BananaTrifleViolin

This laptop is more than capable of running SNES emulation; its 1GHz quadcore, and 4gb ram.

SNES is an old system which had 3.58Mhz CPU and 128kb ram; you’ll be able to emulate it without much issue on that laptop. BSNES has low requirements (like an Athlon or Pentium 4, and 512mb ram, and Open GL2), although if you have problems then Snes9x and ZSnes are less accurate but lighter weight. RetroArch is pretty convenient way to deploy emulators and has BSNES, Snes9x and Snex9x_Next cores to use.

A lightweight Desktop Environement may help make the laptop feel snappier; Xfce or Lxqt. If it feels slow then you want a minimal desktop which doesn’t have overhead like compositing. Also don’t use flatpaks especially if you multitask; use native apps as flatpaks have some overhead.

Mint as a distro is fine for installing lightweight desktop environments, and if you wanted you could install Linux Mint Xfce edition from scratch.

For comparison, prices near me in the UK are £1.55 a litre which is about $7.45 a gallon.

He’s so incredibly stupid; honestly the biggest moron I’ve ever seen in any government.

He started this war, he didn’t think it through - it was well known attacking Iran would lead to them closing the strait of hormuz, and it would be extremely difficult to open it without a ground invasion. Israel has wanted to go after Iran for decades but every US president had common sense and said no. Trump has done what no President has ever done. The US allies are not stupid enough to be drawn into the this pointless war as it’s unwinnable.

Now this so-called “business man” doesn’t even know how global markets work. You remove 20% of the oil supply, then prices go up because demand goes up - you still have 100% of demand. The US isn’t protected from that as a net shale oil/gas exporter.

First: everyone in the world is bidding for oil and gas supplies so it goes to the highest bidder; thats how a market works - everyone ends up paying more including americans. Second: the US is a net exporter but it also imports a lot of gas and oil. It’s exports are driven by Liquid Natural Gas. But it imports Crude Oil, because it can’t produce enough of that for domestic demand. Third: As energy prices go up, you get “demand destruction”. In other words, some activities are no longer economical as the price of oil and gas is too high and obliterates profits. That means the global economy goes into decline - a recession. And the US is in no way insulated from that - it is totally integrated into the global economy.

Trump has fucked over the US, allies like the UK, Canada and EU and the rest of the world. This isn’t his allies’ war, and they’re not getting involved - it’s politically toxic and it’d just escalate this mess. Trump can get frustrated at the mess he’s made and lash out as much as he wants, but he can’t get away from this mess. He has two choices and both are shit: Invade Iran with troops or admit defeat and cave into the Iran’s demands. I suspect he will cave in and try and spin this as a “victory”.

Sim City 4 is the best version of the Sim City games, and is 75% off on GOG right now, $5 / £4.

Cities Skylines 1 is the best modern city builder, 3D and a lot of fun plus well designed. But only really worth it when it’s on sale; lots of DLC and overpriced as a package when not on sale. Avoid Cities Skylines 2 - it’s just not fun and hasn’t been fixed - maybe they will one day fix but I doubt it 2.5 years in…

Yeah, it’s inconsistent. KDE / QT apps should reliably restore to the right desktop / activity and position. But non-KDE apps like GTK & Electron apps are not consistently restored depending on the app. Instead it depends on work arounds on Wayland and apps can still erroneously open on the current screen / desktop instead. This can be still be managed with Kwin with more workarounds - for example specific rules can be applied in Kwin for really problematic apps if users want - but its faffy.

So this is definitely a welcome change to wayland.

On KDE the key combination Alt+Tilde tabs between the windows open for one program. E.g. if I have 4 firefox windows and 2 Konsole windows, if a Firefox window is active Alt+Tilde will tab through only the 4 Firefox windows, while Alt+Tab will tab through all the Firefox and Konsole windows.

Libre Office is maintained by The Document Foundation which is based in Germany. So from a governance point of view it’s already a European hosted open source project.

Also for online collaboration platforms, Libre Office isn’t really a good option. It is an old, sprawling codebase which doesn’t lend itself to being ported to being a server based collaborative platform. It has actually been done but hasn’t flourished, hence alternatives like OnlyOffice.

