Yes, you can add the Mozilla ppa and they offer a non-snap version. I think the Deb that you download from their website also isn’t snap, but I haven’t tried it

Would definitely not recommend KDE Neon. It’s more of a showcase of new KDE features than an actual usable OS. I currently use Kubuntu and it’s fine. I wish it updated more frequently but the update frequency isn’t slow enough to really be a deal breaker.

I disabled snap Firefox, not really because I’m ideologically against snap, but because snap Firefox is annoying to use. Other than that, the OS generally just works out of the box.

I’ve heard good things about OpenSUSE, but I’ve never tried it. My personal opinion is that I want to stick to the most common distros so that it’s easier to find troubleshooting advice

Found someone nice. It was sheer chance, really. Met with a new neighbor and she had a crush on me. Was friends for a while. Years later decided to get into a relationship with her.

Patriotic duck

For me, everything is a belief unless it satisfies the following criteria:

1. It is generally accepted as true among experts
2. There is ample evidence that is both personally convincing and leaves no room for alternate interpretations (not the same as #1, since many fields have “commonly accepted knowledge” that is generally acknowledged as most likely true but has no evidence to back it up)
3. It is specific enough that it cannot be interpreted in a way that is misleading

I find that the one that trips up most people is #3, since some people speak in technically true but overly broad statements and the listener ends up filling in the gaps with their own biases. The listener leaves feeling like their biases have been confirmed by data, not realizing that they have been misled.

In the end, according to my criteria, very little can be categorized as true knowledge. But that’s fine. You can still make judgements from partial or biased data or personal beliefs. You just can’t be resolute about it and say that it’s true.

The Thing (1982) has basically consistently been my favorite horror movie

I mainly do work indoors, so the brightness does not really matter that much to me. But as far as I can tell, the brightness is pretty normal for laptops - I don’t think it’s any brighter or dimmer than other laptops I’ve used in the past. According to this website that I found, brightness is 25 to 486 nits. Google search seems to say that average maximum brightness for laptops is somewhere around 300-400 nits.

My understanding is that the screen is generally what eats up most of the battery on device, so if you plan to have brightness turned up, it might be difficult to find a laptop with a long battery life.

The cpu is on the mainboard and can’t be removed, but you can replace the entire mainboard. Basically, you can upgrade, but you’ll have to upgrade a couple other things along with it

Just tested with normal power profile and screen brightness turned down - battery went down by about 50% after 3 hours. I think my laptop usually dies after 3 hours because I have the screen brightness up

Yes, but that’s my point, you see. Because Arm historically has been used for mobile and small devices, there’s been a strong incentive for decades to emphasize power efficiency. Because x86 historically has been used for desktops, there’s been a strong incentive to emphasize power. It’s only been very recently that Arm attempted to have comparable power, and even more recently that x86 attempted to have comparable power efficiency.

Sure, Arm is currently more efficient, but the general consensus is that there’s no inherent reason for why Arm must be more efficient than x86. In other words, the only reason it is more efficient is just because they’ve been focusing on efficiency for longer.

Both AMD and Intel’s current gen x86 cpu’s are, from what I can tell, basically spitting distance away from Qualcomm’s Arm cpu’s in terms of battery life, and rumor has it that both x86 companies should be able to match Arm chips in efficiency by next gen.

So if efficiency is a priority for you, I think it’s worthwhile to wait and see what the cpu companies cook up in the next couple of years, especially as both AMD and Intel seem to be heavily focused on maximizing efficiency right now

My understanding is that Arm chips don’t have any fundamental advantage over x86 chips. They’re more efficient simply because they’ve been optimized to be more efficient for so long. I’ve heard that upcoming Intel and AMD chips could be able to compete with the new Arm cpu’s, so if you’re not going to get a new laptop soon, it seems worthwhile to just wait and see

Yes, I don’t use the external GPU. I just use the AMD APU. Also I realized that AMD 7000 could refer to both the cpu and the GPU. Ah, AMD and their marketing

Kubuntu on Framework 16 AMD 7000 series here. Sleep is horrible - definitely drains your battery. Bag heats up, and I estimate maybe a 1% drain per hour. I’ve enabled hibernate though I rarely use it.

Battery is alright but not great. I get maybe 2-3 hours of active, light use from full battery.

No compatibility issues that I’ve noticed, though, of course, Linux has its fair share of minor non-hardware-related bugs.

Camera is serviceable but not amazing. Not sure about microphone but I assume the same thing. Speakers are somewhat odd in that the speakers are pointed to the side rather than toward the front, but again - serviceable.

Well, I’m just covering my bases. I can’t personally imagine an instance in which it would be helpful, but human nature (and especially human nature of children) can be really hard to predict and I won’t deny that I might have missed a case in which it could be helpful.

My upbringing was extremely “do what you want, but deal with the consequences.”

“You can watch an R-rated horror movie, but don’t come to me if you can’t sleep at night”-type of situation.

My impression has generally been that my freedom to do what I want let me learn a lot about decision making, responsibility, curiosity, and modern survival skills like Googling things. I’m genuinely baffled by how poorly some people my age use the computer and find things on Google, and I somewhat suspect many of them probably simply haven’t had the opportunity to explore technology on their own. And a lot of my hobbies were developed exactly because I allowed to do what I wanted when I was a child.

As for children doing stupid shit and searching up things that aren’t appropriate for their age, my thought has generally been, why is it the parent’s role to keep that from the child? I strongly believe that a parent’s role is to prepare the child to be a functional adult, not to baby them.

I acknowledge that all children are different, and perhaps there are some cases in which having parental controls would help. But I think my life would be duller if I were raised with parental controls.

Edit: having read some of the other comments, I think there’s 2 aspects to the question of parental control. The first is the aspect of children learning about age-inappropriate things, which I’ve mainly been focusing on. The other is the aspect of discipline and management (ie, preventing your children from spending 12 hours on YouTube). I think people have made interesting points about this aspect, and I respect their opinions. I personally agree with BananaKing’s take that parental controls is the wrong tool for the job. Train your children properly and you shouldn’t need to use parental controls to control their screen time.

One of my cats love fishing used tea leaves out from mugs. She doesn’t eat them, she just paws the leaves out from the cups and then leaves them on the counter. We have no idea why she does it but she absolutely insists on doing it. No other cat does this.

I’m unsure what the game is supposed to be - is it just a collection of different versions of Tetris?

I would like one too, if possible. Thanks ahead

I liked Noroi: The Curse.

No jumpscares, but really quite unsettling

Some astronauts are on the international space station. They were scheduled to come down to Earth some time ago, but the rocket that’s supposed to take them down has failures, and so the return trip has been postponed. NASA isn’t convinced that the rocket can be fixed in time, and they have no alternatives ready, so for now the astronauts are just stuck in space.

Obligatory note that the rocket was built by Boeing, who are already in hot water for negligently lax construction protocols on their planes. As an extra note, Boeing engineers seem to think that NASA should use the rocket anyways because it’s “unlikely” to crash and burn this time