Soleil (she/her ♀)

It’ll be compatible with 5 Gbps devices, but if you’re intentionally looking to restrict even 10 Gbps devices down to 5 Gbps for some reason, you might be able to find something in your BIOS that lets you do that, or you can get a USB 3.0 extension cable that’ll limit your speeds to 5 Gbps.

I moved to Pop!_OS entirely when I built my new system earlier this year (had already been using it on my non-gaming laptop for several years) and relegated Windows to an external SSD that has been essentially collecting dust — I think I’ve used it three or four times.

My experience isn’t the same as everyone’s, but I’m not in love with most multiplayer games, my work uses software that can be run within Wine/Bottles or a browser, and my preferred creative outlet is writing, which could also be done in a browser if I wasn’t such a picky bitch (I am, but Scrivener barely needs massaging to work under Wine and can even be made to look native thanks to using Qt).

Figma balls

I would argue that NixOS absolutely is the OS you get if your time is worthless, but not every distro is the same. I’d argue that if you need something that doesn’t have so many issues a stabler or easier to use distro (Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, and even Fedora or openSUSE) is going to be a better option than trying to bend specifically NixOS to do what you want.

I personally use a mix of Pop, Debian, and Fedora, not because they’re particularly powerful, but because they tend to be more straightforward for what I want to do than NixOS, Gentoo, or Arch. I don’t mind tinkering, but for my main machines I don’t want to tinker much.

Edit: I should clarify that there are plenty of reasonable uses of Windows and I don’t fault anyone for using it especially if their familiarity is keeping them from understanding Linux as well as they want to. But I also would make the case that there are a lot of distros out there.

What type of connection do you use for your monitor? My first thought is just that you might be using something that can’t do better than 60 Hz.

I think their joke was that Thinkpad Arch users (at least online) have a strong correlation with trans women

I’ve also had this issue with both of my SN30 Pro+ controllers but haven’t really found a reliable fix. Sometimes it works if I connect it undocked, and then plug the Deck into the dock, but that doesn’t always work. It’s a shame because it used to work great!

Ares as a project has a goal of accuracy at any cost, so tends to need a lot more resources than most other emulators. Before the tragic loss of Near, they wrote an absolutely exceptional article about the development of bsnes/higan and how much power it required for cycle-accuracy of SNES hardware, and it’s way more than you would think is feasibly necessary given that emulators like ZSNES (or Gens, as was my Sega emulator of choice at the time) ran under a crappy Celeron in the 90s.

I will say your CPU will likely throttle back well before it’ll shut down due to overheating. It might affect emulation performance some, but your PC shouldn’t shut down or anything.

This is my real problem with this (and also broadly pointing the finger to the “Unix philosophy” whenever a project like systemd or Wayland exists, ignoring that the large, complex, multifaceted, and monolithic Linux kernel itself flies in the face of that philosophy). Linux may have originally been built to be Unix-like but has become its own thing that shares a few similarities with Unix.

I forgot about Corel Linux and Lindows as well now that I think on it.

…Except Debian wasn’t even user-friendly when I used it two years after Ubuntu’s release. Red Hat Linux (not RHEL, which came later) was the only distro I’m aware of before Ubuntu that was more UX-focused.

Edit: I forgot about a few others — SUSE, Corel Linux, Lindows/Linspire, and others. Buuuuuuut most of those distros don’t exist anymore. I still stand by that Debian didn’t used to be as noob-friendly as it is these days.

I was a Twitter user and had been for a while; Bluesky replaced it for me and I rather like it. It feels very old-school Twitter, but is lacking some niceties such as videos and DMs.

Manjaro isn’t that fragile on its own. No, seriously, their goal is to make a stable version of Arch. No wait stop laughing —

The majority of issues with Manjaro itself (notwithstanding the team’s other issues) would be fixed by retiring the AUR as an official software source altogether. It simply isn’t a repository built with Manjaro’s slower burn in mind; it demands a bleeding edge system. If you don’t use the AUR, Manjaro is as stable as any other system. It just sucks for many other reasons, which is why I personally wouldn’t use it.

Oh hey, I was thinking about DSL recently and was bummed that it’d been discontinued for so long. It was my first Linux distro, downloaded over the course of I think a day and a half over rural dial-up. I moved to Ubuntu once I was able to get blazing fast 1.5 Mbps “broadband” but DSL still holds a special place in my heart. Going antiX-based was probably a good move to make it a bit more manageable, and while I downloaded it originally because it was 50MB I agree that it’s probably more realistic that people will download it with a connection much faster than dial-up, and the hard cap on a CD-sized image is I think a good compromise. It’s still, as the name says, damn small, at least by modern OS standards.

Every company you can buy a smartphone from is “another big company that will do anything to make money, no matter how much they’re already making.” This is an issue with capitalism, not just inherently Apple. Don’t fault people for using the tool that works best for what they’re doing.

So do cell phones and tablets

I don’t have much to say on this, other than that I appreciate how well-written this deep dive is and I appreciate you for writing it. People get so polarized with these viral math problems and it baffles me.

Ok look I’m not a huge Arch fan either (it’s great for learning the ins and outs of Linux but I’ve gotten to the point that stability is more important than anything to me) but the wiki is the most thorough Linux documentation you can get anywhere. It always, always has the answer, even if you don’t use Arch, lol.

Is it a Core i7 or a Core 2 series processor? 2007 would suggest the latter, and I would absolutely argue for either that you really should prefer something with Xfce or a similar lightweight desktop (maybe Cinnamon or MATE).

I’d probably recommend Linux Mint as a lightweight user-friendly distro, and I’d suggest any of the three available variants based on what you like the most aesthetically.

Additionally, if you haven’t opened them up for a while, pick up an inexpensive SSD for both of them if they don’t have them already. Modern OSes really expect an SSD over a spinning disk as the boot drive.

Hwhat’s this? An overabundance of bees in the workplace? My briefcase full of bees ought to put a stop to that!