Hmm, yeah, if it is the desktop environment that’s having issues, that could be hard to recover from. I’ve never had that happen, or even heard of it happening. Maybe try out Gnome? Or try reinstalling? it doesn’t sound like a normal problem, and if it’s not a driver issue it could be just reinstalling will be enough to get things working.

I can’t help you, but I gotta say that is a cool effect. Some game should do that intentionally for a character who’s on mushrooms.

Robertson wanted to be paid for his good design. Henry Ford didn’t want to pay, even if it was a tiny amount.

Ford was willing to use an inferior screw design that could cause production issues rather than pay a license to use the superior design. And, even though the patent expired a long time ago, these decisions have momentum.

I would bet that Torx is more popular than Robertson even though it’s a much newer design. Is it a better design? To me, Robertson seems to have the edge when it comes to simplicity, but Torx could be better for industrial applications because multiple lobes that have a surface perpendicular to the direction of torque probably gives it more control. Also, thanks to Ikea, I’d bet that hex-head bolts are incredibly common. They share most of the benefits of Robertson. I suspect they’re a little less efficient though because the closer you are to a circle shape, the less the faces of the screwdriver tip align with the direction of torque. I wonder if there are advantages of hex over square, since you see hex so much more often.

It wasn’t an intentional feature. But, when they realized it happened it became a feature that they thought was useful.

There are a lot of things like that, where something has a design quirk that people come to rely on. The quirk is so useful that people assume it was designed to work that way intentionally, but sometimes it was just coincidence.

Hmm, I don’t have any experience with USB speakers. I wonder if it’s using a standard driver or a custom one.

Snaps, and things like it, are really the only one I can blame on “Linux” (or at least Linux distributions).

I’ve had annoying headaches with drivers for 20+ years, but I expect that because Linux just doesn’t have enough users for most companies to bother making sure they have working drivers for Linux. I’ve been annoyed when some software or some tool or process isn’t as polished as the Windows version. But, mostly that’s something I got for free thanks to someone donating their time and effort, so I don’t want to complain about that.

But, I hate it when a major Linux distribution decides they’re going to ignore the standard way of doing things and only do things in their unique way. It often seems like one vendor / distributor is trying to build a walled garden and lock people in. It’s similarly annoying when vendors try to funnel people towards their “enterprise” version by making it harder to install certain apps that are “enterprisey”.

I get that it’s hard to make money selling Linux distributions. But, that’s what you signed up for. You don’t get to start behaving like Microsoft because it turns out to be hard to sell open source / free software.

Is it a bluetooth issue itself, or an issue with the drivers for that particular bluetooth hardware. Imperfect drivers has always been an issue under Linux, and will remain an issue as long as Windows has over 90% market share.

Is it your display driver that’s freezing? I’ve never had issues with one thing freezing the PC. The only time I’ve had it seem like that was the case was when it was the nVidia drivers that were having issues. But, that situation is much better than on Windows because I was able to SSH into the machine and everything seemed normal over an SSH connection. It meant I could shut things down gracefully and then eventually do a clean reboot. Meanwhile, the screen still looked as if the computer was locked up.

That’s weird. What kind of speakers do you have? Ye Olde Fashioned analog speakers tend to be hardwired for left and right. Of course, you can flip that in software, but unless you’ve touched that setting it should just work.

“pa-per”?

True Names (1981), Software (1982), Neuromancer (1984), Hardwired (1986), Wetware (1988)

Cyberpunk is lowlife and high tech. It’s completely dystopian. The early 1980s was the height of the Cold War with Reagan in power. People were not optimistic about the future in the 1980s, they were just hoping that it wouldn’t end in a nuclear war.

$11b worth of goods and services sounds like a lot, except that there are at least 1 million people locked up. Even if they don’t have to pay the prisoners for their labour, the cost of keeping them locked up is much, much higher than the value of any labour they perform.

I’d guess 99.9% of Android users have only ever used the Google Play store.

That reminds me of this awesome video

Apparently Dortmund did their own version more recently, and they did it with a whole stadium full of Dortmund supporters present.

Yes, but they can get away with a tiny amount of it

Not really. Developers have forgotten how to write small, efficient code. Everything is a web page these days, and so the bare minimum app is a web browser, and a web browser is huge.

I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.

I’m just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.

Even those contain RAM.

are there enough people like that to make the “having sex with children party” win the elections?

The GOP? It seems like it.

What’s wrong with that?

It depends on what they did. Maybe they want to make insulting the king legal, that might be a good thing. Maybe they want to make sex with children legal…

In that case, thank you for your service. I, for one, find overly perfumed people to be just as bad as people with bad BO. I’ve had to cross the street when I was outside because someone walking in front of me was leaving a cloud of perfume stench in her wake.