I’d rather have nice sharp jaggies. Antialiasing tends to give me the impression that someone’s smeared my screen with Vaseline.

I acknowledge that this is a minority preference, and the algorithms involved in antialiasing are interesting even if I don’t like the product.

And whoever buys it won’t also have some kind of ulterior motive? Chrome isn’t likely to be a money-maker on its own. If it were, Firefox would have less trouble staying afloat. Anyone who buys Chrome most likely will have plans for it that are no more in the end-user’s best interest than Google’s.

Aqualung—does the small set of things I need it to, and is content to operate on files and directories rather than force the creation of a “music library” that doesn’t in any way match how I categorize my music (although if you actually want a music library, it can do that). Only issue is that it’s still GTK2, which may become a problem within the next few years.

Technically, it isn’t true that there is no alternative whatsoever to udev/eudev. It’s possible to build a system around Busybox’s mdev, although it’s nontrivial enough that most people aren’t going to want to try to do that for an interactive desktop.

Tesla and Rivian are both newer electric-only manufacturers, though (unless there’s something I don’t know about Rivian). Their market is quite different from stodgy old GM’s.

There are still some places with some leftover LitterRobot 3s in stock at lower prices ( here ), but they’ve always been expensive. We have a 2, and it cost $700 CAD at the time.

This is going to cripple them in the market. Removing features does nothing to make a vehicle more attractive to the average idiot. Maybe GM thinks they can get away with it because the demand for cars exceeds the supply right now, I don’t know.

I’m unsurprised that they have the tech. Whether or not their process has a high enough yield to be commercially viable remains to be seen, however.

My sample size is three, with the current one being an X399-A first-gen Threadripper board bought on Black Friday of 2017. The only issue I’ve had that could be attributed specifically to that motherboard was lack of Linux kernel support for the onboard it-87 sensor chip variant at the time I bought it.

Your friend’s notebook sound like everything except the mobo is breaking on him. 😜

There was a time when they were good, but that time is long, long gone.

I haven’t had any problem with their boards either, but that’s a sample size of less than half-a-dozen, strictly AMD-based mobos. Really not definitive, and I believe the people who say they’ve gotten multiple bad Asus boards.

In the end, it’s down to luck. Every manufacturer sends out some percentage of products that have undetected faults or are damaged in shipping. What that percentage is depends on QA and product design. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Asus had some boards with design issues that led to high failure rates, while others are solid.

The main difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is the package manager. Most of the rest is just selected default values for configuration and cosmetics, and what helper scripts are or aren’t present on the system. They’re both mainstream distributions aimed at the general user, and they’re shaped by their goals.

To see how different distributions can be, you need to compare the mainstream distributions to stuff that’s decidedly not mainstream, like Gentoo, Alpine, and Nix.

Just as a trivia note: Gentoo does package a couple of other distros’ package managers (app-arch/rpm and app-arch/dpkg), for use in installing otherwise-unavailable commercial binaries, although I suspect app-arch/rpm2targz sees more use than either of them.

If there’s DRM involved, then you’re renting, not buying. Take that into account when considering how to spend money.

I’m just surprised they took the time to check before getting the hell out of there. Perhaps not the sharpest knives in the drawer, these thieves.

And? Seems relatively harmless, as alternate realities go. No one lives in the real world 100% all the time. We’re not designed for it.

Even assuming AI is up to the task (which I doubt) . . . Cost of electricity. Cost of server maintenance. Cost of robotics maintenance. Who does this guy expect to fund all of that? Theoretically a government could, I suppose, but that quickly? They’d want to study it to death first. Private enterprise cannot produce an acceptable solution here. I’d rather pay for my lawyer than have LawAI spout off an ad for its will-making services every couple of minutes during our session.

That isn’t the reason most of us use Linux, and even if it were, the “administration vs. creatives” divide probably goes back to Ancient Egypt, if not further. But fight it if you want to. I give it six months before you burn out, and the division in question will still be there, and some people will still be basing their identities around it. (I mean, what do you think is a good thing to base your identity around? Your degree of appreciation for Taylor Swift? 'Cause I think you’d find that one is a lot more common.)

Oh, dear. No, in most cases people seem to want the prettiest photos possible. Otherwise digital filters wouldn’t be so popular.

Ooh, CRT monitor. And that’s an odd resolution that it’s suggesting. You could try driving it at 1280x1024 at 60Hz. If that doesn’t work, try 800x600 at 60Hz, which is the traditional lowest SVGA resolution (picture may be slightly distorted if it really is a 5:4 monitor). If that doesn’t work, try the traditional VGA resolution of 640x480 just to get something going. I’d recommend using X as Wayland has probably not been tested very much on hardware this old. And it almost certainly has no clue how to deal with a widescreen resolution or a resolution wider than its “Recommend mode”.

(I was still using a 17" CRT with X at 1280x960 up to about five years ago. I had no issues ever.)

Gentoo is a bad choice for a generic newb, yes, but I would say that Arch is too.

TDE wouldn’t necessarily be a bad choice for first-timers if any distro of significance preinstalled it, but the extra installation work pretty much wipes out the user-friendliness it might offer, alas.