With a bootloader signed using Microsoft keys, or a bootloader that needs a MOK to be set up to install third-party keys in the Secure Boot database?

I did the latter and it was a pretty annoying process that would scare away beginners—hence me saying a “workaround” was possible. I’m not using a common distro like Fedora or Ubuntu, though. Is setting it up less painful on those?

If I want to maintain my Windows computer, do I need a new computer?

You don’t need a new computer, but Microsoft’s influence in the industry made it really inconvenient to run any other operating system alongside Windows on the same PC.

When you start, you need to change some BIOS settings to be compatible with both Windows and Linux. More annoyingly, every time you switch between them you’ll have to change tbe Secure Boot option. Turn it off before booting into Linux and turn it back on before booting into Windows. There are workarounds to that, but they’re not beginner friendly.

You also can’t install both Windows and Linux on the same drive. Windows likes to “repair” itself from time to time, which ends up breaking the Linux boot loader.

If I was already looking for a laptop, do I just buy the cheapest one and reformat? Does Distro utilize Touch Screen?

ThinkPads have a good track record with Linux support.

Hardware with niche features (like multiple screens on a laptop) will be less likely to have drivers for those features on Linux.

Touch screens don’t have a standardized way of connecting to a computer, so support will vary and you’ll need to Google it to find out if some laptop model is supported. If it is, pick any distro that uses KDE Plasma or GNOME for its desktop environment and you’ll be fine. If you’re coming from Windows, I would recommend Plasma over GNOME.

Literally create all the service problems by normalizing launcher DRM

I hate DRM as much as the next person, but if Steam didn’t exist and digital downloads still became a thing, there would still be launcher DRM. Thanks to corporate greed, DRM is an inevitability in the industry.

Games distributed on DVD were packed with DRM fuckery, needing to be inside the computer to launch and using kernel-level drivers to enforce it. Before DVDs, you had games on floppy disks. Those came with physical codewheels that the player had to use to decode a password before it would start the game.

even their precious HL’s engine was IIRC a rewrite or fork of the one for Quake

IIRC, even the HL2 engine was just an improvement on the HL1 engine with a commercial physics engine bolted on top.

Much like Google used to, Valve doesn’t really do anything new. They take existing ideas and remove the rough edges to provide a more polished experience than what is already available.

To their credit, that’s exactly why they succeeded with most of their ventures. Gabe Newell understands consumers well enough to know that most people don’t care about anything other than user experience. Or, as he put it, “piracy is a service problem”.

Also they’ve been separated out of CDPR recently

Someone corrected me on this recently so I’m paying it forward.

CD Projekt owned GOG, not CDPR. CDPR is a separate company under CD Projekt and isn’t related to GOG other than both previously having the same owner.

If people in government were more tech literate and willing to stand by their morals by whistleblowing, they would create a torrent of the encrypted evidence and set up a dead man’s switch for the key.

Funny how it’s only a problem when using the Snap distribution.

It’s not a glitch bug, it’s a feature.

Foreword: I am not the person you replied to, and I also don’t agree with killing anybody.

That being said, I have to comment on this:

Killing them is just a waste of talent and experience.

I would argue they have neither. The people they employ are the ones with the talent and experience.

Take Elon Musk, for example. He makes big claims that sound plausible, but anybody who actually understands what he’s talking about knows that he’s only pretending to be knowledgeable in the subject. It’s the engineers and designers at Tesla that do all the hard work in bringing products to market, yet he gets the absurdly high pay package for doing little more than lying to consumers.

The decryption key for DVDs.

Yep. When talking to Russians who emigrated away from Russia, you will find plenty of stories just like your sister’s friend’s one.

What the tankies idolizing the country seem to not realize is that living there as a national is oppressive. Your standard of living depends on staying in the good graces of the government—good graces that can quickly be lost by appearing to go against them.

The United States government is working its way towards that at an astonishing pace, but saying Russia has more freedoms is a complete delusion.

Chinese, Russian and Iranian people don’t need us to fight for their ‘freedom’,

Oh look, yet another Tankie who thinks the grass would be greener where the lawn describes itself as communist.

How’s that “more freedom” been going for the Uyghur? Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?

Presumably, yes. The only thing Taco hears is himself.

I agree with your overall opinion, but I just don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:

… lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances …

The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.

I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.

I dislike centralization as much as the next person and have my issues with lemmy.ml being allowed to control anything outside its own instance, but I think the way you phrased it is misleading.

what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances

That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances, while the anti-feature is actually about them being the sole source of truth for what counts as a “popular” community.

They can censor and curate that list to their authoritarian-apologist desires—which is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.

Your source is 3 months old and doesn’t back up your claims.

what does “hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities” mean in practice.

It is an attempt to pre-populate new instances with some popular communities which is seen as a way to improve discoverability. I find the general concept of using “popularity” for that to be somewhat problematic, but the main issue I have with the actual implementation is that it uses lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that, and there is no way to change that*.

He is obsessed with windmills and thinks they are bad.

Donald Trump
Don a l d t r u m p

Sort the letters…
Don a d l m p r t u

Erase part of the l…
Don ad i mpr t u

Flip the ad by 180 degrees and mirror it…
Don qu i mpr t u

Squish the mpr…
Don qu i (*) t u

Unsquish it back…
Don qu i xo t u

Substitute sounds of excitement with boredom…
Don qu i xo t e
Don Quixote

How did we not see this before?
It all makes sense now.

“After a brief investigation over mimosas and a cheese platter, we have found credible evidence that Good was a member of the Alphabet Mafia. The agent was justified in his use of lethal force against a dangerous criminal. No charges will be filed.”

Would they even get that bonus as cash? The cynic in me thinks there’s a missing asterisk saying “in equivalent benefits”, where the benefits are just health insurance and something stupid like a gym membership or subsidizing part of the price when buying a new American™ car.

That would at least make it less of a slap in the face to the teachers who are actually trying to make the country a better place.

As of now, total is 800 k.