Cybercriminals are creaming their jorts at the potential exploits this might open up.

Surely you can. Modern electric stovetops use infrared radiation from a wire coil to heat cookware. The stovetop is covered with a ceramic that allows infrared radiation to pass through, and if you put something on it, it’ll absorb the radiation as heat. The technology is also scalable to industrial applications.

I’ll let Brown Jacket Man explain the principle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff04ecF9Dfw

(edit) My house has an electric water heater that was built in the Soviet Union. It uses a ~200-litre tank with a large heating element inside.

1. Better insulation.
2. Heat pumps.
3. By the time gas heating is eliminated, climate change will have solved that problem.

Now, if we were talking about one Nokia…

Doctor Ignaz Semmelweiss in the mid-1800s suggested that obstetricians should wash and sterilize their hands before attending their patients to reduce the chance of postpartum infection. He was rejected by the medical community, ridiculed by colleagues, and eventually locked in an asylum where he was killed.

We’re sliding back in time.

That’s pretty much how he kept the public image of “eccentric genius” for so many years. I once read an article (can’t remember where, don’t care enough to search) that said that SpaceX had/has a team whose entire purpose was to babysit Musk when he had a temper tantrum. The team formed organically, like a cyst around a foreign object, and minimized damage to PR.

When Twitter was infested, it didn’t have this immunity and now the world (or those of us who care) knows how much of a shithead he is.

If you really, really, really don’t want to buy a keyboard and monitor, you can buy a USB KVM console, but it’ll likely cost more. Something like this: https://www.startech.com/en-us/server-management/notecons01

At a quick glance, the Sweet Ambar Blue SDDM theme has two versions – one for Plasma 5 and another one for Plasma 6. You probably want the one for Plasma 6. You can check which version of Plasma you’re running in System Settings -> About this System -> KDE Plasma Version.

Be extremely careful when installing Plasma/SDDM themes. They are user-submitted, not always reviewed, and can contain arbitrary code. There have been incidents involving malicious damaging code downloaded through Plasma global themes.

Naw, everybody knows that you have to use regex for that

People who consciously use and support F/LOSS usually do it because they look at software with a very critical eye. They see the failures of proprietary software and choose to go the other way. That same critical view is why they are critical of most “AI” tools – there have been numerous failures attributed to AI, and precious little value that isn’t threatened by those failures.

jq, and its Yaml sibling, yq.

If you want something Debian-but-not-Ubuntu-based, give LMDE a try.

The Unity desktop’s search would display Amazon ads based on the query. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Conformity_with_European_data_privacy_law

It’s like the “nazi bar” anecdote. It always starts small. You let in a bit of ads, a bit of self-promotion, then the revenue reaches a plateau. You let in a little more ads, maybe a pop-up saying that you could be more secure. Then a few years later you have a Recall situation. If you let one nazi drink at your bar, he’ll bring his friends, and you’ll be running a nazi bar.

I don’t trust Canonical to act with integrity.

It’s Debian-based, but Canonical has been really Microsofty about its development. They now have Snap as a universal packaging format, and have mandated that all official Ubuntu flavors (so X/K/Lubuntu and others, but not derivatives like Mint) must include Snap, and must not include Flatpak in the default installation. They’ve also fucked with APT where installing certain packages, like Firefox, would first install Snap and then the application’s Snap package, without even telling the user. They’ve had some controversy with Amazon ads in the search results, and advertising Ubuntu Pro in the fucking terminal. The default GNOME desktop also has a ton of issues.

I, and many others, recommend against Ubuntu. Linux Mint is the most commonly recommended “just works” distro. That being said, switching to Ubuntu, if able, is still preferable to staying on Windows.

My dad is now pissed at both Microsoft and Adobe, and curious about Linux. If I can find a Lightroom alternative, he might actually switch.

I’m in the same position, and it feels so damn powerful. I’ve convinced an entire university to ditch Ubuntu in favor of Linux Mint, and I’m also advocating for replacing our aging VMWare servers (with a soon-to-expire license) with Proxmox.

Damn, I had no idea netcat had a hardware implementation

Skullcandy has been a good experience. Cheap and durable. I’ve had two, a pair of Smokin’ Buds 2 (died from a broken cable, now discontinued), and a pair of Jib True (my current earbuds).

I bought the Jib True five years ago for about $40 and so far they’ve survived a dog, getting dropped in the toilet, and multiple drops onto a hard surface. I haven’t noticed any battery degradation. The audio quality is kinda mid (I used them in a factory at my previous job) and I can’t speak for the microphone, but they’ve served me well. My biggest issue has been some oxidation on the charging pins and contacts.

I hope they enjoy analzying my once-a-month subscription to FFXIV and nothing else.

Sounds to me like the kernel or the video driver died. Try pressing caps-lock a few times – if the keyboard’s LEDs don’t change, your inputs are dead and pretty much your only option is to power down or reset the computer. Most modern filesystems, like ext4 and btrfs (you likely have one of those) are very robust and can easily handle an ungraceful shutdown. When you start the OS again, it’ll run fsck on the root partition and get it into a functional state. Data loss can still occur if the computer dies while a process is still writing a file, but I think it was inevitable the moment the OS froze.

Unfortunately I can’t offer much advice other than to use a numbered Proton version instead of experimental, and to try again at a lower quality setting. You should also try Gamemode to temporarily optimize your system for running games.

I’ve played RDR2 on a weaker system than yours. It’s a very intensive game to run in terms of memory usage, streaming from mass storage, and CPU/GPU. Install it on an SSD to give it the best chance, and use a system monitor like bpytop or htop to check the RAM/CPU stats and temperatures.