With Star Wars, they didn’t even do the main film franchise well. Episode 7 was okay, but 8 was such hot garbage I read up on why and found out there was no overarching plan for the trilogy, and different directors for each. No wonder they pulled a J.K. Rowling to completely change the rules of their own systems to meet the needs of the (bad) plot, and shit all over their own franchise. Skywalker might as well have been given a Super Time Turner to save the day in 8.

Disney Star Wars films are bad fan fiction, not canon.

I knew about the Debian > Ubuntu ordering, but I take it Debian is still often used as a desktop environment, which is what I thought.

Oh, that’s very good to know. That’s a big limitation. That might make moving to Linux at all DOA for me. I’d likely need to do everything for work in a VM, but then what’s the point?

Unfortunately, I’m tied to Excel 2024. I make heavy use of new functions, like SORT that aren’t available in any other desktop app, and the web client doesn’t allow for VBA scripting, so it’s not suitable, either.

oh, shit:

The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoyingf

You’re right. I have a crappy work-supplied Windows laptop that has exactly that installed. It would be nice not to need to boot into that when I need to work on the server from home, but it’s not a deal breaker.

No other specific non-web-based software is needed for work, aside from the aforementioned OneDrive and Excel 2024.

Edit: Your last paragraph is exactly what I’m asking about; I’m capable of doing slightly involved tinkering, but it would need to be something that I can Google Fu through each step of someone walking through most of the steps. I don’t know it at all well enough to go completely “off script” and just tinker with confidence.

It sounds like you’re suggesting that going for something mainstream and getting it to work for games is likely a better option, particularly for someone with limited Limits experience?

Good to know! I use it at work for a server; ngl, my non-Bazzite distro search hasn’t been extensive, except getting to the point that I think I don’t want anything Ubuntu-based.

Thanks for the reply!

A few thoughts:

I was thinking Win 10 EOL won’t matter if the VM has no Internet access. Linux would sync the files for me, so the Windows VM can just run Excel (and maybe Word, since I’m setting up Office 2024 anyway) using the files synced by abraunegg’s onedrive, so it doesn’t need internet access. (Assuming there’s a partition format that works well for both Windows and Linux that I can use for onedrive, which I assume is a “solved” problem by now—i remember this being hard 20 years ago.)

And his package apparently works in Fedora 42 with docker, which I assume should work fine.

But yeah; maybe what you’re suggesting makes more sense. And that VM definitely would need web access, then, so Win 10 is a non-starter. The database work I do is likely easier in Linux, but that’s likely easy enough to get data files out of the VM for just that work, I would expect.

Another question now comes to mind; I’m going to look this up now; how hard is it to copy/paste between Linux and a VM? Edit: As I’d hoped, this is also apparently a solved problem and sounds easy to configure.

If Firefox continues to work, does that mean that it can be used as a workaround, potentially? I guess it depends on how the DRM works, if something like running it in a Firefox tab would work.

And surely blocking Firefox would be a bad move for Google since that would clearly be using monopolistic power in one market to gain advantage in another, right?

I mean, I guess? But regardless of what comes next, we know that humanity is having a global impact on geology, so calling it the anthropocene seems reasonable. Even if we reverse anthropogenic climate change and use science and technology to live in a climate utopia, that’s still man-changed. Or if we cause our own extinction, then we were the cause of the next geological epoch. Regardless, “anthro” works.

I mean, sure… But a whole lot of people use Photoshop professionally without a license.

Krita is great, though. Their Android version is even fully featured, so you can use a tablet with a digitizer if you don’t have a drawing pad for your desktop.

So… Your honest stance is that “security personnel” who fired automatic weapons into defenseless, non-violent crowds should be memorialized because a handful of them were killed in the ensuing chaos?

How about this one: If someone is charging you with a machete, you should just stand still so you don’t accidentally hurt them defending yourself? Or are you saying that if you both die, you should both have your pictures and caskets side by side at the memorial service?

Any local “street vandals” taking notes? A Winnie the Pooh stuffie with a strategically ripped hole and a big free-standing ladder is all that would be needed…

Can we revert the special status of capital gains tax and treat it as income? Now that’s something I could support!

I was looking for someone to mention “opinionated”. I’ve been using computers since the 386 days, mostly on Windows, granted, but with some Linux tinkering here and there, and I have no clue what that means.

Still, maybe I should just jump into Bazzite regardless since gaming performance is a consideration for me.

All true. But the unfortunate political realities the Democrats are facing seem to be that voters just don’t care enough so it’s political suicide to take strong action against climate change.

If voters actually cared about climate change, then it would be a major part of the platform. But there’s a huge swath of the population that only cares insofar as it doesn’t inconvenience them, or who have been brainwashed into believing it’s a “Leftist Conspiracy” while completely missing that the QAnon memes they got their “facts” from is literally a conspiracy.

We’re fucked. Biden doesn’t have the political strength to take any political risks. We’re seeing the same in Canada, with Trudeau not having the political capital for anything that could lose ground to the Canadian Conservative Party (which is currently polling as over 99% likely to get a majority government if there’s no change in the next 1½ years).

I don’t know how we can de-radicalize the Christofascist Right, but we’re fucked until we figure it out.

Yes. I know some of those words.

Seriously, though, I’m not a programmer, but I picked up enough from context cues and background information that I think I got most of the big ideas. It’s fun to read about computer science.

I wonder where my life would have gone if I’d made a different career choice, away from CS.

I’d rather trust an auto company with decades of experience with safety and quality control to figure out batteries/electrical motors, than a software/battery company racing emerging tech to market to figure out cars. Even if I need to wait a few more years to shift to electric.

What a great article. Practical and poetic.

It would have been nice to have a connection made to Flow, since that’s what was being alluded to throughout, but maybe excluding Flow was deliberate in some way I’m missing?

Does this read like an LLM-written article to anyone else? It jumped from WW2 to 1919, and reported that the standard size is both 1½×3½ inches and 1⅝×3⅝ inches.

I have no confidence in the accuracy of anything in this article, but maybe that’s just me being skeptical of the effort that went into researching this text.

The idea is also that a compromised system will remains compromised after all storage drives are removed.