All my grandparents are dead but when they where alive we did the usual thing which was meeting few times a year. On top of that I used to call them at least once a month and we’ve talked about everything and nothing, usual small talk. The interesting part is that I got a lot of insights between the lines and I had a pretty good idea how my grandparent were in their early years.

If you want a better relationship with your grandparents, call them every now and there or visit them and have a casual conversation. After a while you will know them way better. And if you’re not comfortable with what they say, just let it slide. Old people are known for not giving a crap about political correctness.

Back then I was both surprised and creeped out by the idea some stranger would look over my shoulder when I use my device. Nowadays, you need to hand out your device and provide the pin to unlock it. I honestly miss the good old days.

Fifteen years ago I was traveling to the US. I had a stop in Germany and Chicago before I reached my destination. Every time I was on a ground I was questioned, I had to fill several documents, I had a full body scan and I had to power on all my devices and perform some basic tasks, e.g. I had to take a photo with my camera and show it to the agent.

Corporations need to make profit somehow. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a year or two Spotify would introduce payed plan with ads.

I don’t listen to podcasts but to answer this question

But since I am paying for Spotify I am expecting not to have to listen to any ads.

Companies are forced to increase revenue every year. It means the amount of crap will just keep on increasing.

I’m a pretty good cook with a focus on bread making. I’ve been working on a perfect pizza recipe for years. I always have a frozen pizza dough in case of an emergency :)

My perfect pizza is thin, with mozzarella cheese in the crust, made on a pizza iron cast plate (way better than pizza stone) - I don’t have a pizza oven yet.

Ingredients from the bottom - pizza dough, tomato sauce (with basil, oregano and garlic), cheese (mozzarella, parmesan, cheddar), red onion, ham, mushrooms, a little bit of cheese, oregano and jalapenos.

As for the store/take out pizza - I will never eat frozen market pizza and most of the global franchises are at best mediocre. I have few local places I like to order pizza from. They are good enough but still I prefer my own pizza.

Thanks for reminding me, there’s also " supporting" linux community…

Are your specific issues a reason normal users shouldnt use Linux? No

I cannot agree. Most of the users would be upset about bluetooth dropping connection or constant issues after running updates.

Your comment is a perfect Linux answer - it works on my computer :) And I don’t mean it as an insult. The problem here is that Linux, despite of all its advantages, is not for a global consumer.

I think, you should keep these two things (messing with containers accessing GPU and “just play a game”) separate. I mean on separate boxes. Because now you can’t “just play” because you’ve been elbows deep in OS internals. You can’t take apart your fridge and then expect it to just cool the water the next day

I agree, that’s a valid point. But, I had a clean system, prepared for a normal user (clean install, official repositories, etc. And still GPU drivers refusded to work. I have covered all basics before I asked for help and even I got some good advice that worked, I ended up in the same place.

Then I’m guessing these might need some KDE envs

True, but sill for a regular user it looks like “Linux is ugly”

Ah, you’re trying to breach the non-open wall. Is there an app on i* that allows you to set up an ftp/http file sharing server on the device? You probably could set it up as rclone upstream

I know too well the unbreakable apple garden. And I don’t mind tinkering with it but again, we are at the regular user level, that wants things just to work.

Privacy means that no one can see your data, and only you can decide who can see it. Anonymity means that everyone can see your data but no one can match you with the data.

As for the question, yes, I would more than happy when people could understand the risk of giving up the privacy. But I’m afraid that not many people would understand the message carried by those books.

Start with Gentoo or Arch (maybe Slackware). These are close to the grass, so the way to set things up is the way to fix things up

I’ve tried Mint, openSUSE, Debian, Gentoo and Arch but I had other, non-regular user issues with those. I wanted to point out the standard issues.

are these gtk based apps? Different toolsets require different envs

Some were GTK based other were “optimised” for KDE

Have you tried syncthing?

Yes, I use it on a daily basis but there’s no easy way to get it working on iOS/iPadOS.

As I wrote, I did the clean install. Even if I didn’t do a thing with it, it would still break. As it did couple days ago.

As I said, I did a clean install and still all Steam games were failing on directx issue. Also, a “regular” user when switching to Linux will have to know what a GPU driver is in order to use it, event if it’s just for playing games. And the cherry on top - once I fixed the directx issue and I was able to play a game I wanted, the drivers update broke it. And despite spending days on fixing the issue, I got back to a square one.

In a perfect world, data collected by companies would be used to improve user experience. But we don’t live a perfect world and nowadays if a company doesn’t provide yearly income from investment it goes under. And to keep the numbers up, companies screw its users.

Ok, but why? And to be clear, I’m not against what you wrote, just wondering about people’s motives.

Don’t want to be a devil’s advocate here but nowadays it’s left-wing weirdos that use publicly available data to cancel people they don’t agree with. Let’s keep personal political views out of this discussion.

As for the first paragraph, I vaguely remember reading about this. And this is a great example.

Funny thing, yesterday there was an update for nvidia drivers. I was stupid enough to install it and now I have the same directx error as before. I’m done with gaming on Linux.

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia

This worked. I haven’t checked the bios yet. If there’s an option to disable integrated graphics I will use it. For now I will just use the vars.

Why don’t more people use Linux?

Because Linux breaks randomly, in many cases without user interaction. New driver update - external monitor stops working, games break, etc. Official desktop widgets - tend to break without any reason. Apps don’t follow desktop theme.

I’m a software engineer and I work a lot and I want to spend my free time using OS, not fixing it. After my recent issues with graphic drivers I decided to buy a Windows PC just for gaming. I will stick with Linux for my home server and work.