It’s two different things being argued about: the legal term “hacking” vs the every day language term, which I believe implies something more specific than “unauthorized access”, something where technical or social skills were used to gain that access.

That’s the parallel I was trying to draw by mentioning the word “hotwiring” instead of “stealing”. It would be like if the legal term for stealing a car was “hotwiring”.

That said, I did see that the OP of this tangent is actually trying to argue the “this isn’t illegal” angle rather than the difference between legal terms and broader language terms.

I agree this falls under the legal definition of hacking, but I also agree with those basically saying that this falls outside of the way they think the term should be used. It waters down its meaning.

Yeah but if I did, no one would say I hotwired the car.

I switched about a year ago to fedora cinnamon. Less frustration than windows, even though cinnamon kinda sucks compared to KDE that I switched to immediately after the first time I tried it (should have tried it months sooner, literally only took a few mins to install and check out).

While I wouldn’t say that there were zero problems, I did notice that I spend less time troubleshooting or searching for how to change something on Linux than I did on windows by the end. Also, going from empty disk to gaming involved fewer steps, at least with an AMD gpu.

Not sure if you’re exaggerating the low resolution, but I haven’t noticed quality issues on Amazon. I doubt the stream I’m getting is 4k, but it’s certainly better than 720p.

I’m using the flatpak firefox from the fedora install instructions that comes with more codecs, though. It plays a bunch of video that VLC won’t render with my current setup and I haven’t yet put the effort into getting full codecs outside of Firefox yet, but maybe your system has a similar codec situation and prime video defaults to some old or neglected format that caps out at the res you see.

Or it could be what you think and for some reason my system isn’t triggering it. Argh, this future is annoying.

Seems like this is possible, but the method (and maybe ability) depends on your window manager.

If you’re using x11, you can interact with the window manager via the command line (so could set up the whole thing in a script). An example command line tool: xdotool (search for “interacting with x11 via command line” for more info).

If you’re on Wayland, one of the design principles was to avoid programmatically interacting with window size or position; the user will set up their composer to behave as they want, not how the programmer of that program wants, and especially not how programmers of other arbitrary programs want (it was a security issue at the extremes, or could be annoying for more common cases). But you, the user, do have control, though it depends on your DE and what Wayland compositor it is using. On fedora KDE, you can use KWin scripts (which supports several languages).

There’s also some other window managers that can offer better control, and perhaps it’s enough for the window manager to simply remember the position of windows when they are closed (which I think Wayland does or can be configured to do easier than writing a script, then you just need a launch script for the programs in your shortcuts).

Yeah, I wasn’t sure whether mine wasn’t working due to hardware issues or the software. Haven’t dug in to debug it much because I don’t really use it, but the times I have tried, it failed. It could sometimes connect to some devices but the connection wouldn’t be stable and no useful data transferred before it dropped.

Not even sure I have the tools to debug it. Does BT have a loopback mode to test if bits in are the same as bits out? Does wireshark work at the physical link level?

They might have set up the user agreement for it. Stackexchange did and their whole business model was about catching businesses where some worker copy/pasted code from a stackexchange answer and getting a settlement out of it.

I agree with you in principle (hell, I’d even take it further and think only trademarks should be protected, other than maybe a short period for copyright and patent protection, like a few years), but the legal system might disagree.

Edit: I’d also make trademarks non-transferrable and apply to individuals rather than corporations, so they can go back to representing quality rather than business decisions. Especially when some new entity that never had any relation to the original trademark user just throws some money at them or their estate to buy the trust associated with the trademark.

Yeah, when you’re compiling from source code, it’s much easier to add in ARM support. Kernels do need to handle more hardware-specific stuff, like interrupt handling, context switching, feature enablement and the like will likely need custom ASM code and might have different parameters/events to handle. But at the user level, you can often compile for ARM by just changing a few command line arguments and it’ll be fine as long as you don’t rely on inline ASM and have ARM versions of any libraries you need.

You still might need to do some adjustments for specific behavior differences when it comes to concurrency and atomicity of operations. It didn’t surprise me to see that the previous attempt to make an ARM ReactOS didn’t support multi-threading, because trying to enable it was probably an unreliably buggy mess with race conditions all over the place.

Running another uarch is a whole new level of complexity vs just running on a different OS but with the same uarch, especially if concurrency is involved because translating from one instruction set to another can break atomicity assumptions that concurrency depends on to maintain coherency. You’d need to do thorough analysis of the code to determine where special care is needed, and even then, it won’t be trivial setting it up in a way that avoids deadlock because you have to understand what the threads are doing before you can say if it’s safe for one thread to wait for another (since they could end up waiting for each other).

