It’s the Lutris version shipped with 22.04, which by today’s standards is definitely ancient. Because I’m not generally a Flatpak fan for stuff that requires larger packages or dependencies, I went directly to the Lutris PPA. And because I’m running KDE Neon, I had to work around the annoying libpoppler dependency issue that’s always plagued Wine on Neon.

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.

In addition to the perception that you have to be “good at computers” (aka a programmer) to use Linux, in my experience a lot of Linux media outlets (websites, YT channels, podcasts, etc) tend to be heavy on advanced features and tools without much explanation in layman’s terms and tend to be geared towards an IT professional/hobbyist audience, which can reinforce that stereotype among those (like me) who are not.

I live in one of the most rural states in the country, where loads to haul are generally large and the posted speed limit on the highway is usually 75 mph, and the de facto highway speed is usually 5-10 mph above that. No truck that can barely push 70 is gonna keep up with that. On top of that, you’re dealing with ice and snow on the roads half the year, so you’ll need to be able to deal with that too.

IMO the title of “worst computer tech company” is essentially a tie between MS and Google right now, with the two constantly one-upping the other back and forth on stupid ideas and corporate practices.

Advertising costs money to produce, and the vast majority of paid Linux distro users, such as Red Hat, SUSE, etc., are business/enterprise users, who usually wouldn’t rely on advertising through TV, YouTube, and so on to find enterprise computing solutions. It would be a disconnect between the ad platform and the primary target market.

Being super smart and super evil are NOT mutually exclusive. Intelligence =|= morality.

I’m slowly converting my dad on it but the rest of my family likely sees me the same way, lol.

This won’t last long. It’s too public now. Google will find a way to kill it and force their AI on you as much as possible.

Linus himself just seems to give off that “nice guy on camera, exact opposite behind the scenes” kind of vibe. I’ve seen him get a bit riled up on podcast videos and it really comes off like he’s holding back. Perhaps the employee’s story was all too believable from others who get that perception of him. So I could see how the defamation threat would be like him/the company to try to show “we’re really angry and could do more but we’re gonna hold our temper”.

I’ve brought it up before with /e/, that because it’s based in Europe it tends to focus on the European market, IMO too much so. Lots of Europe-exclusive phones supported, barely any US-available phones that support tech like 5G (which is not available in Europe). If you want 5G in the US, you’re pretty much stuck with the Pixel or the Fairphone, and like you said, you also won’t find the Fairphone in a US store (though you can order one from /e/'s website in the US). While I did buy a Murena One (which is a cheap Chinese OEM) in the short time they were selling them in the US market on their website a couple years ago and I’m using it now, good luck finding a US carrier that will support it (T-Mobile was the only one that would) or a repair shop that will touch it if it breaks. I’ve dropped it a couple times and have a large area of dead pixels on the bottom of the screen, but nobody can get a replacement screen for it.

Really, this seems to be the best way to spread Linux adoption to me. I would bet that Linux got at least a good few users from the Steam Deck coming with it pre-installed. Big way to show people that for most things the average user doesn’t need to go into the command line to use their system for what they need as well. Of course, continued improvement in the software included in the most popular distros would really boost Linux adoption as well. I’ve seen plenty of people say they’d make the switch - if only they could use MS Office or Adobe software on it. Alternatives like LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Kdenlive and the GIMP have come a LONG way since I first made the switch around 2009, but especially the Adobe software still outclasses the competition when it comes to features. MS Office isn’t as hard to let go of, especially since you can still use Office 365 Online on Linux and LibreOffice is closer to having all the OOTB features of MS Office than the other programs are to Adobe, but you have to convince people to give it a try first and a lot of employers still require MS Office for work.

I will also say, though, that it was only due to Windows Vista otherwise bricking my laptop back then that I even made the switch. I’d heard of this mysterious OS named Ubuntu so I thought I’d give it a try to save my laptop before I bought a new one, especially since I was living abroad at the time and didn’t want to deal with the hassle of buying a computer with a foreign language version of Windows on it. So I had a friend burn me a copy of Ubuntu 8.10, it worked like a charm, and I only ever since ran Windows at home when dual-booting for a couple years for gaming purposes before Proton became a thing. I didn’t even know Ubuntu was Linux until I’d installed it and started learning how to use it in earnest. Really showed me how even then Linux wasn’t so difficult to use for the average computer user.

