I used to be one of those as well. Moved to WV and it added a new element of fun…icy roads. Three years of that and sadly I became an ex-owner of a Miata since I couldn’t really winter the car and I had a motivated buyer. I miss that car most days but you really have to be on your toes all the time with the tractor trailers and “yank tanks” as they lovingly refer to them across the pond.

Subes are boring but effective in this part of the country.

Just a hunch but I am guessing you are referring to the first wave of good quality LED bulbs that hit the market. Those did last a long time and didn’t flicker like the new stuff that has been pushed out more recently. In my experience, even the better quality brands like GE are now enshittified so they fail sooner and I almost miss incandescents in spite of their higher power draw.

The last few packs of new bulbs that I have purchased to replace malfunctioning LED bulbs (less than 5 years old) start to flicker almost immediately. In contrast, the stuff I installed in my last house ran problem free for many years without any issues. Perhaps I am just unlucky.

I did the dual boot setup with Win10 and Ubuntu during my initial foray into Linux about 8 years ago and liked it until the boot loader got messed up and prevented me from loading Ubuntu anymore; I eventually just gave up on trying to fix. Apparently this is something that Windows is doing unless you make special provisions to protect against it. In the end, it was the forced obsolescence of Win10 that drove me back to Linux and I am super happy on Fedora after trying and failing to get Mint to work to my satisfaction.

Boring and just working are exactly what I want my OS to do. Open source options are proving to be effective or even superior to what I was using before and I have even switched my kid over to Linux already. My wife wasn’t having any of it though so I painfully migrated her to Win11 and had to purchase or get subs for her daily-use applications that worked fine on Win10.

Ah ok, I will chalk this up to a reading comprehension failure on my part. Sounds like what I shared was actually the opposite of helpful. Sorry about that.

I gave up on Mint Cinnamon when I was trying to get my new build running due to persistent issues with tearing no matter what I tried. In my case, the issue appeared to be X11 so the recommendations I read pushed me to a Wayland based distro. After switching to Fedora Workstation (i.e., GNOME DE), I was able to easily enable VRR and HDR and now I never get tearing anymore; even with more graphics intensive games like CP 2077 and Enshrouded. Typically, I enable V-sync and/or a framerate cap and run games in fullscreen or borderless (preferred since it is less likely to freeze the display when I alt-tab).

I am not sure this is the minimum latency route as you mention but it solved 100% of my other issue and has been rock solid for gaming. GNOME seems to be a deal breaker for many, and possibly you as well, based on the comment about tiling window managers. Just figured I would share my own experience in the hopes it might be helpful.

There was a book which I picked up from my high-school library and it really did a number on the younger me. “Green Rage” was a book written by Chris Manes in the early 90s about radical environmentalism and it gave me a new perspective on things I had not been aware of at the time. While I never actually got directly involved with any environmentalist groups, I did start to better appreciate how our Capitalist system’s need extract value at any cost from natural resources would have disastrous consequences.

Fast forward 35 years and I can’t honestly say if the author’s more dire predictions haven’t come to pass since you simply can’t trust corporate media to give unvarnished truth about anything. But I have seen and experienced things with my own eyes that give them credence. The fact that the title for this book came to mind immediately when I read this post/prompt says something about it’s impact I think.

There was one which stands above them all and I think would still hold up well today…Guardian Heroes. It was a fantastic multiplayer side-scroller beat-em-up with fighting game style moves, magic, choose your path, and even an arena mode. I loved that game and always hoped it would be ported to something more modern (besides Gameboy).

I have a school age child in a super red state and I am rather surprised we have had free school lunches and even breakfast for the last 4-5 years. Granted, poverty is really high around here and I am certain that this is most kids’ best meal of the day so it may not be high quality, but its better than an empty stomach. This is all paid for with tax money which is something I am totally in favor of. The bigger issue is summertime hunger since those same kids are out of school for about 3 months so they even offer a meal option during that time as well but I am not sure how it works since we don’t use that service.

100% agreed on the point made about how conservatives only seem to care about fetuses and consider them grease for the machinery once they get born but somehow this backward-ass state is doing the right thing…for now at least.

Haha, I was too lazy to zoom in on the picture but now I can see that the bottom unit was not a VCR like I initially thought. Point to you, internet stranger :)

I’ll take the bait. This is a classic AV rack setup which is a relic of the bygone era. Looks like a pretty typical configuration with a Receiver/amplifier, CD player, Laser disc player(?), double tape deck, and a VHS Cassette player. And of course you have to have the colossal speakers to accompany this technological tour de force from the early 90s. The little box may be a headphone amp but not sure.

Once you had all of this, you officially made it. I never quite did and this is one of my many regrets. I will go back to the nursing home now…

When I was building a new dedicated Linux gaming PC, I opted for Mint as my Distro because of all of the recommendations and the very helpful compatibility database which gave me more confidence in the new components I was picking out. What ultimately killed my interest in Mint with the Cinnamon DE was the use of X11 and I had an issue with screen tearing that no amount of tweaking could fix.

