I don’t produce music, but for transcription, you might look at Rosegarden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosegarden

If you want nondestructive editing, my understanding is that you might want Ardour rather than Audacity. I personally find Ardour’s UI a bit confusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardour_(software)

Gotcha.

Luanti says that it requires a Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU or comparable. That’s significantly more powerful than Intel HD 2500:

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-UHD-Graphics-630-Desktop-Coffee-Lake-i3-vs-Intel-HD-2500-Desktop-105-GHz/m359294vsm7696

…though I agree that Luanti and Minecraft-type games in general are fun to try if you haven’t.

That being said, for anything in Ubuntu, I mean…there’s not much penalty to try it, aside from the download time. It’s free, so…shrugs

I mean, that’s not a problem if you’re playing it in Steam – will just transparently work, unless you have an ideological desire to run a Linux-native binary.

But I don’t know if the system requirements will work.

Lethal Company’s system requirements on Steam says that it requires a NVIDIA GForce GTX 1050.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-HD-2500-Desktop-105-GHz-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1050/m7696vs3650

The GTX 1050 is an order of magnitude more powerful than an Intel HD 2500.

Ah, gotcha. Well, so, for Metal Slug in particular, I’m pretty sure that there’s Metal Slug releases on Steam.

Yeah.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?term=metal+slug

If you’re wondering about a Steam game, you can check ProtonDB to see comments from Linux users as to any compatibility issues.

https://www.protondb.com/search?q=metal+slug

The Steam installer is in Ubuntu. So install that, run it, and stuff in Steam should be available.

For MAME, I can’t personally recommend a frontend. MAME iteself is already packaged in Ubuntu. You’re going to need the ROM files, which are floating around out there on the Internet (probably something like mslug.zip, mslug2.zip, etc, and there will probably be some dependent ROMs for the system in question. checks Probably called neogeo.zip, the system ROMs, since it’s a Neo-Geo game. On my system, the roms are stored in ~/.mame/roms (the tilde representing one’s home directory, if you’re not familiar with the convention).

RetroArch is also an “emulate many different types of hardware” emulator in Ubuntu, and you might consider it to be more-approachable; it can apparently also act as a frontend for MAME, though I haven’t used it as such.

For games kind of like Metal Slug…hmm. I haven’t really played much in that line recently, though they used to be popular in the 1990s. These recommendations are gonna be pretty old, but I guess side-view platformer shooters, like Contra. Bionic Commando. You could probably emulate these, and I’d guess that they’ve likely also seen Steam releases. I’m wildly out of date when it comes to current games in the genre, though. “Metroidvania” games might fit this too; they tend to be a more-slow-paced genre, with backtracking and traveling all around a large map while a character gains abilities and powers, but they do the side-view shooter thing, but they have the platforming and shooting aspect. Those have seen a lot more development in recent years.

Older Contra games:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1018020/Contra_Anniversary_Collection/

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1628%2C5379&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

There’s a list of Metroidvania 2D platformers on Steam sorted by user reviews; I’ve generally found Steam review score to be pretty accurate as to how much I like a game (though there are a few exceptions). I…actually own a copy of Rain World, though I haven’t played it, but that should run on your system and I’ve seen a lot of people praise it, and it’s highly-rated there. It is considered to be difficult (which arcade Metal Slug games aren’t, if you throw enough quarters at them).

I haven’t played Captain Commando or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, but both look like isometric beat-em-ups. I haven’t played anything there in a long time either; I think the last game in the genre I played was probably the arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, from something like the 1990s, when they were a popular genre in the arcades. Here’s a list of Steam beat-em-ups sorted by user review, though:

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=4158&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

That’ll mention the release year, and I’d guess that anything aside from new, 3D-perspective games would be fine.

In general, fast-paced, drop-in-and-play type games have a genre — albeit a very broad one, “Arcade”, and while my experience has been that it’s something of a grab-bag for a lot of different types of games.

Here’s a bunch of Steam “Arcade”-tagged games sorted by user reviews.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1773&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

On that list, of the games near the top, I can say that I enjoyed HoloCure and Vampire Survivors, which are in a fairly young genre of video games kicked off by Vampire Survivors — games where the main character keeps automatically-attacking and getting increasingly powerful while increasingly-powerful waves of enemies come at them. Geometry Arena. Nova Drift, which is kind of a modern take on Asteroids. Both of those have one guiding a ship around the screen dodging attacks and shooting back; they shouldn’t be particularly graphically-intensive, don’t require much from 3D hardware.

