is the difference between them paying rent, and getting evicted.

As for the average user, as others have stated, they have friends, family, and content creators that they like to follow. Digital privacy comes at a cost. We cannot afford to create the misconception that acts protecting our digital privacy are free actions. And the level of cost and willingness to pay it varies from person to person. I don’t need Facebook to keep up with my parents. But many people do. For their parents and the rest of their family and loved ones. I was willing to make the switch to Linux, but it cost me some simplicity in my gaming; some titles aren’t just plug n play. Even ones that were on Windows. Switching to Lemmy was nothing for me, but for some people, they’re giving up subreddits they loved, or they have to keep using Reddit to access them. And there are some valuable resources there.

Privacy isn’t free. It’s invaluable and sometimes the price tag reflects that.