Mordikan

California’s AB-1043 already passed, so we get to bitch about it now. Thanks for your support.

The most common I remember (I was like 5 at the time) was to go to the video rental store and rent a bunch of movies on VHS. You’d also rent a VHS player. You take the rental VHS player home and cable it to your existing VHS player. While one is playing the movie, the other is recording. Quick way to get a massive library of movies all named with sharpie markers and those little VHS stickers.

The real question is how many times you write over that movie and have to cross out what it was because you obviously can’t be bothered to go and buy more VHS tapes.

Qutebrowser

I ran into the same thing. Nix store got up to 57GB in size for me. I have lots of generations and upgrades ran which just continually fill up. Figured out you have to run garbage collection or use the optimizer (which takes a LONG time to run for me): https://nlewo.github.io/nixos-manual-sphinx/administration/cleaning-store.xml.html

I’ve used Arch as my daily for so many years now, it is a little tricky moving from imperative to declarative configuration. I’m treating my NixOS machine more as long term maintenance, so I’m not using the most bleeding edge packages. You can do that though by pointing to nixos-unstable.

I plan on using flakes for pinning and home-manager for writing ~/.config configurations, but I don’t think I really need it, more just to learn how. With home-manager, I could rebuild this machine from scratch (including individual application preferences/settings) just with the backed up configs. I can at any point rollback to any saved previous generation though, too, just by restarting the machine.

I’ve really been impressed with it though. To the point, I will probably be moving my Arch DIY router over and converting it to NixOS.

NixOS for fun:

powerManagement.enable = true;
services.logind.extraConfig = ''HandleLidSwitch=suspend'';

I remember the IRC channels where you would interact with channel bots to have them list what they had available. You’d make a selection, possibly end up in a queue, and then start downloading at 56k.

Honestly, none of it felt like or was treated as piracy. You were just sharing games (a physical thing you lent your friend). Even the game manual anti-piracy stuff was just treated like something you needed to work around. Your friends would just write down a few examples (like pg 43, line 26, word 12 = “punisher”) and just retry until that question was asked.

AI PR is absolutely correct: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/freebsd-cve-2026-4747-log-suggests-mythos-is-a-marketing-trick/

One user pointed out that Claude “wrote code to exploit a known CVE given to it” and did not “crack” FreeBSD.

So that’s not actually true with DNS exactly.

State actors can and have compelled ISPs to redirect DNS traffic. The most notable case I can remember is Turkey assuming control over Google’s anycast address (8.8.8.8) via BGP hijacking to enforce Twitter bans (that was in 2014).

If we are talking DoT/DoH, then BGP hijacking has a more limited impact as there is encryption involved there, but it still requires IP routing the same as anything else, so modifying BGP routes would be effective if the goal was to break non-compliant DNS providers.

To be fair, the move to Linux has nothing to do with user rights. That is strictly a move to become less reliant on the US as the US has become increasingly unstable.

They have more than one product. They provide anti-cheat as well as anti-tamper

“Rules for thee, not for me”

You could try Arch with dwm for the display manager. That will run on a Samsung 905S3G pretty decently well.

I would again fallback on my original statement that non-technical users don’t have issues with Linux so making it “easier to use” is not actually asking to make things simpler, its just another way of saying “make it Windows”.

One thing I think is a very viable use case for AI is parsing search engine results.

I’d never turn over decision making to AI, but having it churn through relevant data on setup or troubleshooting does make that process a bit easier. It’s still not perfect and just reading some suggestions it generates I just have to be like “yeah, that’s stupid, I’m not doing that”. I think if you learn a subject and then are just using AI to assist and not lead the way, you’d do fine.

The biggest problem we have right now is companies trying to make money off the hype and trying to push AI into some part of their company so they can say they are AI-positive to their shareholders. For every 1 good use case, there are probably 100 bad. But the reality is even a bad idea if implemented correctly (in terms of revenue - not actual function) can be successful and dig that hole a little bit deeper.

The problem with this idea is that you could basically summarize it as being “difficult as a new user to make advanced changes”.

Your average non-technical user does great on Linux. There’s nothing to unlearn from Windows. Its the Windows “power users” that crash and burn because they keep trying to force Windows logic into a non-Windows environment, get upset about it, complain it doesn’t work, and then leave.

I’m not sure what basic feature you’re referring to, but if you are installing dependencies than that is not a basic feature. That is additional software that probably maintains its own configuration. I would also argue that a non-technical user, much like they would in Windows, is not going to be trying to make changes like that anyway.

In the end, I think this is the real issue:

But even as a very experienced desktop computer user…

No, you are not a very experienced desktop computer user, you are an experienced Windows user. In Linux, you are a new user trying to leverage the non-applicable OS you came from and struggling because of that.

If I’m being completely honest, it sounds like you hit a problem and then just kinda gave up (I’m not trying to sound mean or anything - please don’t take it that way).

If I were in that situation I would probably drop to a terminal (ex. CTRL+ALT+3) and try to find what failed (journalctl). Especially if the screen just stayed black I would probably wonder what packages I just updated. I’m not going to remember, but it’s probably something graphical. Maybe I installed nvidia dkms packages and I have a mismatch or I decided to try out a different login manager and it happens to not support Wayland or something. Snapshots would be my last resort, not my first.

As far as NixOS, I love it. Its incredibly stable and the declarative language is really handy to write in. I’m not aware of any graphical store though (outside of maybe some github project). Its declarative meaning you write the configuration.nix file and import any secondary files into the config. And packages are installed declaratively:

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    pkgs.gnome-tweaks
    pkgs.gnome-control-center
    pkgs.gnome-terminal
}

I would say if you are wanting GUI that NixOS is probably not a great choice. I mean just to get installed package version, you’re going to have to do a one-liner (mine for example):

#!/bin/bash 
find /run/current-system/sw/bin/ -type l -exec readlink {} \; | sed -E 's|[^-]+-([^/]+)/.*|\1|g' | sort -ui

The problem with religious texts is they are so badly written that essentially anything you want to do is permissible. Look at a comment you made:

The basics argument is taking anything from anyone without their consent is morally wrong and haram.

Who did take from? You couldn’t have taken a game from a developer/publisher if its pirated. You took it from a bittorrent seeder. Did they provide consent? Yes, they were seeding it to you.

If I tell you a joke that I heard from someone who heard it from someone, etc. did I steal the joke? At what iteration of copying something does it stop being theft? Is it theft to begin with to make a copy?

So like a virtual KVM switch? Barrier was discontinued, but I think solutions like Synergy, Deskflow, or InputLeap still exist. There might be a better community suggested alternative to those as well.

A lot of flatpak stuff requires pieces of the Gnome environment, but that doesn’t mean its installing the Gnome DE to your machine if that’s what you mean.