That’s why they did it in sets of three. They could just give every user a blank text box for every option, but doing it this way makes it far easier to analyze the data in bulk.

Well, it literally is from the definition of the word… And also, if you’d ever been to North Dakota in the winter, you might even prefer words like “balmy”.

Fargo is actually in North Dakota. There are places in northern Minnesota that feel similar, but generally MN is significantly more forested and temperate than the biting cold and drifting snow on the plains of ND.

On the contrary, that’s why it’s a great state; the cold builds so much character!

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The meme is mostly a relic from the days when installing Arch was a very involved and mostly manual process – it wasn’t to the level of LFS, but you had to configure most of the base system, and it would leave you with a pretty bare-bones setup (no GUI by default, etc). So it was a pretty big hurdle and successfully installing it did give you a bit of nerd cred, though even then the “arch BTW” meme was tongue in cheek.

These days it’s just one of the most well-supported rolling release distros, and it’s got automated installers and GUI spins just like any popular distro. The two biggest assets are the AUR and the wiki.

NixOS does kind of feel like the spiritual successor in terms of effort to set up, and in that immutable OSes are kind of the next big thing, like rolling release was fairly unconventional when Arch was taking off.

That’s kind of overzealous. I would expect most desktop users to run kernel updates without being plugged into a UPS, this is functionally identical. It’s not like it’s an unrecoverable error, but yeah if you’re updating a critical system you should have redundancies in place.

I don’t mean it as a derogative, but there’s a certain point at which you have to either go whole hog on minimizing your digital footprint, or accept that some companies are gonna know more about you than you would maybe prefer. I think the Firefox defaults are much less onerous than, say, signing up for a loyalty program with any major retailer, and you can disable the few things that do any tracking.

OpenTTD is fantastic. The graphics might give new players pause, but if you like building networks or logistical puzzles, or just like trains, it’s still one of the best in the genre.

BAR is great – Total Annihilation was always one of my favorite games from childhood and BAR feels the most like it compared to other spiritual successors like SupCom/FA and other community projects. I actually tried to contribute a couple commits to the project but I don’t think they took them.

It’s not open source, but I do want to mention Barotrauma here – it’s not totally unheard of, but I don’t think many people realize that it’s a spiritual successor to SS13. Supports a lot less players, but still up to 12 or something on the bigger ships, and it manages to turn the absolute insanity of SS13 into a compelling survival game that still has plenty of goofiness.

Yeah it seems half the commenters missed OP’s clarifying comment and just think he started a kernel update with 2% battery life.

Yeah IMO there is nothing in vanilla Firefox to complain about that you can’t disable easily from the settings. You only need librewolf or the arkenfox user.js if you’re a privacy nut.

In a comment he clarified that the laptop was plugged in and there was a power failure. Regardless, chrooting in should be a fairly straightforward fix.

I don’t think lack of precaution was the issue here given that it was an unexpected power failure, but it is a fairly easy fix with a chroot.

I think there’s value in pushback against popular but problematic software. Some people just don’t realize that, for example, WhatsApp is owned entirely by Meta and is known to collaborate with law enforcement, which are two facts that entirely undermine its main selling point.

I’d rather gatekeep than lie to people, which is what you’re doing if you’re claiming that using Linux for gaming on your home PC doesn’t require a good amount of knowledge and a willingness to learn and fix things. If you get a steam deck or a pre built Linux gaming pc, yeah, just about anyone should be able to use those without issue. But any gamer looking to run non-steam games, or even steam games that aren’t well-supported, is going to run into edge cases and optimization issues, and not everyone wants to put in the time or effort to figure those out when Windows does most of it for you.

If you’re rebooting to fix an “fps issue”, you don’t understand what’s causing that issue. It doesn’t sound like you’re looking for advice, but to others scared off by this, this sounds a lot like a user who got in over their head and started mucking with things they shouldn’t have.

That’s why it’s marked as “center-left”. But it’s factual.

facepalm it’s not an “ad tracking component”, it’s a test of a new API that, if adopted, will let sites opt in to a much less invasive anonymized system for evaluating the effectiveness of their ads, instead of the current crazy amount of personal data they scrape. The data is anonymized in a double blind scheme, and it’s already way less data than every ad is grabbing.