As someone who has done a lot of distro hopping in the past, I’ve found that going for a stable release that is widely used as a daily driver is superior for gaming than “gaming specific” linux distros, largely on the basis that the gaming distros have routinely had buggy UIs, driver issues, and a variety of unexpected and undesired behavioral problems tied to the array of “gaming adjacent” software installed, most of which you can install yourself with little to no effort and most of which you probably don’t want or need in the first place.

And if they are…well, first of all, yikes, and second of all his career as a content creator is going to go from “damaged” to “gone” as no platform would let him stream after that.

I mean, this entire discussion hinges on the definition of “trivial,” so…cool.

Not the person you initially asked, but a good one is Eli Whitney’s cotton gin that made separating the cotton fiber from the seeds much easier. It had traditionally been done by hand, which is very time consuming. Whitney’s invention greatly simplified the process and made cotton farming much more economically viable as an industry, ultimately leading to an extreme expansion in chattel slavery in the Southern United States and serving to solidify a planter aristocracy that would eventually seek to split with the United States in order to create its own slaveholding empire, triggering a Civil War that would decimate a large chunk of the country and kill three quarters of a million people.

Great thing is that since it’s open source someone can just fork the project and continue development in a different direction.

Extrapolating from this, we can say that Youtube hosts around 2.5 to 3 exabytes (2.5 to 3 million terabytes) of data. Interestingly, the total volume of data on the internet is, as of the end of 2023, around 120 zettabytes, so Youtube only makes up around 0.0025% of the total volume of all that data.

XBox has always been a weird console. It never really competes with Nintendo because NIntendo always does its own general thing and also slides neatly into the kids and family market. So it competes with Playstation by default. Except Playstation actually has contracts with good studios to make exclusive games. What’s a non-Halo exclusive for the XBox? Back in the day, you’d play games like Gears of War, Halo (obviously), Fallout 3, Psychonauts, KOTOR, COD, etc. I can’t think of a single meaningful game on the most recent generation for the XBox.

Sounds like a hell of your own making. Always change the background to something generic. Like a nice tree. Always. Nobody gives a shit about trees.

DOS2’s fatal flaw for me is that you really can’t have an optimal mixed-damage party because you have spell shield and armor, which each block one of two kinds of damage. If you go all physical, you can just blast through armor and then kill people that way. All magical and you can do the same thing for people with shield. Mixed damage parties just kinda suck by comparison because you’re effectively splitting your damage output.

I’m not. Universities aren’t places of open or free learning. They’re deeply invested in capitalism and benefit greatly from intellectual property laws. In fact, most universities function largely as state subsidized pipelines that take people without a viable, real world skill set and turn them into people who still don’t have a viable real world skill set, but who do have a piece of paper telling corporations that they’re able and willing to put up with complete bullshit, general mistreatment, and dull, grueling labor for years without incident. Which is good enough for your typical middle-class wage slave and whatever they might want to do.

“Freen Ginks”

does that mean they must not be fun

Whether or not someone finds this or any other game fun is not something I really care about. Nor does it have anything to do with my observation.

I don’t know if the “general public,” which as a concept sort of conceives society as a monolithic entity, when it very much is not, should necessarily condemn or not condemn any specific artistic theme in a piece of media, but I do think that the art a society produces reflects the ethos of large segments of that society and, to some extent, reinforces that ethos. To borrow from your example, I don’t think someone is going to play Call of Duty and become a knife wielding maniac, but I do think they might play a video game where, for example, a bunch of terrorists have taken over a hospital in some unnamed middle-Eastern nation where American forces are engaged in a “peacekeeping operation” and the only way to get through a particular part of the game is to call in an airstrike on the hospital. A younger person playing the game might see this and then later on hear about military strikes against civilian targets (like hospitals) on the news and think “well, maybe there were bad guys in that hospital, like in my game.” In other words, it has the potential to shift what a person perceives as a legitimate target of state violence. And I know that specific example itself is overly simplistic, but the point is that there are multiple avenues by which political ideologies and their component beliefs are reinforced and reproduced, and the media you consume is one of them.

I understand my own criticism of video games is unpopular with large segments of the internet. Especially places like Lemmy or Reddit where people reduce criticisms of the content of games to strawmen comparisons to delinquent parents and politicians trying to legislate video games into oblivion because they think they cause school shootings. But I think it’s a valid and worthwhile contribution to most discussions of the medium.

