This. When YouTube finally succeeds in making it impossible for anyone to use their website without watching ads, they probably still won’t succeed in preventing people from downloading for offline viewing. When this happens I’m going to invest in making scripts that autodownload stuff ahead of time and I’ll only watch whatever videos are in my home network.

Im not watching their brainwash bullshit ass propaganda. I’ll find other stuff to do for entertainment before I give in to ads.

Fuck smart tvs. I only use tvs by plugging in my laptop via hdmi. It’s only a matter of time before smart tvs start reporting people for stuff like watching pirated content or voiding TOS’s with adblockers.

Not sure what distro you’re using but try the liquirox kernel. I did that one time on a really stubborn laptop and managed to get both the HDMI and the suspend feature working.

Using mainline or something to ensure I’m up to date on the latest kernel has never solved a single issue in my entire history of trying but using liquirox worked one time.

I always get screwed pretty hard with Debian drivers. Just the other day I updated my Debian server to Debian 12 and then it refused to allow my atheros 9k PCI wifi card to work unless I rebooted after a cold boot. After an entire afternoon, I got to where it wouldn’t work after a cold boot or after a reboot. I literally had to choose between buying a new wifi card or reinstalling Debian/a different distro.

I used to only use Debian for non-laptops but from now on I don’t think I’ll install any new Debian installations on anything.

Dang I thought proton was older than that. I remember playing No Man’s Sky on Linux around the time it was released on pc. I don’t remember running a pirated copy of NMS just so I could make it run on wine but maybe I was. (you used to have to do that whether you owned the game or not if you wanted to play on Linux).

Usually, I do the simplest thing: all the stuff goes on one big ext4 partition. I don’t make a separate partition for /home. I’ll make a swap partition if I can remember but I’ve forgotten to do that before and nothing bad happened. The bootloader goes on a fat32 /boot/efi on the same drive as whatever the Linux install is on. This way I can swap around the drive to different pcs if I have to or easily change/upgrade drives without having to reinstall all my stuff.

This strategy works for dual booting Windows also. I’ll put the windows install all on its own separate drive so it won’t try to erase grub during a disk check or something. That happened one time. Also, by putting Windows and Linux on separate drives you can use the bios to boot between Windows or Linux if you mess up one of the bootloaders.

I’m poor and I hate stupid bullshit. The only way to personalize ads for me is to make them go away.

Is there a guide on how to do this? I have a rooted phone with custom rom and unlocked bootloader.

You can still run Gentoo on a 486. I don’t recommend it.

I doubt my experience was the same as everyone else but I tried to install Debian on my gaming pc a week ago and I could not get Nvidia drivers to work for anything, there were no relevant search results and no one on any message board had any ideas. I gave up and installed Arch and Nvidia drivers without making any hardware changes and it was so unexpectedly easy I still can’t believe it.

I use Debian on my server so I was shocked that it was basically impossible to get Nvidia drivers working, at least on my chipset.

I use gitea to self host my own git projects internally. I only post the really good and well-refined stuff to my actual github.

I’ve been dual booting Windows and Linux since the 00s. At some point around 2015-2016 I just stopped installing and maintaining Windows altogether and now I have a virtual machine image I just transfer around my network if I ever have to use Windows for something.

I think the real turning point for me was when they introduced UAC and ever-increasing restrictions on unsigned drivers starting with Vista. Wine was already a thing and I could run most games I cared about even back then although I still had to boot into Windows for gaming sometimes. Once steam Proton starting getting really good which was around 2015, there just wasn’t a reason to be using Windows anymore. As the enshittification of Windows continued getting worse it became more tedious and time consuming to get anything done in Windows to the point you might as well use Gentoo. I do programming and game modding for fun and there’s no way I could use modern Windows for this it’s so bad and slows everything down with it’s utter bullshit.

I’m a long time Linux user but I’m really lazy. I recently installed Arch to try it out again as last time I did it was maybe 2012. Personally, manually setting up the hard drive partitions on initial install is just annoying enough to be too much work (I have a lot of drives) but luckily there’s an installer that does that part for you. Everything else you have to do is sensible and easy and actually ends up being less work in the long run. The wiki is also extremely informative, helpful and correct.

Arch probably can be a beginner distro just because if you have a problem it’s so much easier to find out how to fix it on the internet thanks to the wiki and the forums. Something as mundane as installing nvidia drivers in Debian can be a massive ordeal and the minimum required skill level to fix it yourself if it doesn’t work on the first attempt is very high.

