I second this. Chances are high that OP ends up reinstalling multiple times (either to check out multiple distros or after they accidentally nuked the system). Doing so on a separate SSD so they don’t accidentally wipe their data during reinstall and so they don’t have to constantly migrate data is a good plan.

Have you ever watched someone play Candy Crush? It’s full-on manipulative. “Oh, soo close! You almost managed to beat this level! Don’t let this chance escape! Just pay 5 gems and you can continue!”

There are certainly different kinds of players and some are more or less easily manipulated. But somebody who manages to stay rational wouldn’t play Candy Crush eitherway. If you tell them beforehand that they have to pay €200 to play this stupid minigame they’d ask you what you are smoking. But with microtransactions it’s quite easy to draw money out of somebody’s pockets.

People like that have as much agency over their microtransaction spending as a smoker has over their next cigarette or a gambling addict has over playing the next bet. The mechanics of microtransactions are often close to identical to the mechanics of gambling.

That is not wrong. But interpreting “dark” as “evil” is just wrong in this context.

I have read the article, and I got your point before, and I still think that it’s totally moot and besides the point.

If they had been two total randos, say Max the car repair man cheating with Mandy the receptionist, then nobody would have even tried to recognize them. Not with social media, not with facial recognition not with anything else.

And even if Peter, the coworker of Max and Mandy would have recognized them, he’d maybe have told their partners, or he might have made fun of them at work, but that’s it. Because these people don’t matter.

To get back to your example: Somebody took a picture of you. Ok. Now what? Did that picture go viral on social media? Did that picture make it into international news? No. Because you don’t matter.

And you said it yourself:

Shit, my workplace couldn’t even identify the people who walked in the front door and stole stuff and walked out. The police could see their faces clearly in the security footage, but they weren’t from around here and no one knew who they were.

We should bring back paying to read a newspaper, magazine, (pc-magazine :P)

You are probably not wrong, and we should be paying for a lot more things, but the genie is out of the bottle for many things here and it’s difficult to roll that back.

For example, newspaper reading habits have changed a lot. Before the internet, you’d usually stick with one newspaper and that’s it. Maybe two if you have too much money. You buy your newspaper and you read it front to back, probably even the topics you don’t particularly care about.

Now it’s often the other way round. Most people read news from quite a few sources (or often just follow links on social media and don’t really even care for the publisher), but they don’t read their news from virtual cover to virtual cover. Instead, they stick to the topics they care for, or maybe even read about the same thing in multiple publications, comparing what they have to say about it.

For this kind of newspaper reading, current forms of monetarisation don’t really work. Most newspapers only offer subscriptions to the whole newspaper, often in the range of €5-15 per month. So if I were to pay for the ~20 newspapers that I read news from at least semi-frequently, that’s €200-600 per month. No way I can or want to afford that.

Some allow you to pay per article, but that is usually pretty expensive too (€1-3 per article) and also I need to register to every single newspaper. That’s not great either.

What I’d really like to see would be a industry-wide subscription. For example, I pay €10 per month and that allows me to read 100 articles per month across all newspapers. That would be really nice.

“dark” as in “not visible”. Adblock users can’t be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. “Dark”, in this instance, is not a derogatory term.

“Brutal” is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.

See it, sure. But as a society we used to have an expectation of anonymity, for better or worse.

That’s the case if you are some unimportant rando, yes.

But these two people we are talking about are very public figures due to their jobs, and they are compensated very well for this. As a public figure you can’t have the expectation of anonymity. That just comes with the territory.

Every time JK Rowling lets out an anti-trans fart, the whole internet is up in arms. When my transphobe uncle does the same, nobody cares. Because one of them is a public figure and the other one is not.

The main problem I see here is that people still don’t seem to understand what “public” means.

That applies to doing shit in public, but also posting shit publically.

If you do something in the open, expect that people will see it.

Especially considering that warranty is usually region-locked. You usually can’t claim warranty from outside of the country where you bought it.

So if your friend in France has to claim warranty, they’d have to first ship it to Canada so that someone else (e.g. you) can do the warranty claim for them.

Also, warranty is usually region-locked, even if the device is not.

Buying a steam deck in Canada usually gives you warranty in Canada. So of you then use the device in France and it breaks, then you have to first ship it to some friend in Canada, so they can do a warranty claim.

“The past” ^TM is a big place and a lot of very different things happend in a lot of different places at different times.

The same way it is true that “In the past people believed that fat was super unhealthy and suger was super healthy” and at the same time “in the past people believed that fat was super healthy and suger was super unhealthy”.

Both statements are correct for different times and regions.

There’s even worse stuff: Planting trees is sold as carbon offset. But where do you plant trees? Certainly not on valuable farmland. Instead they drain bogs to plant trees instead.

The issue is that bogs can store about 10x as much CO² as a forest can, and by draining the bog, that CO² is released.

And bog land isn’t exactly well-suited for growing trees, and also the carbon offset only pays for planting the trees, not for keeping them alive. So the trees die almost instantly, thus releasing their stored CO². But the upside to it is that on the now re-deforested land, more trees can be planted.

It’s complete greenwashing with at best no effect and at worst terrible effects.

The main issue with planting trees to remove CO² is that a forest doesn’t consume CO² but instead just stores it. Once a forest is fully-grown, no more CO² is sunk in there. A hectare of forest stores ~400t CO2. Germany creates about 650 million tons CO² per year. So to offset that, Germany would need to plant 1.6 million hectars of forest a year, which is about 4.5% of the surface area of Germany. 32% of Germany is already forest, so that leaves a theoretical maximum of 14.5 years of CO² emissions that Germany could offset by planting trees.

But Germany has been creating CO² for much longer.

Not to forget: It contains a ton of medicine as well. If you want to have antibiotics in your salad, use human waste as fertilizers.

Sadly we had that problem before AI too… “Some dude I know told me this is super easy to do”

Can we have the same in the EU too, please?

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According to more realistic data, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202406-202506 the market share has been around 4% for the last year, even slightly declining in the meantime.

But that doesn’t make for nice, sensationalist headline stoked by wishful thinking.

Sorry to say, Linux isn’t going mainstream anytime soon and by and large the end of Win10 just means that the comparatively small group of users still running 5+ years old hardware will just buy a new PC or keep using their outdated OS.

In fact, if you combine the market share of outdated Windows versions (XP-8.1) you get a market share very close to the market share of Linux.

As much as we all would love it if the Linux market share goes to 50% in fall, it’s not going to happen.

The main issues with Linux adoption (it’s not preinstalled and most people have no idea which OS they are using and really can’t be bothered to reinstall) are just as present now as they were for the last 30 years.

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I read a similarly sensationalist headline with 4% two months ago and 5% yesterday. What’s up with the headline makers?

Exactly my point. Also on Linux you quickly get to the limits of what you can find in the first-party repos without ppas or downloading .rpm/.deb/… files. And same as on Windows, having a malware-free first-party repo/store won’t protect you from malware if you download your programs from elsewhere.