That said, how is this worse than the whole slew of games about US soldiers killing people across the world, almost always portrayed as the cool protagonists?

Uh, it’s not. Those are fucking terrible, too. Arguably worse. In fact, where did I say those were better?

The idea of a “Prison Architect” series of games is just conceptually wild to me. I wonder if in a hundred years this will have the same ring to it that a game like “Slave Plantation Architect” would have today. Just remarkably crass and tasteless.

This is the only realistic answer. Corporations have effectively decided that the future of the web is closed source proprietary javascript bloatware apps that are all functional skinner boxes. Many people, especially young people, have no clue how to use an actual computer. It’s “click the bubble to make it pop and give us your mom’s credit card number to unlock super premium bubbles.” That’s the future of the internet. But probably worse.

I prefer Stargate on Plex and praising the Lord with TempleOS.

Twitter is terrible for people like me. I like following interests: books, coding, landscape photography, linux, etc. Twitter is more about following people, and people have diverse interests. One thing I really liked about Reddit was that it had active subreddits dedicated to particular interests. You could just hang out in those subreddits and only ever interact with things on topic to said interests. Lemmy has a bit less of that, unless your interests are politics, linux, and programming, and shitty memes.

Is this a change I’m too “command line” to care about?

A “typical” home user, whom I assume is less knowledgeable about technology, is probably the person who would benefit the most from strict firewalls installed on their device. Such an individual assumedly doesn’t have the prerequisite knowledge, or awareness required to adequately gauge the threats on their network.

They also would not realistically be doing anything that would cause open ports on their machine to serve data to some external application. It’s not like someone can just “hack” your computer by picking a random port and weaseling their way in. They have to have some exploitable mechanism on the machine that serves data in a way that’s insecure.

Would this not be adequate rationale for having contingencies, i.e. firewalls? A risk/threat needn’t only be an external malicious actor. One’s own mistakes could certainly be interpreted as a potential threat, and are, therefore, worthy of mitigation.

I am assuming that there’s a hierarchy of needs in terms of maintaining any Linux system. Whenever you learn how to use something (and you would have to learn how to use a firewall), you are sacrificing time and energy that would be spent learning something else. Knowing how your package manager works, or how to use systemctl, or understanding your file system structure, or any number of pieces of fundamental Linux knowledge is, for a less technically sophisticated user, going to do comparatively more to guarantee the longevity and health of their system than learning how to use a firewall, which is something capable of severely negatively impacting your user experience if you misconfigure it. In other words: don’t mess around with a firewall if you don’t know what you’re doing. Use your time learning other things first if you’re a not technically sophisticated user. I also don’t exactly know what “mistakes” you’d be mitigating by installing a firewall if you aren’t binding processes to those ports (something a novice user should not be doing anyway).

Well, no, not necessarily. It’s important to understand what the purpose of the firewall is. If a device can potentially become an attack vector, it’s important to take precautions against that – you’d want to secure other devices on the network in the off chance that it does become compromised, or secure that very device to limit the potential damage that it could inflict.

You just wrote that “One’s own mistakes could certainly be interpreted as a potential threat, and are, therefore, worthy of mitigation.” The best way of mitigating mistakes is by not making them in the first place, or creating a scenario in which you could potentially make them. Prevention is always better than cure. You should never open ports on your local network. Ever. I don’t care if you have firewalls on everything down to your smart thermostat - if you need to expose locally hosted services you should be maintaining a cloud VM or similar cloud based service that forwards connections to the desired service on your internal network via a VPN like Tailscale. Or, even better, just put Tailscale’s service on whatever machine you’re using that needs access to your personal network. And, yes, if you’re doing things like that, you would also want robust firewall protections everywhere. But the firewall simply isn’t ever “enough.”

Anyway, just my 2 cents. The more you know and do, the greater steps you should take to protect yourself. For someone who knows very little, the most important thing that can help them is knowing more, and there is a hierarchy of learning that will take them from “knowing little” to “knowing much,” but they shouldn’t/don’t need to concern themselves with certain mechanisms before they know enough to reliably use them or mitigate their own mistakes. That said, if you are a new user, you’re probably installing a linux distro that already comes with its own preconfigured firewall that’s already running and you just don’t know about it. In which case, moot point. If you’re not, though, I’m assuming your goal is learning linux stuff, in which case, I’ve gone into that.