BananaTrifleViolin

How small is your smallest device? BTRFS doesn’t have a minimum size, but practically probably 50-100mb is just about doable before even just setting things up get complex. Having said that though, it’s copy-on-write and has overhead as a result, so may not function well below 1gb.

ZFS meanwhile really won’t work well below probably 8gb. It’s also copy-on-write but with a lot more overhead due to how it works. It really works best on big drives and filesystems.

If your old storage is in the mb range, then really neither will help you achieve what you want.

BTRFS and ZFS do offer the same benefits as NTFS with regard to compression and speeding up some slower devices (due to lowering the actual read/writes needed to achieve the same result as the data is compressed into a smaller space and decompressed rapidly by the PC in memory), but NTFS can go be used on much smaller disk sizes due to how it works. BTRFS and ZFS are designed and optimised with other benefits in mind. And NTFS compression isn’t well supported in Linux.

Windows is in no way free. Every new Windows Laptop and PC comes with a license; when you pay for the PC part of that money goes directly to Microsoft.

Microsoft made upgrading to Windows 10 and 11 “free” for those on older hardware who already had paid for a license because they wanted to move people onto the latest versions and stop supporting the old versions. At the same time they’ve been harvesting and selling users data to make even more money.

They are not trying to “kill” Windows, they are trying to change it into a cloud based system too so that you do have to pay a subscription to use it. They want new PCs and Laptops to be essentially nothing more than thin terminals, using your hardware to support their cloud based system but not actually owning any of the software at all.

But they are less bothered about the absolute revenue Windows makes now, and more bothered about making it a walled garden they control and which up-sells you to all their other subscription services under Office, and Xbox.

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.

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…

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.

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’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.

Thanks for sharing this! This was new to me but makes modding Steam games so much easier.

A little more difficult for GOG games but not much; definitely much better than the manual approach.

At this rate we’ll need a Wine/Proton that runs on Windows to allow you to run Windows software.

I find it strange how in the US “moderate” involves frequently invoking Christian faith. Here in Europe that’d be seen as right wing conservative behaviour.

Data has value and this data is particularly valuable to Valve and its competitors. So Valve share the raw data which has gross numbers but they don’t share the useful data. The useful data is the processed data - the corrected and weighted data based on the other information Valve has about its users and install base. That way can weight this months survey responses to expected proportions of the whole user base and see actual user wide figures and trends.

What Valve shares is akin to a polling company sharing the raw data from the people who completed a polling survey. It’s relatively meaningless and even misleading until they correct the data to weight it to make it representative of the whole population.

So this month there were 1.15% fewer linux users in the survey pool, not 1.15% fewer linux users overall. They will correct the data to see an actual proportion of Linux users. For example: they have data on every use of Proton and every install of Linux versions of software; and how many times each user installs a game (occasional vs heavy users). They don’t share that but they can use that to help correct the data and get much more accurate picture - one they don’t share as it gives them a commercial advantage.

Christ Trump looks at death’s door in the photo.

That’s misrepresenting things. He’s said british planes have been in the air protecting british air bases and personnel. They UK has not been involved in the strikes on Iran.

Starmer’s rhetoric however is aggressive, blaming this entirely on Iran when the US and Israel have decided to attack Iran. I’m no fan of Iran’s regime, but I’m not a fan of countries unilaterally attacking other countries, and Starmer is being a hypocrite given he usually talks so much about “international law” but is not condemning Israel and US aggression.

So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.

As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It’d be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don’t believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it’s not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.

I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don’t benefit big US corporations.

And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn’t be going to Apple or Microsoft. You’d save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.

I prefer XFCE for lightweight uses (e.g. VM or raspberry Pi) and KDE for normal desktop use.

For me MATE isn’t quite light enough for lightweight when XFCE is there, and no where near attractive or pleasant enough for day-to-day use when RAM/CPU use isn’t a bottleneck. KDE is certainly more resource intense but up to 1gb of RAM and 1-3% CPU idle for a full featured, slick desktop environment is worth it.

I don’t really see the appeal of MATE unless you strongly want a GNOME 2 desktop. In which case, yes it makes sense. Although ironically you can make a very close but modern take on GNOME 2 with KDE with modern bells and whistles if you’re willing to customise KDE - it’s that flexible.

So I started by dual booting; it’s not a bad way of doing things although Windows likes to mess with bootloaders.

Optimal way is have physically separate hard drives/NVME cards, Windows on one, Linux on the other. The Linux bootloader should detect windows and point to it’s bootloader as a menu option without issue.

Make Linux the default OS and only switch to Windows when you really have to. I haven’t used my Windows install in like 1 year? I kept it for gaming but everything I want works in Linux. I even have a Windows VM in Linux for using Office if I need to for work (used it a few times in a year and beat having to restart into windows)

I’d wipe the windows drive but I just can’t be bothered right now.

I recommend a KDE distro to start as it’s very flexible - it can mimic windows and also be wildly different if you want. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but I’d recommend OpenSUSE Leap as a stabler point release distro when starting out. I know longer recommend Mint as I find Cinnamon tired and there is so much old and bad advice on tweaking or fixing issues on Mint that it is actually potentially detrimental to being secure and safe.

In fairness to Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird are platform agnostic. It’s not really for them to tell users what OS to use. It’d cause them more aggro than its worth from all the people who have differing opinions on what the best OS is or the best distro to use. It’s already a tightrope act keeping their users happy when they announce things like AI in the browser. I think they’re right to focus on their own areas of interest.

Most home users use a PC for internet browsing, watching videos, gaming and maybe a bit of basic word processing - all of which Linux does well and for free.

So yes absolutely, vast majority of people should stop wasting money paying for software licenses and go free.

Nah that’s it. Their logic is seemingly if you don’t give the money to Google it’s not contributing to economic growth.