I don’t like flatpaks because they never feel cohesive visually on my system.

Building off of this awesome and thorough response. There are some games that you might need a different version of Proton for everything to work right. I had issues with Blue Prince not being able to see any videos that played during the game. With Proton-GE, that is solved. So there might be a little adjustment and tweaks that need to be done but I’ve found everyone in the Linux community more than happy to help.

As to your comment about security vis-a-vis open source software. I think that comes from an inherent misunderstanding about what open source software is because I had a similar thought when I was younger. If a program is open source and you can see all the bones of the software, you can see the code and know how to hack it. That was my thinking at least. But the security comes from having everyone able to view the code and patch out vulnerabilities. Closed source just means that you might have the veil of security through obscurity where it takes a little time to have your bugs exploited.

Is data on when I turn the oven on, and how long I run it for, even worthwhile?

They wouldn’t be holding you hostage for it if it wasn’t.

There is no center in the US. If you’re okay voting for Donald Trump, you are not in the center. That’s entirely the point.

Centrism can win in places that aren’t America. Too many Republicans are being fed propaganda all day long by Fox “News”…an organization that has argued in court that no one should take them seriously. But that’s where they get their news. They’re also indoctrinated by their religious upbringing from Evangelicals. There is no such thing as a moderate Republican anymore. They have shown that they will vote every time for the Republican candidate regardless of how flawed they are. Trump is a convicted felon that tried to overthrow the government, has been found in a court to be a rapist, was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein, has had numerous failed businesses and bankruptcies, has denigrated our troops. NONE OF IT MATTERS. Stop trying to appeal to the right and actually get your voting base excited about the policies you want to push.

I’ve tried but for some reason, I can never get them set up correctly and I’m not technologically illiterate. Its been a while since I tried it though since Floorp just works.

The biggest pro for me is the vertical tabs. It’s got the same vertical tabs that Edge has which are great. I only use Edge at work but it’s great especially when you have a web based production environment like nCino that you work in all day and have dozens of tabs open. You can group them up nicely and keep yourself organized. Floorp is based off of Firefox ESR so it’s on an older build (but up to date security). The current build is based off FF 115 while FF is on 129 now.

I don’t have access to my music torrent site anymore due to the first one shutting down (W.CD) and then going idle on the other one for years. Don’t feel like re-downloading everything either since I lost all my music in a hard drive crash. Could probably recover it from my Cowon X7 but don’t know where the cable is for that anymore.

I find this to be an option with Movies/TV Shows but a struggle with Music. At least once my kids were older and listening to stuff. They were constantly asking for stuff to be downloaded, my mom and wife were asking for stuff, my brother, etc. Had a subsonic server set up and just got tired of actively managing it. Spotify isn’t great but it works and it saves a headache. I just wish there was better options because I don’t like the Spotify app. YouTube Music is even worse, especially since it subscribes to everything on YouTube too so all my subscriptions got jacked up.

Are we able to fly the flag at twice staff?

I’m surprised that makes you want to move back to Windows instead of moving to another hardware platform. I guess it’s cheaper to go back to Windows but I’d just rather support a company that supports what I do.

Just got a Keychron Q5 Pro and love it. It and the Zoom98 were the only two that had layouts that would really work out for me (wanted a 96%/98%) since I need a numpad and wanted a volume knob instead of just media keys.

Even if we were thirsting over it, what’s wrong with it? Apple makes some impressive silicon that’s really efficient. The problem is that it’s tied to their products and closed off. You can marvel at what they’re doing on the production side while not liking their business practices.

Have mine sitting in a dish on my desk right in front of me. It’s what I use to pop off our Arlo doorbell to bring inside to charge it back up when the batteries are low.

Excel is vastly more complicated than Word. Word is just basic word processing. Excel has lots of data manipulation, formulas, tables, charts, plus when coupled with visual basic, scripts and macros. I could do all that stuff in LibreOffice if I only worked in LibreOffice. But having to work in Excel at the office and LibreOffice at home would’ve been a NIGHTMARE.

I think a lot of the issue with mainstream adoption to Linux is the software suite and not the operating system. I refused to switch to Linux because of needing MS Office (specifically Excel). I needed it for work at my previous job until they provided everyone with laptops during the pandemic. And before you say just use LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, they are fine options for personal use for me. But for my productivity, switching between the two with different shortcuts was miserable. LibreOffice still pisses me off for formula auto completion. If I hit tab while making a formula, I want to go to the next parameter in the formula not the next cell.

Just looks like a second confederate flag to me.

I work at a credit union where we deal with a lot of smaller investors and many of them have properties where they aren’t breaking even on a cash flow basis. But they are using the losses to lower their taxable income while building equity elsewhere. They are (from tenants I’ve heard from) good landlords. Lately we’ve been dealing with a lot of realtors that are buying up properties and that just doesn’t sit well with me so I’m looking to change careers and get more into C&I and CRE rather than SFR investments. Being able to cash out 7.25 weeks of accrued vacation time I haven’t been able to take too is a big plus.

And you can get a cheap enclosure for the old m.2 or SSD to copy files you need off the old one.

I’m with you especially since what I use Reddit/Twitter for the most is sports highlight clips/discussion during games. Those communities just aren’t here. I love chatting with other Orioles/Panthers/Penguins fans in the game threads on Reddit during the game since none of my friends are fans of those teams other than my brother being a Penguins fan too.

Luckily a lot of the Twitter follows I had which were mainly for College Football are on Bluesky so I can use that more but missing out on the rest here. Once Boost for Reddit stops working (still works if you mod a sub) I won’t be using Reddit anymore though. The official app is that bad.