Also this is more about OnlyOffice’s issues - the lack of transparancy and true collaboration with contributors, the proprietary code used for mobile apps, and it being based in Russia which is geopolitically problematic especially if part of the idea is “Euro sovereignty”

It’d be time consuming and expensive to turn this round with regular animation. Ironic that AI is being used by the Iran’s supporters in this way.

True but at the same time bees help spread pollinating plants - it’s a two way relationship. They may be commercialised for crops, but they will go to any plants in range and contribute to their spread.

So a method of increasing bee populations may also be helpful in spreading wildflowers and speeding up rewilding efforts.

In addition dramatically increasing bee populations may help resolve issues with pollination such as in some regions of China where damage is so bad that hand pollination is needed for crops. Restoring bee pollinators in those areas may increase crop yields, which in turn reduces the general pressure globally on expanding the use of fertile land for farming.

So while crop/pollen diversity is certainly very important, this kind of research still has potentially big benefits for the environment both in the fight to rewild and slow the spread of land use being moved to farming.

Few options off the top of my head:

• Open a terminal (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+T) and type “firefox -p &”. The & operator runs the process in the background so it will continue to run even when the terminal is closed

OR

• Use your desktops equivalent to windows “run”. So for example, on KDE use Krunner (Alt+F2 or Alt+Space usually launches it) and type in “firefox -p”; it usually defaults to running a command. There is also a dedicated “Run Command” plasmoid that can be added to your desktop. On Gnome, I think the “run a command” dialogue will do the same (also Alt+F2 I believe).

OR

• Add an app entry to your desktops menu for Firefox Profile Manager. On KDE if you type Profile, “Profile Manager - Firefox” already exists as a Krunner action; so you can easily get it from your menu or krunner just typing Profile. If it doesn’t exist then you can use your desktop’s menu editor to copy the firefox entry and add the -p as the command line argument. On KDE that done most easily by right clicking on the menu icon and selecting “edit applications…” or search for menu editor. Other desktops will be very similar.

Limo is fairly staight forward, and supports the NexusMods API. It autodetects Steam games and needs a little manual set up for non Steam games. Available on Flathub.

Someone mentioned it here and I’ve been trying it; so far fairly good I think.

Native English, very basic German from school.

I want to learn another language but can’t decide which.

I love The Net, it’s a decent thriller even if janky by todays standards. I saw it as a kid some years after release, and the tech side of it was absurd even then. But the core plot is basically Hitchcock like, and Sandra Bullock is good in it. If you can let the silly tech side of things go (it was made when the Internet was a new concept even to users, so it does get things wrong), it’s actually a decent enough plot.

Its an interesting build and cool, but this seems overpowered and overspecced to me?

From his reddit post he’s hosting: Immich, Nextcloud (file sync across all devices), Frigate NVR (Coral AI detection + Home Assistant integration), Plex (with full *arr stack), pfSense (firewall, DNS, DHCP, WireGuard VPN, ntopng monitoring), Vaultwarden and Pfblocker. He says on the Youtube video: Plex, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Immich, Nextcloud, Frigate, and more.

Does this really needs 4 Lenovo PCs (1 used as the router) to run all this? Maybe he has multiple users and is going hard on the Immich and the security camera set up (including video processing?). Even then I just can’t see how this would make full use of all this hardware?

Tech seems to often seems to follow the Pareto Principal of 80:20 split; where one company dominates and gets at least 80% of the market share. In tech its often more extreme and 90% domination often occurs, and is even expected by investors.

It’s debatable where this is cause or effect - e.g. whether tech would naturally move to such dominant splits or whether this is actually the effects of bad regulation allowing monopolies to form. I personally favour the latter but thats irrelevant.

So in the space of “forums” Reddit has taken a dominant position. In some ways it gets away with this because it’s regarded as “social media” and as such is no where near dominant, with Meta dominant (Facebook, Instagram) and big players like TikTok etc. But in terms of the forum style discussion platform it really is dominant. It’s so dominant that people who host communities on there seem to unquestioningly believe Reddit when it says it owns them and all it’s content.

Lemmy, MBin, and PieFed show that actually anyone can host their own instances of Reddit like forums, but Reddit does still dominate as a single location hosting and controlling lots of other peoples content.

This is a potentially interesting study but there is a key gap which is around the actual health risk.

The figures around safety mg/kg are to do with the rate the toxic materials leach out of an item, not the absolute concentration within the materials or artificial lab based maximum leach rates. The quoted 10 mg/kg is also not an actual limit:

10 mg/kg limit originally proposed by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).