Seriously, if I hear “X, formerly known as Twitter”, one more time… It’s been over a year. If people don’t know the name has changed by now, I don’t know what will help them.

The term “dark pattern” refers to any deceptive practice, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem, that online websites, apps, etc use to get people to do the site/app’s desired behavior, such as in this case, not cancel their Prime subscription. Not all of these examples may apply in Amazon’s case, but some examples would be making the fields or buttons for canceling or keeping your subscriptions different colors or sizes, making the default choice to keep the subscription, making you view a bunch of ads to keep the sub or go through a bunch of other pages before canceling, or hiding the cancelation option in fine print in a corner of the site. The “dark” part means that the average person usually doesn’t notice the deceptive nature of the practices.

The eternal excuse of those who profit or benefit from children getting involved in things they shouldn’t.

+1 for Odysee here. Some give it a pass due to it being a haven for people whose content gets kicked off YouTube, but the same is true for just about any alternative out there, including many instances of PeerTube. With PeerTube you have greater control by being able to self-moderate and federate if you run your own instance, but that takes time, effort and resources you may not have. Odysee has a greater variety of viewpoints and video categories/topics on the front page than many other competitors such as Rumble, which is basically just right-wing YouTube (and IIRC that’s what Rumble is meant to be) and it has a nice balance of enough content to find new stuff to watch every day and not being so overwhelmingly big that you’ll get lost in the vast ocean of content. If you just want to find a place to upload videos, join a PeerTube instance that seems good to you or use Odysee.

Yeah, I’m a Jerboa user too. The left-right swipe is my only criticism as well, mainly because it can be sensitive when you’re just trying to scroll up or down.

It seems to me to be mainly from people who are dedicated to the Unix philosophy that programs should do only one thing, and do it well. Tying everything up into systemd doesn’t follow that. I don’t care either, and I don’t mind systemd, but some people care about it enough to throw paragraphs of hate on it wherever it’s mentioned online. And apparently it’s “bloat”, and to some " bloat" is worse than the devil himself.

Yeah, thanks for the catch. That is what I mean. FreeTube is great, I use it on my PC.

Unfortunately, the free, decentralized nature of PeerTube actually makes it more difficult to be a legitimate YouTube successor. The main reason: monetization. Most of the big creators people watch on YouTube don’t just do their videos as a hobby, it’s a job where they make their living. Some of the biggest will make enough in stream donations or Patron pledges to not have to worry about ads or sponsorships, but there’s a huge “middle class” of content creators, you could call it, who live video ad check to video ad check with Patreon or stream donations being supplemental to the ad revenue. Drop that ad money, and those creators will have to either figure out how to quickly multiply their income from other sources or there would be an extremely sharp drop in both quantity and quality of videos. Expect a ton of much-beloved channels to die in the process. To be any sort of competitor at all while retaining its free, decentralized nature, you would need to have many, many times more instances than exist now, with a large percentage of them run by entities with enough resources to pay for both server costs of hosting and distributing large amounts of content and the cost to pay and support the creators on those instances who previously lived mainly on ad revenue or who want to monetize themselves on the platform. Centralized platforms for video take away many of these issues, or make them a ton easier to handle. They allow for easily setting up a subscription based service such as Nebula that the creators know they will be able to at least count on being steady. It may or may not be a lot, but it’s something guaranteed without the creators themselves also having to worry about paying out in server costs, which is still more in income than PeerTube can offer. What would a creator prefer, some guaranteed income with only their video production costs as overhead, or no guarantee of income while bearing both production and hosting costs?

EDIT: updated “FreeTube” to “PeerTube”. I absolutely recommend FreeTube, great YouTube client. PeerTube has some potential, but it will never properly compete with YouTube for the reasons I list above. In one word, money.