The fact that one side is a piece of shit doesn’t mean the other side isn’t also a piece of shit

Linux has 2.6% on the Steam Hardware Survey.

Nay, once every week for the past four years, I go to McDonald’s and order a hamburger for $3, but they ask me for $3.27, so I only put down $3 on the counter and then loudly proclaim I refuse to pay the sales tax on it. Then I walk out of the restaurant to force them to accept my money.

(I have not eaten a hamburger in four years)

Today I learned that if I buy some Bitcoin, this will prevent the Government from taking money from my wallet and bank account to give to these people

Today I learned that if I buy some Bitcoin, then this will prevent the Government from giving loads of money to these people

I can’t explain the exact reasons why, but let me provide some examples.

In Cities: Skylines (which is natively supported on Linux), I had two mods installed that had different behaviour depending on whether Steam was installed through a Flatpak or whether it was installed as a native package. One of them needed to access a system installation of Mono and call it (which sounds like virus behaviour, I know), and this functionality would be blocked by Flatpak’s containerisation. The second mod was a map-drawing mod which would create maps of the in-game city and put them in a specified folder in your home directory. On the native package Steam, it would put the files in the default folder, but crashes if you tried to change the directory. Otherwise, it worked as expected. On the Flatpak Steam, it would allow you to select the directory, but no files would actually be written there. It’s easy to just blame bad code written by amateur developers, but clearly it’s a case of the same code resulting in different behaviour depending on variables like Steam’s installation method.

Also, the Sims 4, which is not native and runs through Proton, worked pretty reliably on X11 but occasionally crashes mid-game using Wayland. It was not perfectly stable in either case, but it crashed far less frequently on X11 compared to Wayland.

This is not a game, but Firefox supports touchpad gestures on my laptop on Wayland, but not on X11.

That’s what they did, though, except the only distro on that list is Steam OS. And now people complain.

The Steam Deck comes in essentially one hardware configuration with one operating system complying to one set of standards. Linux users have a higher-than-average tendency to do weird, nonstandard shit on their computers and then complain when it breaks something. On Windows, Steam OS, and Mac, if you test it on maybe 5 different configurations, you’re done. With Linux, you have to test at least four different distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), two different packaging formats for Steam (Flatpak, native package), and two windowing systems (X.org, Wayland). Plus the proprietary NVIDIA drivers along with open-source drivers. That’s already 32 combinations for 2% market share.

Seeing that he is French, one would think he should know better than to invite this to happen.

When Jean-Marine Le Pen (founder of French far-right political party) died, French people went out into the public squares dancing, waving French flags, popping champagne, and loudly cheering “the racist is dead!”.

I have already procured a bottle of what here can legally only be called sparkling wine, and I’m ready to pop it any day now.

There are already lots of viable strategies for getting rid of brine, they are just more expensive than the naïve approach of having a big pipe on the shore spewing it into the ocean. Diluting it with seawater seems to be the most viable right now.

I wonder if something like a 10 km underwater pipe with small holes in it that only let out a little bit of brine at a time would work. Might be a hassle to lay, at least to start, but I think that once it is in place it could operate without maintenance for decades. And piping is not really that expensive. Perhaps there are already researchers studying it, or it has been proven to not work. It seems like such an obvious idea.

I’m not sure why you took them literally. They’re making a tongue-in-cheek statement about how Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is able to manipulate the American president seemingly with ease and impunity.

This is probably one of the top 10 dumbest war strategies in history. Make the population of the region you’re eventually seeking to occupy hate you even more, and on top of that, it makes the very foolish assumption that Hamas leadership would give up if they see their Gazans suffer, which is so naïve it’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. Hamas leadership doesn’t give a shit if ordinary Gazans starve. In fact, they probably think it’s all the better for their recruiting numbers, seeing that I have yet to see a single Hamas fighter suffering from malnutrition on the level of ordinary Gazans.

To external observers paying attention, this can only lead one to conclude either Netanyahu is a terrible military strategist or he’s using this “strategy” as a cover to snuff out the entire Arab population of Gaza. For all I know, both are true!

I am not opposed to reading. I will happily read a 1,000 or 2,000-word article to hear new ideas. What I will not do is listen to a 90-minute podcast or read its transcript, which is so long it crashed LibreOffice Writer when I tried pasting it to get the word count, just to understand what CabbageRelish@midwest.social is talking about with the comment that took them twenty seconds to write.

It’s not unreasonable for me to say that if you took less than 60 seconds to write your comment, I’m going to spend a maximum of 5-10 minutes thinking about and writing my response.

I am not reading through a fucking 10,000 word podcast transcript to find the relevant two paragraphs. Quote some points if you want.

Edit: I actually underestimated this thing. The transcript is so large that it crashed LibreOffice Writer the first time I tried pasting it in to get the actual word count. The transcript is 16,719 words long.

No, mate, the parent commenter asserts that the tankies only claim it murders 500,000 people a year because it also economically hurts Russia.

The Taiwan issue has exactly to do with the fact that sending official diplomatic representatives to it means recognising its legitimacy and sovereignty. Even though most Western countries already believe this, sending the representatives would be to express that they believe this which is what upsets the Chinese government. China doesn’t care what people think as long as they keep it to themselves. It’s when they get “embarrassed” on the world stage that Chinese leadership thinks it demands action.

The whole system of formal diplomatic recognition needs to die. Right now, “recognising” a government seems to be tantamount to acknowledging that government is legitimate and representative of the people. This is a very obstructive and unproductive system. It doesn’t matter whether you “recognise” a government and it also doesn’t matter what you decide to call your representatives to it. Refusing to recognise a government doesn’t mean that group of people doesn’t hold power or doesn’t actually control territory. It just prevents you from engaging with them in a constructive manner. It’s just a head-in-the-sand approach to intergovernmental relations.

If there’s a group of people calling themselves a government that holds power over a group of people or a piece of territory that you are interested in, it shouldn’t have to result in this whole game of charades. You should be able to send official representatives to that group without having to worry about offending everyone else. The whole concept of “recognition” is just nonsense.

The presence of far-right politics has really seen an uptick in recent years. It seems to have started in America but has spread to Europe and other countries like a plague. You have the AfD in Germany who claimed second place unseating a centre-left government, the entry of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party into the British parliament (even overtaking the traditional Conservative Party in recent polls), the fourth consecutive election in Portugal where the nationalist Chega party has gained seats, and Canada narrowly avoiding electing Pierre Poilievre the “Maple MAGA”.

Surprisingly enough, prior to Donald Trump blowing up the US-Canada alliance, Poilievre was predicted to win in a landslide in Canada with a 90%+ chance of his party getting a majority but somehow it really does seem like everyone who associates with Trump outside the US loses their election. The premiership really shipped right through Poilievre’s hands like a lump of dry beach sand. Lol

Yet another irreplaceable natural landmark destroyed by idiot hooliganism. There is nothing the courts can do that will ever bring that tree back.

Edit: Apparently the tree sprouted from its stump.