I wanted jeans that would last more than two months. Buying stuff that quotes its quality of cotton and weight of cloth just breaks at the seams.

Well stitched stuff tears.

Price is no guide.

I en ended up buying a brand and model that scored well in amateur testing

Consider a person who isn’t good at dog training throwing a shoe at their barking dog

A howling wolf isn’t too different

He’s at higher altitude than he appears

They won’t. There are bacteria that eat plastic. There is no path* to creating oil or coal again, biology is too good at breaking hydrocarbon precursors

*Except by deliberate human industry

I wouldn’t do that. I installed the software for them and set up their email and showed them how to do things. Linux was harder to set up back when I did that. Printers were a headache especially

But once set up a Linux box is no harder to use than a windows or apple one

Shouldn’t you commend them for their overkill?

Nothing recent, one magazine publisher from back when magazines were paper

“neither” you mean prison labour and Arby’s, right?

It’s not surprising you can remove it, but it seems contrary to teaching good habits to not install it by default as a basic utility. You don’t want to train people to log in as root

Actually I think the only way I can log in as root is sudo -i

Pretty sure root has /bin/false as its shell and it’s configured as no login my machines

Surely any user planning on using arch would want sudo. I mean if Ubuntu desktop didn’t come with sudo I’d understand but arch? Linux From Scratch was a thing when I was still playing with Linux (rather than just using it) and that also was very much an if you want it, install it, but that suggested sudo as the likely alternative was the user would log in as root

(But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)

You don’t run VLC as root because you don’t especially trust that build of VLC

We don’t run random stuff as root because it’s a stupid risk. We try to only take necessary risks. Risks that make things easier. Running random programs as root gains you nothing and causes annoyance in that you need to fix permissions on its configuration files if you want to run out as a user

There is nothing stopping you though if you want to set up a Linux machine where you log in as root, run a desktop environment as root, run apps as root. You’re unlikely to be taking an unreasonable risk as a home user.

I feel like he has a machine that someone set up for him, and he can’t escalate permissions, because he’s on a basic user account.

The normal way this works on a single user machine is:

1. You try to do something that is restricted to admin
2. Windows puts up a modal dialogue box asking if you want to do it as admin
3. You click yes
4. You do it as admin

But in that case he can’t have locked himself out of a file, he can only be locked out of things Microsoft think you shouldn’t muck with unless you know what you’re doing

I think we’ll see more office drones happy with Libre Office (perhaps even on Linux) to avoid the monthly fee for MS 365, not in the office, because few care about what the boss provides (except for the crap screens) but at home

Linux is especially good for normal boring people. It’s only bad for tech-adventurist idiots. It does email, web, documents just like windows. There’s no learning curve (though it isn’t great for users unwilling to log in, as their keyring won’t be unlocked by auto (or biometric) log-in, so they need to add their login password before they can get email or have their browser log into Reddit for them

Always know your escape characters! Usually \ works

(I wonder how many clients show that as double backslash)

Did I do something odd when I set up my windows 11 machine?

If Microsoft has something marked as admin access, it just presents me with a dialogue asking if I want to do whatever as admin

I mean it’s not like I have open hardware so there’s a whole lot of my machine I really have no practical access to, but everything this guy wants is there

Him saying he’s the owner suggests a private machine, so no corporate lockout from system components. Do computer shops set up admin accounts and lock their customers out as low-privileged users?

It’s the red and gold and circularity

As much as that extracted a snort from me, it’s almost true, at least in the sphere of printers that talk one of the few major print languages

Planes are supported by the gas that is part of Earth, it’s not a lot different to boats that are supported by Earth’s water

It’s pretty easy to draw a line at orbit at any altitude. If you are staying aloft by moving fast enough that a straight line in the planet’s gravity well forms a closed ellipse, or faster, that excludes jumping (and every other sorry of suborbital movement), flying, floating (on water or in air; nothing we have made our can imagine can float on air)

Orbit is different to everything not orbital in a more significant way than other modes are different to each other

I think you can even word your way around how flying is on Earth, in that you’re supported by the gaseous part of Earth, just like a boat is supported by the wet part of Earth

You cannot get out of Earth’s gravity. Gravity stretches out to the edge of the observable universe though it gets pretty weak outside the solar system