You can do everything except 3d rendering in SDL alone relatively easily. You can still do 3d rendering in SDL but you have to be a graphics rendering expert to get anywhere near efficient acceptable performance.

If there’s a free software alternative to what I want to pirate, I always use that instead. Software is like sex. It’s better when it’s free.

Workspaces in Linux window managers. I thought it was a dumb idea at first but I tried it and found workspaces are great.

I use my right hand to wipe my ass because my ass is very hairy and I need all the toilet paper precision I can get. I eat with my non-dominant left hand so that I can fuck around on my phone while I eat.

There’s this one called lightweight music server. It’s basically just a glorified in-browser vlc. It has playlists and remembers what you were doing if you close the browser but it’s not possible to move songs up or down in the playlist. You can add songs to the front or back of the playlist as well as remove songs from the playlist but there’s no dragging up or down. For me it’s still the more desirable choice vs using Spotify and either paying a monthly fee or listening to ads. I know there are anti ad hacks but they always break after every update and are hard to install.

I think they also throttled gpu performance at the kernel level. I vaguely remember reading a post about that but don’t have source or anything. However back in the day I was getting dogshit framerates in VR and I had a a “pretty good” computer. After trying everything to solve these performance issues for months and failing, I tried out Windows 10 and suddenly all my framerate problems were solved.

I use cinnamon on capable pcs with large screens but on anything weaker or anything with a smallish screen I use xfce.

Gnome 3 is OK and it doesn’t interfere with gaming or fullscreen mode programs as hard, in fact it’s superior to even cinnamon in this regard. It’s frowned upon for high resource usage but the way it deals with fullscreen works really well as long as it doesn’t crash for some other reason. I dont use Gnome because without extensions, it’s a barely usable mess. VERY ESSENTIAL extentions like Window List or that one that makes the top bar work on multiple monitors take forever to get updated every time a new Gnome version comes out.

KDE Plasma seems to be a good choice. A lot of people seem to have good experiences with it. I’m not one of those people. First of all, that keyring bullshit alone is too much to deal with. I already type my login password once when I first boot up which is pushing my patience in the first place but KDE makes me ADDITIONALLY type in my keyring password in order for essential drivers and wifi to work? Fuck no. Also, that update nag screen is the absolute worst. It’s almost worse than Windows fucking 10. It may not kick you off so it can update but it pops up at the worst possible time with impeccable timing. Just about every time I’m jacking off to some porn, right as I’m cumming the stupid fucking update screen pops up and I blow my load to the update screen. I don’t know how KDE gets the timing just right but this happens too fucking often. These 2 issues already push it pretty far past usability for me but I’m not done. The 3rd pillar of KDE’s shittiness is the file transfer window (or lack thereof). The only way to know the status of a file transfer is by looking at the window icon in the taskbar where the transfer progress bar is overlayed with about 0.00000000000000000000000000001% opacity. There is almost no difference between the “progress bar” color and the “no progress bar” color. That’s just the major issues, there are others but I’m not writing a fuckin book about KDE.

Xfce is good. It’ll run on anything without really sacrificing too many features. The biggest hit to it’s usability is that the start menu doesn’t have a search bar but if you’re using like a pentium 1 or something this is a feature not a bug. There exist add-ons that add a search bar anyway. If you need something even more lightweight, use CDE, NSCDE or if you’re really desperate to not waste cpu clock cycles, dwm. I had to use an Athlon XP as my main pc for school for a few weeks in the year 2016 and using xfce still didn’t give me enough leeway to run YouTube very well even with a GeForce 6800.

I use Cinnamon primarily though. It has its share of stupid bullshit. For example they made an attempt to make the ui customizable like KDE but you can’t get a taskbar on the second monitor or do anything useful with custom panels at all. If you want to make a custom panel that does anything other than render a useless gray rectangle on your screen, you’re out of luck. You do get a lot of customization options for the window icons/labels on the 1 working taskbar though. Being able to see what’s going on at a glance makes all the difference. I do get random occasional crashes that seem to be possibly related to context menu bugs. It doesn’t happen often but there’s no way to really break out of it without power cycling the computer when it does. Print screen area select doesn’t work as well as it does on gnome and you can’t change the directory of where screenshots are saved (you’re supposed to be able to with dconf editor but it doesn’t work).

Tl:dr KDE bad. Gnome meh. Xfce fast. Cinnamon is my favorite one right now all things considered.