“I can’t stop the heterocyclic declination!” (TNG: “Samaritan Snare”)

It’s nice that major news outlets are saying what we nerds have been screaming for the past two decades. Microsoft only shares a small portion of the blame for the recent outage (they could have built their OS better so software vendors don’t feel the need to use kernel modules, but the rest is on CrowdStrike) but we are too depenent on them.

If my American university has a system in place for students that don’t own Windows, I would not be surprised if yours has a better one :)

LibreOffice has opened every DOC(X) the school has sent me, albeit imperfectly, and all assignments are turned in as PDFs, which I usually make using Markdown and LaTeX. I have had to use Office 365 for collaboration, but only about twice a year, and that runs very smoothly in Firefox. On one occasion I tried to collaborate with CryptPad, but it didn’t work as well as I hoped.

Most computer labs at my uni run Windows 10, rarely 11, but a lot of the science labs run Linux. A surprising amount of the software required for classes has been open-source, too.

The most frustrating thing has been the lockdown browser used for some exams. My university library has computers I can borrow for exams, but yours might not, and they detect VMs, so you might have to dual boot for that.

Yeah, only thing I can think of is the few banking apps that don’t have web versions.

I was lucky enough to have all my banking and 2FA apps work perfectly on GrapheneOS. The only app that gave me a significant amount of trouble was iClicker, which my school uses for attendance. That was fixed by enabling Google Play location services, and there was a (fairly expensive) alternative anyway.

I did have to buy a new phone to use Graphene, because I got my previous one as part of a carrier’s cell plan, and it had a locked BIOS. Though I think the purchase was worth it, and just moving my SIM card from one device to another was enough to get it working.

From what I’ve heard uBlock Origin Lite only barely falls short of the ad-blocking coverage that regular uBO offers, so there will still be options for Chrome users after this happens, not to mention the multitude of alternative browsers and app stores for Android.

I still think that making Linux phones a viable alternative is very important, but it’s not significantly more important now than it was a month ago.

“Move Along Home” would work so much better as a Doctor Who episode. Has a kind of absurdity that is perfect for Who, but stands out in a bad way in Trek.

Niccolo Ve did a pretty comprehensive summary of all his problems recently: https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=mhqeuO9RKKk

He’s been on a right-wing, transphobic, anti-woke downward spiral for years now.

of course not!

The AtGames Genesis Flashback is more akin to the Ferengi “Genesis Device” from Lower Decks than the original Genesis Device.

I don’t have much PC building experience, but these specs seem sufficient. Only comment is that you might need to use a distro with a new-ish kernel and graphics stack, given the very recent CPU and GPU. So not Debian stable, but Fedora, Ubuntu, or any rolling release distro will be fine.

Handbrake will probably still work if you compile it from source, but it seems like upstream isn’t paying much attention to libdvdcss support.

The version in Debian’s repo still works for me, anyway.

Yeah, it’s fake, and as other commenters have pointed out, it’s also inaccurate to how the GPLv2 works. It was not meant to convince anyone.

I’ve never used these, but I’ve come across them while scrolling through F-Droid and they seem to fit this use case:

Kotatsu
Kinoko

I came across a bunch of those recently, which is how I came up with the idea for this, as a parody :)

Internet horror is disappointingly un-creative. I have no idea why the weakest works (sonic.exe, anti-piracy, kill screens) always end up becoming huge trends, or why so few people try to put a significant twist on said trends.

This sounds like the Wayland compositor is crashing. Some troubleshooting steps that might help to narrow down why:

• Make sure all system packages are up to date (sudo dnf upgrade)
• Next time this happens, run sudo dmesg and sudo journalctl -ab as soon as possible and post the last 30 lines or so of the output of each here. It might help explain the cause.
• If all attempts at solving the issue fail, from the gear menu on the login screen, select “GNOME on X11”. This session may lose some functionality, but is less likely to crash in the same way.

Tons of companies are shipping Linux without giving users access to the source code, it’s just that only one has the term “Tivoization” named after it.

Saru and Kelvin Spock would probably get along really well. Everyone else would be having heated arguments that I think would be amazing to witness, if not take part in.

I think I’d most like to sit between Mariner and Pike, though.

If you haven’t set up this laptop yet, then I’d suggest installing a server-oriented distro like Debian, AlmaLinux, or Ubuntu Server. Those have minimal install options that come without a desktop environment installed, as most servers do not need one. If you’d like to make the install harder for yourself, this might be a good excuse to give Arch Linux or Gentoo a try, as those have the option of a fully manual install. If you’d like, you can install a desktop environment afterwards using the package manager.

If you already have a Linux with a graphical desktop installed, you can configure the system not to automatically start it with sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target. (Do not do this on your main device!) You can re-enable it with sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target.

Regardless, you can then start a graphical session using startx, or whatever command is more appropriate for your desktop environment (gnome-session to start GNOME on Wayland, startplasma-wayland to start KDE Plasma), or by sudo systemctl starting your login screen manager (sddm, gdm, lightdm, etc).

I’m not averse to trying new foods, but I have strong aversions to certain foods that I have tried. If I have a bad experience with one food, I will not be willing to try it again for a very long time, possibly ever. And if I have a good experience with one food, and it is easily available to me, it will remain in regular rotation for a very long time.