Whereas running code meant for a different OS just requires implementing that OS’ API (and behaviour, possibly including undocumented behaviour some code relies on, which can vary from application to application, hence windows compatibility modes where they add a translation layer themselves). Not saying this is trivial, but compared to the above problem, it kinda is.

Not that ARM support is impossible, just if they manage that, it will be proclaimed loudly, not something that requires digging. If they don’t say it supports ARM, just assume it doesn’t.

Does ubuntu not support other desktops? I had little annoyances like that with fedora cinnamon, not quite enough to make me miss windows but enough that I’d notice them and wish I could adjust them, also I eventually learned that it was a desktop environment that heavily relied on some form of javascript, which likely explained why it sometimes couldn’t keep up with mouse updates. But then I tried KDE and it addressed all of my issues, plus some others that I didn’t even realize until I saw a better implementation, plus it’s able to maintain that realtime responsiveness cinnamon struggled with (and my machine is far low end).

It’s been a while since I used Ubuntu, and even then, it was just for school so I only really needed the terminal and didn’t care what the GUI was doing as long as it didn’t interfere with that.

Hope they update those to your liking soon in any case.

Is there a predictable difference between an exponential growth curve and a sigmoid curve before the linear growth section? Like I suppose you’d be able to measure the dropoff in acceleration as velocity reaches its peak, but given that this is also a random sample, sample noise would make that impossible to determine in real time.

I mean, it’s a % of people who use x chart, so the only way it won’t be sigmoid eventually is if it drops off as something else replaces it, but I don’t think looking at the chart will help predict where the chart is going any more than how well that works with stock prices.

Before doing the switch, part of my mind thought that it was accepting a new pain that might equal or exceed the familiar pain in the short run but would be worth it in the long run to get away from the frustration of windows.

The reality that I experienced is that it was less painful than wrangling windows to behave more like how I want it to.

I would suggest separate partitions for data/game installs if you want to try multiple distros without needing to reinstall your games. Just need to mount the partition in the new distro, maybe have steam scan it (or just set it as your game install location) and you’re good to go. Encryption might complicate the steps, but I don’t see much point in encrypting a game install partition in the first place.

Edit: Meant this comment to add on to your reply and address the “just set up a single partition”, since you addressed the distro. On that note, I’ve been happy enough with Fedora KDE that I haven’t even gotten around to trying a new distro (took me almost a year to try KDE and realize I liked it better than cinnamon in practically every way).

Now I’m curious, can you be more specific?

Ah mine is always left plugged in, guess it can depend on use case.

To take it a bit further, I found at least cinnamon and KDE to be familiar enough that you can use your “discover how to do things on windows” skills for figuring out many things.

And once you get a handle on the repository software, it can also be easier to find and install new software when instructions direct you to a terminal command that doesn’t exist. KDE even does a search and says what needs to be installed when the command isn’t found. On windows, you need to download shit from some random website (which always sketched me out that someone could take advantage of that trust by making their malware behave as expected) and their search can fail to find something already installed on your machine, let alone figure out what you want to do if the name is a common word.

Can you give some examples of basic features that weren’t working with your dual monitor setup?

KDE might also help with this btw, as while I didn’t have any glaring issues with dual monitors in cinnamon (on Fedora), it improved overall when I switched to KDE. Used to have to change the audio output to my TV whenever I enabled it, now it happens automatically (plus the option to disable my HDMI audio if I preferred the “keep the same audio when switching to a different video output” behavior).

Only issue was that it didn’t work correctly the very first time, followed by it suddenly working the next time when I was intending to troubleshoot it.

Imo, KDE handles dual monitors better than windows even, especially if your secondary monitor is a TV you enable and disable depending on what you’re doing. Two clicks to toggle it, it handles different scaling seemlessly across the monitors (iirc, windows would “pop” to the scaling setting of whatever monitor they were mostly showing on as you moved them). Mouse cursor visibility improves when shaking the mouse, so it’s easy to find it on a giant screen.

Yeah, DHTML popups aren’t much different from the old popups that used to plague the internet. The only real difference is that I haven’t seen them used maliciously like the old popups were to be super annoying, but even “good faith” uses were all “hey, stop what you’re doing and do this for me” without any shame that went along with a real person doing that in a store.

I look forward to the day someone gets an AI to block this shit (on the assumption that it’s more complicated than blocking the old style popups without interfering with legitimate DHTML and needs context awareness).

Anything Mr. Bean.

Or that you’ll ever get paid if you do win.