EDIT: You don’t mention them, but shmups were also popular in the arcade (maybe a little prior to the era with the games you mentioned). These have a constantly-vertically or horizontally-scrolling level with a little spaceship that shoots enormous amounts of firepower at enemies. In recent years, “bullet hell” shmups have become more-popular, which tend to have extremely large numbers of projectiles on the screen at once; not quite my cup of tea, but many people like those. Shmups have remained a genre that is very gentle in terms of hardware requirements. We have a dedicated shmups community on the Threadiverse, [email protected], so if you have specific interests, they might give better recommendations.

EDIT2: Nova Drift lists Intel HD 4000 as their minimum system requirement, so I might want to forego that or be prepared to return it if it doesn’t start; I don’t know if it’ll run. Intel HD 4000 looks like it supports DirectX 11.1, and Intel HD 2500 apparently does 10-point-something in terms of hardware functionality.

Do I have to use steam?

No, but it’s a relatively-plug-and-play way to get access to a lot of commercial games.

GOG.com is another alternative, and there are a few other stores.

There are also free games in your existing distro. They aren’t generally comparable to commercial games, but they’re there.

Which tittles do you recommend for integrated intel hd2500 graphics on linux

I mean…that’s pretty broad. Maybe if you could list some games that you like, or a genre at least?

I can list games that I like, but they might fall completely flat with other people.

From a performance standpoint, that’d be probably any 2D game and…let’s see. The HD 2500 was released in 2014, and wasn’t a stellar performer at that time, so probably any 3D game that was released prior to that date?

Like, you can probably look at any list of popular older games for ideas; doesn’t need to be Linux-specific.

searches

https://gamesreq.com/50-best-games-for-weak-pcs-2025-edition/

From that list, games that I’ve played that I enjoy are Half-Life 2, Hades, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, Balatro, Fallout: New Vegas, Far Cry 3, FTL: Faster Than Light, Bastion, Transistor, Don’t Starve, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Max Payne 2, Factorio, and Rimworld, all of which you can get on Steam and have worked fine for me on Linux, but…again, it really depends on what sort of games you like. There are games on there that are popular that didn’t particularly rub me the right way (e.g. Dota 2 is popular, but realistically should be played multiplayer, which I don’t want to do. Ori and the Blind Forest is pretty, but didn’t grab my personal interest). But…they might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Also can i get a recommendation about using mame emulators.

MAME is a particular emulator, which emulates many different types of hardware. There are a number of different frontends to it — setting up MAME manually takes a bit of work, though it’s how I’ve used it — but I’m not sure what you’re asking. If you just want recommendations for an emulator and not specifically MAME, then maybe list a system that you’d like to emulate (e.g. Super Nintendo, or whatever). If you want a frontend recommendation, I haven’t used other frontends myself, though you might get recommendations from others. If you want a recommendation as to games for older systems that you could run emulated in MAME, that’s another possibility, but again, I think I’d ask what sort of games you’ve enjoyed or a genre or something.

I don’t have a YouTube account, and have no interest in getting one. I hid shorts with this browser add-on:

https://github.com/Vulpelo/hide-youtube-shorts

QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/3’s multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2, which is carried over TCP, can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays if multiple streams are multiplexed on a TCP connection and any of the TCP packets on that connection are delayed or lost.

SCTP was going to do that too. It hasn’t seen much uptake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol

Features of SCTP include:

• Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminates unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.

Such an entrenched technology that would take decades to replace across the planet.

I don’t think that it’d really be necessary to alter the underlying protocol (well, you could make something a lot more elaborate with designated “receivers” and acks of transmissions, but I’m talking about something analogous to what humans already do, retransmitting in the event of collision). Humans do have to figure out whether someone’s transmitting, but the reason you don’t hear static on analog radios constantly is because they have a squelch feature, detect when there’s a transmission present; the radio is already looking at the signal sufficiently to do the necessary work.

Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in [email protected] when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don’t think that it’d be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.

However.

End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn’t the case for me for this at all or (b) there’s too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don’t want thrown at them. I think that there’s enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what’s covered that it’s probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren’t interested in or where their knowledge isn’t relevant.

Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like [email protected] still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like [email protected].

I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. As things stand, I tend to say “I’d like to have more traffic in the communities I’m in” than “there’s too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down”.

I bet VASAviation has it. They’re pretty good about having ATC recordings of anything in the news up.

searches

Nope, but it is on YouTube anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qVOMskSH4

EDIT: Though they do have a recent recording of ATC and pilots talking about pizza toppings, which is more-or-less in the same “it’s technically not necessary to have on the air and shouldn’t really be there, but it’s at a level where it’s not really causing a problem”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qVOMskSH4

I suspect that if the airwaves got too crowded, they’d transmit “break, break” until they got through and ask people to tamp it down.

EDIT2: Though…you can still get someone stepping on a transmission. That is, it’s not just inability to get through, but sometimes someone will transmit and not realize that someone else is transmitting. That’s caused some real problems in the past, including partially contributing to the Tenerife disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on a runway at Los Rodeos Airport (now Tenerife North–Ciudad de La Laguna Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife, killing 583 people and injuring 61 others in the deadliest accident in aviation history.[1][2][3][c]

The controller then immediately added, “Stand by for takeoff; I will call you”,[4] indicating that he had not intended the instruction to be interpreted as a takeoff clearance.[25]

A simultaneous radio call from the Pan Am crew caused mutual interference on the radio frequency, which was audible in the KLM cockpit as a three-second-long shrill sound (or heterodyne). This caused the KLM crew to miss the crucial latter portion of the tower’s response. The Pan Am crew’s transmission was “We’re still taxiing down the runway, Clipper 1736!” This message was also blocked by the interference and inaudible to the KLM crew. Either message, if heard in the KLM cockpit, would have alerted the crew to the situation and given them time to abort the takeoff attempt.[26]

I guess maybe radios could be made to be capable of detecting conflict, buffering a voice transmission, and then immediately transmitting it afterwards.

In astronomy, you first enjoy three or four years of confusing classes, impossible problem sets, and sneers from the faculty. Having endured that, you’re rewarded with an eight-hour written exam, with questions like: “How do you age-date meteorites using the elements Samarium and Neodymium?” If you survive, you win the great honor and pleasure of an oral exam by a panel of learned professors.

I remember it vividly. Across a table, five profs. I’m frightened, trying to look casual as sweat drips down my face. But I’m keeping afloat; I’ve managed to babble superficially, giving the illusion that I know something. Just a few more questions, I think, and they’ll set me free. Then the examiner over at the end of the table—the guy with the twisted little smile—starts sharpening his pencil with a penknife.

“I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?”

My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder of a Neanderthal contemplating fire. I force myself to say something—anything. “Scattered light,” I reply. “Uh, yeah, scattered sunlight.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Well, words came from somewhere, out of some deep instinct of self-preservation. I babbled about the spectrum of sunlight, the upper atmosphere, and how light interacts with molecules of air.

“Could you be more specific?”

I’m describing how air molecules have dipole moments, the wave-particle duality of light, scribbling equations on the blackboard, and…

“Could you be more specific?”

An hour later, I’m sweating hard. His simple question—a five-year-old’s question—has drawn together oscillator theory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, even quantum mechanics. Even in my miserable writhing, I admired the guy.

— The Cuckoo’s Egg

Paul Krugman pointed out that opaque approval processes are fertile ground for corruption.

https://people.com/jd-vance-heckled-says-pope-leo-should-be-careful-talking-theology-amid-donald-trump-conflict-11950188

While speaking at the event on Tuesday, April 14, Vance, 41, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, insisted that the first American pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

I don’t feel like the current cabinet would be strongly-positioned for a theological dispute with the Pope.

change the default SSH port

Any port scanner — take nmap — is going to turn this up. $ nmap -p0-65535 <hostname> takes a little longer than checking a single port, but what’s the threat that you’re worried about? Someone brute-forcing a password? That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer than that, and you use strong passwords that will make that wildly impractical, right? A zero-day remote exploit in OpenSSH’s sshd? If someone gets one of those, they probably aren’t going to waste it on you.

