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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I use MXLinux, picked it somewhat at random when I was frustrated with windows 10 privacy settings and haven’t looked back since. I tried mint, mint cinnamon, Ubuntu, and Fedora before MX, and Fedora is the only other one I have stuck with, to use on a Surface Pro (I needed Wayland for the touchscreen).

    MX has been really stable, light on resources, and has worked really well through two complete hardware upgrades. I play games on steam, some brand new some old, and I haven’t found one that I can’t play yet. That is due to steam/proton/proton GE more than the OS I expect but I’m happy nonetheless. I also run my home entertainment box on MX on an old PC (I know there are better choices for os for this, I was just comfortable with it).

    I like it because I haven’t felt any reason to try anything else, perhaps someday I will and I’ll just find a new OS then, but until then it’s my favorite I think.


  • I never played BioShock 2 or Infinite, but I watched full playthroughs of each, and I thought infinite was great! Different to be sure in most ways, but it was a neat expansion of the world and themes hinted at in the first two games.

    I seem to remember a lot of sideline criticism when it came out that boiled down to “NPC sidekick not love interest but hot so I don’t like game”. I thought, and think that is ridiculous, and fortunately I think that criticism has faded with time because Elizabeth is such a positive part of the game, from my view.

    I should play through the BioShock games…


  • I made the leap a few years ago now, and since getting a (slightly) newer AMD GPU I haven’t had a single problem that I didn’t create by messing around with things without knowing what I was doing. I use steam and the Glorious Egroll version of proton and every game I have wanted to play has worked, even ones that are brand new. No tinkering past the initial steam setup. I don’t really play competitive online games with anti cheat so you may encounter problems that I haven’t if you do.

    I use the advanced hardware support version of MX Linux, if that really matters. I had bad experiences with Ubuntu, but haven’t tried it with this machine so I don’t know if it was the OS or the hardware.

    I’d say give it another shot on its own drive when Microsoft frustrates you again, you can always swap windows back in if you don’t like it.


  • If I’m reading that right, that could also say that Instagram is suppressing anti-israel content? It’s just saying that in comparison to Instagram tiktok is showing more x, y, z. But Instagram is absolutely not a neutral point to measure from.

    For starters there’s different demographics on each one, but I’m sure you could adjust for that, maybe the study did. But I don’t think you can adjust for the impact the US government has on Meta. I don’t believe for an instant that some US agency isn’t manipulating algorithms or requiring certain tweaks to steer discourse just like they did with US news outlets.


  • I had a very similar experience but just kinda glumly stuck with the broken experience in that in between, and just played what I could get to work. But now with proton, specifically the ge version, there’s isn’t a game that I can’t play (that I have wanted to play). It’s pretty amazing how quickly the changes and improvements to gaming on Linux have come.

    I also have an AMD system now, which might be a big part of why it’s so painless now.


  • Second for guild wars 2, the world is huge when you first start playing, and though the initial levelling experience can feel like it takes a while, once you have hit the cap you can go pretty much anywhere. The story is pretty linear, though, so if you want a deep and complex story it might be better to look for a single player game.

    I’d also say the combat system in Guild wars is fantastic, it’s simple enough to pick up and not have to stress about playing the game, but if you want to engage and get better there is so much to learn about and improve.




  • But it is often additionally used as a software package distribution platform, so it would be helpful for some developers to reach their users by having a clearer path to the most current release.

    I can personally do without a special button, and the op is obviously making a joke, but why not improve the UX for some users? It’s certainly possible to do this without impacting the smelly nerds who wouldn’t use the button.


  • We had a mold issue stemming from a shower vent not connecting to the roof and just dumping humid air into the attic so we wanted to fix that. Found rotten newspaper from the late 40s as insulation mixed with vermiculite under a thin layer of cellulose, which we treated as asbestos and had that professionally removed. Under that found a whole spiderweb of live knob and tube which wasn’t connected to any devices, was disconnected from many of its knobs, and was missing insulation in many places while it was draped loosely over some metal plumbing up there.

    The project started as a disconnected shower vent causing mold, and ended up with a whole rewire of the lighting and outlet circuits in the house. Wild stuff.

    We were also swapping out the breakers for ones up to code since we had messed with the circuits, and one a/gfci breaker just kept tripping. Found a light fixture that had evidentially been sparking away up there for who knows how long.

    Feels really good to have had eyes on every box in the house and know that what’s there now is leagues safer than what was there before.



  • Caususes are a way some state political parties choose to pick out their favorite party candidate for the November election.

    In most states they have a primary which is just a normal election by US standards. In a few, including Iowa, they gather in a physical room and move from location to location to physically show who they support.

    That means if I’m “caucusing for Bernie” I’d go stand next to the Bernie crowd. This ends when a certain candidate has a majority (I don’t remember the exact amount). So people move from candidate to candidate as they see theirs isn’t winning or as they are persuaded by others there.

    Every state has their primary or caucus on a specific day, so yesterday was Iowa’s day, and it’s often very cold this time of year in Iowa. This year it’s pretty brutal, high of 3°F and low of -3°F today (-16C and -19.5C), and it was colder a few days ago.


  • Their coffee tastes the way it does because of how they roast it, it’s a purposeful style thing (that tastes terrible and is horribly overpriced imo).

    Their roasts are also darker than they say. Everything they have is dark roast, with their ‘blond’ coming in closer to a medium.

    People go nuts over the sugar, caffeine and perceived status, it has nothing to do with the taste of the coffee. As a fellow black coffee drinker, my recommendation is to avoid Starbucks unless you happen to be near a union store where the coffee is guaranteed to taste more like freedom, but still like ashes soaked in oil.

    In case you want more details: The way coffee roasting works is you move beans around in a real hot container, and you try to keep them to a specific point on a temperature graph at each moment as they roast. A different roaster would roast them a bit slower, but Starbucks just blasts those beans with everything they have, then they don’t stop until the beans are burnt. This gives them their “signature taste”. This is largely because of Howard Shultz, the guy who drove the company to be a cafe, and until recently the CEO. That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.


  • I just installed Fedora with KDE plasma and Wayland last weekend using the surface kernel. Was pretty painless, after abandoning a couple other distros that did not play nice.

    The instructions on the GitHub are also very good, though obviously every years surface has its challenges I’m sure.


  • I’ll second this, I’ve only had issues with a couple games, even brand new ones run with proton and it just works. Obviously distro and hardware make a big difference (I have AMD) but even when I had an NVIDIA GPU it was very simple and stable with only a little messing around with drivers up front.