The limit orignally proposed is not the same as the actual limit. As far as I can see it is 0.05mg/kg leach into food, 0.04mg/l for toys, and as far as I can see there are no other limits in place. They are essentially being restricted in food contacting materials and toys, and requiring clear labelleling in other uses: https://www.echa.europa.eu/hot-topics/bisphenols

What really matters is under what circumstances the “maximum concentrations of 351 mg/kg” were reached. If that is an artificial lab test with no relatability to real world situations then it’s meaningless. If that rate of leach occurs at body temperature with a bit of moisture then it’s very worrying. But even then the absolute amount of the bisphenols in the products also matters - for example it might be there amount mixed into the plastics in a ear bud is too small to actually be toxic to a human.

Without that information this feels like sensationalist reporting of the findings - the article is implying there is a health risk when there may be none, and they are also implying there is wrong doing or failure of the EU enforcement of its regulations when there may be none.

It is worth reading the disclaimer at the end; while their aims may be laudable they are not conducting independent research and it’s not clear their work is even peer reviewed. Instead this is a single issue lobbying group, part funded by EU funds, producing research with a political aim.

About ToxFree LIFE for All: The ToxFree LIFE for All project (LIFE22-GIE-HU-101114078) is an EU-funded initiative aimed at protecting citizens from hazardous chemical exposure through awareness, testing, and policy advocacy. Partners include VKI (Austria), Arnika (Czechia), dTest (Czechia), TVE (Hungary), and ZPS (Slovenia).
Funded by the EU Life Programme (LIFE22-GIE-HU-ToxFree LIFE for All, 101114078) and the Ministry of Environment of the Czech Republic. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or other donors. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

I blame social media. We have moved from shared media and expertise presented to us (including it’s faults) to listening the loudest and most obnoxious voices in the echo chamber of your choice.

We really do need social media regulation; instead of them being dopamine engines to fuel advertising there needs to be some semblance of control and exposing people to more than their chosen echo chamber or preferred content. It’ll be difficult to do, but doing nothing is patently leading to the breakdown of our societies all just to line the pockets of American tech billionaires and shareholders.

All OSes are a collection of lots of different software that work together to run your system.

For Linux distros, that includes kernel packages (the core of the OS), but also a huge range of software to make the desktop work, apps you run (office software etc) and more. They are all separate projects, constantly working on and releasing updates at their own paces. There are new software releases all the time for all sorts of things.

If you install a Linux point release Distro, like Ubuntu 22.04, you get the OS and a snapshot of lots of different software they have chosen to package. Then after install you will receive constant minor patches and security updates, but the main software doesn’t get major updates. For example, if Ubuntu uses say version 1.0 of your desktop (e.g. Gnome), and the Gnome project then releases 2.0, you won’t receive that. You’ll just receive patches and security fixes for KDE 1.0, but not big updates for new features or changes. This allows Ubuntu to keep 22.04 stable and working predictably for people, and means they don’t have to retest the whole OS to make sure it works and stays secure. All they have to do is test the security patches, make sure those work well with the existing OS and then release that to users.

But overtime Ubuntu 22.04 inevitably falls further behind all the major releases of the software they use, and people are missing out on more and more new features, more major bug fixes and more. The desktop environment for example might have released version 2.0 with new features, and the Office software may have released 2.0 with new features, and 100s of other components the same even in just 6 months. So the distro maintainers then build a whole new version of the OS with all the big changes they want to include, and release that as 22.10 in October 2022 - this is their next 6 monthly point release. People can chose to stay on 22.04 and just get security patches (so the OS is stable and safe) or decide to move their PC to 22.10 and get the newer software.

This is a constant process. Ubuntu is on a 6 monthly release cycle, and people can chose when they want to switch; they can do it every 6 months or less frequently if they want. Ubuntu and other distros also have LTS releases - Long Term Service releases - if you use that version, it is maintained for a few years as is, except for patches and security updates. Not everyone wants the latest version of software, they may just want something that they know works and they get on with using it.