SSH is also trivial to fingerprint as a protocol. Here’s me running netcat to my local SSH instance:

$ nc localhost 22
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_10.0p2 Debian-7+deb13u2
^C
$

It ain’t rocket science to identify an SSH server.

I personally think that port-knocking isn’t a great idea and just adds hassle and brittleness to something, but I’d do a port-knocking setup before I tried running sshd on a nonstandard port.

If you honestly don’t trust SSH, then okay, fine, wrap it with a VPN or something with real security so there’s another layer (of course, that raises the issue of whether you trust the VPN software not to have remote exploits). Or have one host that you can reach and bounce from there to another host or something.

There are ways that I’d say are useful to try and secure an SSH instance. Use keys rather than passwords. Whitelist user accounts that can be connected to remotely.

But anyone who is likely to be a real risk to your system is going to be able to find an ssh server running on a nonstandard port.

I’m rather concerned about what I do when my Surface Pro 7 dies

Well, most of what I’ve seen expects memory prices to be coming down in 2028. So if it’s got two years of use in it, you’re probably good.

If you’re desperate for a laptop sooner and cheaper, you can get used laptops on eBay (well, maybe somewhere else if you’re not in the US; dunno what the used PC market is like globally).

How in the ever living fuck does this dude get to have any say on healthcare?

Trump gave him the spot in exchange for the guy dropping out and giving Trump his endorsement.

I have a really hard time believing that both the Windows installer and a Linux installer don’t work without there being at least one hardware problem present. But you did swap out most of the parts that I’d think are likely culprits.

Hmm.

When you were swapping parts on this thing, did you have the system either unplugged (preferably) or powered down at the PSU switch? Not just the motherboard’s power off? I remember once accidentally pulling a video card without cutting the actual PSU power, frying both the motherboard and (though I didn’t realize it at the time) the video card, then plugging the video card (correctly) into a new motherboard and frying that motherboard as well, so that even after I swapped out the video card, I still had problems. That is, a damaged part theoretically can damage other parts. Never heard of anyone else hitting something like that, but…

I could imagine that an underpowered PSU could maybe cause a variety of other failures, but you said that you replaced it, and I’m assuming that you checked that it was rated for the components that you had.

Manually underclock the memory in the BIOS as far as possible? Try running with just two sticks (your motherboard manual will tell you which slots to use if you have only two DIMMs)? If the memory’s marginal with your hardware, that will help. Not saying that that’s a fix, but it’d isolate the issue.

EDIT: Maybe vacuum the thing? I guess if you have metal shavings or a screw or something like that rolling around in your case shorting stuff, it could cause issues.

I mean, something clearly isn’t working right there, and I can’t think of many things that would cause that.

considers

The keyboard (and mouse?) do work in the BIOS, just not in the Windows installer? While plugged into the port in question? (I mean, it’s possible to disconnect the cable running from the USB header on the motherboard to the front panel.)

Have you tried, while the PC is on and the Windows installer is active, unplugging the keyboard and mouse and then re-plugging them back in? That’ll reset the device and let the installer handle them. It’s not completely impossible, I guess, that the BIOS talking to them could somehow put them in some kind of wonky state.

EDIT: If the keyboard and mouse aren’t working in the BIOS either, try them on someone else’s computer to rule them out as a source of trouble? I doubt that they are the problem, but might as well get the data point, just to be sure.

The U.S. paints a similarly bleak picture. Roughly 45 million Americans read below a fifth-grade level.

I assume that they actually mean adult Americans, as a considerable number of Americans haven’t gotten to fifth grade yet.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2026/

About 40 million.

I would guess that immigration is gonna be the major variable in US literacy levels, since you’re going to have a significant chunk of people learning English as a second language.

searches

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

U.S.-born adults make up two-thirds of adults with low levels of English literacy skills in the United States. However, the non-U.S. born are over-represented among such low-skilled adults. Non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34 percent of the population with low literacy skills, compared to 15 percent of the total population (figure 2).

White and Hispanic adults make up the largest percentage of U.S. adults with low levels of English literacy, 35 percent and 34 percent respectively (figure 3).

Yeah.