After forcing Mint to use a newer kernel version, so it could actually detect my Radeon 9060XT, and making my system unbootable while trying to edit the X11 config file, I ultimately switched to Fedora Workstation which uses Wayland. This solved my problem and also allowed me to use variable refresh rate and HDR with no issues. I am not using the rolling release version of Fedora; the versions I am getting appear to be stable and only a few weeks/months behind.

As a Win10 end-of-support refugee, I ended up on Fedora Workstation which uses GNOME as the DE and I have really enjoyed how clean and functional it is for me. I guess I just don’t care enough about extensions and customization to want to use anything else so the common complaints about GNOME don’t affect me.

In sharp contrast, when I demo’d the KDE version of Fedora using a LiveOS on USB, I immediately disliked it and stuck with Workstation. I have been daily-driving Windows based operating systems since 1995, and grew up in an exclusively Apple/Mac household; so having experienced all three, Linux with GNOME has been the coziest option and meets 100% of my needs.

I can appreciate that others have strong opinions on this, but I don’t have any issue going between Win11 at work and Fedora Workstation at home and it just makes me love my Linux system even more.

TL/DR: I despise MicroSlop and their persistent enshittification of their products and user experience; Linux with GNOME allows me to experience something simplified and clean that looks nothing like what MS offers.

Thank you for clarifying and I don’t disagree at all with the points you raise. Unfortunately in application, the higher ideals seem to be lost on these red-hat troglodytes who are in the majority in my local area. I used to believe similarly that minds could be changed with rational and candid discussion, but my own experience has been that MAGA types just double down when presented with anything that doesn’t align with what they have come to believe; until they are negatively affected by one of the horrible things they support of course.

I haven’t given up entirely but active avoidance appears to be the simplest near-term solution. The problem is the currently dominant political party has done a very effective job of demonizing anything and anyone with an opposing viewpoint to their proponents. That alone makes open discourse almost impossible.

I can certainly appreciate the sentiment behind this comment but I would have to challenge its applicability in a deep red part of the US. The danger here is expressing incompatible beliefs to people who vocally and energetically talk about rounding up and “shooting all of the democrats” they can find. As much as I would like to accept the fact that they have the right to this opinion, I am also self-aware enough that I chose to keep my own politics (independent but left-leaning) to myself.

Would they really kill me? Probably not. Would I be immediately treated with hostility? Almost certainly.

I think there is a stark difference between “different” and “opposing” viewpoints and I imagine it would be nice living in a place where being open-minded was a common virtue. Unfortunately for me that isn’t really viable at the moment.

Had this bad-boy since like 2015 and its finally starting to misclick on occasion. Shame I didn’t buy a backup and Anker stopped making them a while back since the DS-2368 was the best budget gaming mouse I have ever found for my hand size and grip. I have tried about 4 other models with similar profile and nothing quite touches it. Going to be a sad day when it finally gives up and dies. Similarly to what you mention, the Basilisk V3 is also the closest fit and it has decent linux support so that is my backup plan.

Anyone know if Gamedec is any good? I thoroughly enjoyed Esoteric Ebb and Disco Elysium and that one has been on my radar for a while. Its on sale this week via Steam and thinking of grabbing a copy since I am running out of things to do in Swords N Magic and Stuff.

Ahh ok, I think this is worth a try and I don’t believe there are any mods installed.

Are these options accessible via the in-game menus or some other way? Since this is running via Steam I am guessing it would be done using the Properties sub-menu? Thank you for the suggestion!

My kid has been playing this game for a while and loves it but this update has been nothing but trouble. We had the settings dialed in and running great on his Linux PC and now it runs like absolute drek and all of the road-signs are blank (odd issue) and the dashboard inside of the cars are fuzzed out and super blurry. Tried adjusting the settings to get the FPS back to about where they were (75@1080p) but no idea what needs to be changed to fix the other issues. Apparently there were a ton of complaints already posted so hopefully the devs will do a hotfix or something.

dotard /dō′tərd/ noun

• One whose mind is impaired by age; one in second childhood.
• An old person with impaired intellect; one in his or her dotage.
• An oldster in his dotage; someone whose age has impaired his intellect.

Looks like a toddler who is actively shitting his diaper (probably is). Best part is he was recently talking a bunch of shit about Spain and now they won “his” world cup.

+1 Fedora (Workstation, in my case) When I set up Fedora on the machines I loaded it on, I normally allocate 50 GB to /root and the balance of the space to /home after setting up my swap and /boot partitions. This has worked well for me so far, YMMV. It also sounds like its not a bad idea to leave a small percentage of a drive un-allocated but I haven’t done this personally.