Another model is rolling releases where the Linux distro constantly rolls out new updates for all the components. This can even be weekly, or near enough daily; for example OpenSuSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release. People might not update every day but the maintainers are constantly rolling out the latest versions of software (after some testing to make sure it works) so that end users can keep bang up to date on near enough everything. This is riskier than a point-release, and sometimes bugs get through that have to be undone, but it allows those who want cutting edge systems to have them. OpenSuSE also have a point release version Leap which updates once a year, and is also developing Slowroll which works on a monthly release cycle.

Windows actually does something very similar to the “Point Release” system for new features and major changes, although the updates are all closed source and under Microsofts control. Windows 11 has had major annual updates 21H2, 22H2, 23H2, 24H2, and now 25H2. One big difference though is that Windows updates are only Windows and Microsoft provided software; all the rest of the OS including drivers the user has to update (or sometimes Windows Update manages). On Linux, much more of the system is usually updated by the Distro, and the user generally updates a much smaller proportion themselves (e.g. maybe their Nvidia drivers, and their flatpaks).

The big point releases are not about increased security, they are instead more about getting feature releases out to users from lots of different projects. The security side is managed by constant patches and smaller bugfixes rolled out within each major version.

If you’re on a 6 monthly distro, you probably won’t notice big changes, you’ll more likely see lots of smaller changes. The really big changes (like KDE moving from 5.0 to 6.0) are less frequent - maybe every couple of years - while the smaller but still substantial changes are frequent - like 6.2 to 6.3. You will notice when you move from 5.0 to 6.0 but when you move from 6.2 to 6.3 you’ll have lots of smaller nice changes but not a major change to your desktop. So while it seems like little is changing, lots of small things are changing all the time.

I don’t think Flatpak “won”. Flatpak makes sense for it’s use, but AppImages also make sense for other uses, and even Snap has it’s place.

It just happens that Flatpak has become the more “popular” method on many desktop Linux set ups, as Flathub integrates well into software stores and the shared dependencies can be more efficient (if you use a lot of Flatpaks).

AppImages are great for self contained portable apps with minimal local dependencies needed, and especially if something is pretty much “feature complete”. They aren’t quite as convenient in terms of keeping them updated or integrating into desktop environments seamlessly (they can be if you visit AppImageHub and install the AppImageLauncher - doesn’t work for me thought - but even then they’re not really as well integrated into desktop environments as Flatpaks have become).

If you were to use lots of programmes, AppImages would potentially take up more space than the same apps in a Flatpak setup because AppImages do not share dependencies while Flatpaks can (if dependencies are the same version). But AppImages are also ultraportable and can run on an even broader range of distros and setups than Flatpaks. AppImages don’t require any installed tool locally to run, while Flatpaks need Flatpak installed. Both Flatpak and AppImage are bloaty compared to direct installs from a distros repos, but thats a trade off for their benefits (containerised, easily deployable across different distros etc).

Snap is proprietary particularly around snapd’s hardcoded dependence on Canonical servers despite being otherwise open source. So it’s not really been embraced by most distros outside the Ubuntu ecosystem, and even then there are Ubuntu derived distros that deliberately remove Snap. Snap does have its strengths in the server space (which Flatpak is not designed ofr), but Docker is the more popular system for this. Snap is still used “widely” in the sense that Ubuntu is widely used and Snap is its default, but outside that ecosystem Docker is much more extensively used (and probably on a lot of Ubuntu servers too). Snap in the desktop set up is also slower than Flatpak due to how it works, which adds to the perception they’re “worse”. Still Snap is convenient in the Ubuntu server space for deploying software.

Flatpak and AppImages aren’t going anywhere. Who knows with Snap; probably not going anywhere?

I’ve not had this issue around batteries? Is there specific hardware you can give as an example? For me laptop batteries last longer and I’ve replaced Windows on a random laptop, not researched anything hardware wise.

Note, Windows has a “trick” of defaulting to “balanced” mode on Laptop installs (even when plugged in I’ve found), which basically means your hardware is throttled unless you turn it off but this trick does make the battery seem to last for ages. You’re actually not using the rest of your hardware at full potential in this situation. Many users seem to be unaware of their power profile setting in Windows. Meanwhile, in my experience Linux installs tends to default to a performance power profile unless you specifically change it yourself (for example balanced or battery saver while unplugged etc) but again this may depend on your distro’s default settings.

In KDE the power profiles are in the Settings > Power Management section and in the task tray. Same will exist on Gnome, and I know it exists on XFCE as I’ve used it’s power profiles before too.