Squiddles

Some people learn that way, but most don’t. It’s usually better to start with a working environment and work on one thing at a time until you learn enough that you’re ready to dig down another layer. Start with little mysteries and learn the structure of things and how to troubleshoot before jumping in the deep end. Having a system that’s hopelessly broken and you don’t know why or how to fix it is just likely to turn people away from Linux entirely. People don’t win extra points for suffering needlessly.

The bigger problem when running Arch is that there’s a very high gap between “the bootloader makes the kernel run” and “functional desktop system”. The installation guide will get you to the first one. For someone who’s used to Windows, even as an IT pro, learning Arch is a firehose that’s hard to drink from.

Once you’ve pacstrap’d and set up a user you reboot and start your new OS. Except you have no internet because you didn’t know you had to install dhcpcd. Fine, install that–except your user isn’t in sudoers, so you have to figure out how to get back to being root to edit the sudoers file. With visudo. Ten minutes later you’ve figured out how to find and edit the right line. Another ten to get out of vi. Then once that’s sorted you’re sitting at a terminal you don’t know any commands for with no idea how to get to a graphical environment.

You look on your phone and find a recommendation for XFCE4 as a lightweight and simple DE. Great, install that. Try to launch it, and…a bunch of arcane errors. Another hour of troubleshooting and you learn that you missed xorg, which for some reason isn’t a dependency of XFCE4. O…kay. You don’t want to have to launch it every time you boot, so you go digging and find out you need a desktop manager. Takes some time, but you finally install one and enable the service in systemd, which you have to do manually for some reason.

Finally you get to a graphical environment, and…the fonts are all weird, and unicode symbols are just placeholders. Wait, fonts. You have to install fonts. More research, but you get there. Finally you launch a browser and are delighted to find something familiar. It all works the same. Great! Let’s watch a video to make sure playback is working, and…no sound.

Okay, more research, and turns out you missed pulseaudio. Install that, start the daemon aaaand…no audio. Fine, how do you check the audio level? Ah, there’s an XFCE4 plugin for pulseaudio. Find that, install it, put it on your panel, click it and…pavucontrol isn’t installed. Whatever that is. Okay, install it and try again. Great! So, for some reason the default audio level when you install is 0. Turn that up and you finally hear sound! Hours after starting the process.

And every. little. thing. is like that. For weeks. Especially with Nvidia, and especially if you make the mistake of following a recent guide that shunts you into a Wayland environment. Every time you need to do something there are 20 options, five of which are well-documented but deprecated, the first three you try don’t work for reasons you don’t understand, then you finally find something that works well enough. Rinse, repeat, for every little thing.

And this is coming from a complete Arch stan. I love Arch. It’s my only distro these days. I’m on Hyprland, my neovim is tricked out, everything is slick, responsive, just takes a couple keystrokes to accomplish anything I want to do, and I have everything set up exactly how I want it. It took a long time to get there, though, and I’ve been using Linux off and on for over 20 years, maining it for the last 10.

Screen sharing is fine, handled by Pipewire. OBS is adding (has added?) streaming through Pipewire too. And I’ve had no issues getting screenshots using grim, which isn’t tied to a specific compositor. Not everything is copacetic, but the things you’re talking about are mostly non-issues these days.

Great name, btw

Fair enough. I used XFCE for 15 years and decided to give Hyprland a go. Still some rough edges, and some shockingly basic things are still being figured out (should multiple windows from the same process be able to set different icons, and windows being able to set–or even hint–where they want to go), but overall I’ve had basically zero issues, and I’m enjoying it enough that I made the change permanent. Screen share and streaming work fine. I wouldn’t call the overall functionality mature, but it’s perfectly workable. Unless, you know…Nvidia. I’ve heard it’s gotten a bit better lately, but I wouldn’t have switched if I hadn’t gone AMD for my new GPU.

Yep, using Pipewire.

Other things helped–like drinking half a liter of water before going to bed so biology forces the issue–but the sunrise light was the key for me too. I set it to fade in over 10 minutes, ending 10 minutes before my alarm goes off. I used to set alarms in three minute increments and still take an hour to get up. Now I’m usually up with the first alarm, and much more alert.

I heard Japan described as being “stuck in the year 2000 since the 1980’s”. I think South Korea fits the original question better than Japan nowadays.

Loved this game! The Stanley Parable meets a cosmic horror visual novel with fun voice acting. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did, and I’m glad to hear that the devs have this perspective.

Definitely second Dyson Sphere Program! I’m not at all interested in the combat (it’s optional), but now that they have that completed they’ll be updating other features too. I’m hundreds of hours in and still come back to it.

I just ran a quick check and private games (whether installed or not) are still shared. Seems like a weird oversight.

Lots of possible uses for private games, beyond the obvious. Off the top of my head: when working on mods I’ll relaunch a game dozens of times and Steam will spam the in-game notification to my friends unless I sign out of chat. Now I can stay in chat and just make the game private until I’m done modding. Some games get left open a lot (like idle games) and I don’t want them cluttering my profile’s recent games. Sometimes I just want a dumb-fun game without advertising it to friends because I’m self-conscious about it. Some people have coworkers as friends on Steam so they can play socially, but some games may give away political/personal information that they would rather keep private (eg, LGBTQ+ focused games). I have young family members who are friends on Steam and I’d rather they don’t see certain games in my library.

I wish it was implemented like an access control list instead of just private or not-private, but being able to keep the games I want to play with others public and keep other games private is absolutely brilliant. Now I can take private mode off, which makes figuring out which game to play with friends much easier since they can see my library and the “what games do we both have” library filter will work.

I don’t even think you need one for eggs necessarily. I switched from PTFE nonstick to all metal (stainless/carbon steel and cast iron) a few years back. Eggs were no problem once I figured out heat control. I cook scrambled eggs and omelettes every week with no sticking.

I did eventually get a ceramic nonstick for making soft tofu in a sticky sauce. Definitely don’t try that in a stainless steel pan. It worked okay in the carbon steel wok, but was obnoxious to clean.

Yes, NIST now recommends against requiring periodic password changes in their official guidance document.

Broadly, I agree with what you’re saying. Totally just devil’s advocate-ing and speculating to provoke thought, so feel free to ignore. I wonder if the enormous number of games available plays into this. I can almost always dig around and find at least one 10/10 game from the last couple of years that I haven’t played which is already on sale for cheap. Comparing that to a 7/10 game that just came out at full price… I’d almost certainly enjoy the 7/10 game, but I’d spend less money and likely have more fun with the 10/10. The newness factor may not be enough to bump the 7/10 game to the top of the queue.

With so many great games available an 8/10 might actually feel like a logical minimum for a lot of people, which may influence the scale that reviewers use. If people tend to ignore games with 7- scores and a reviewer feels that a game is good enough that it deserves attention, they may be tempted to bump it up to 8/10 just to get it on radars.

Meanwhile, back in the day there wasn’t such a glut of games to choose from. And with better QoL standards, common UX principles, code samples, and tools/engines, games may legitimately just be better on average than they used to be, making it fiddly to try to retrofit review scores onto the same bell curve as older games. To reverse it, I can see how an 8/10 game released in 1995 might be scored significantly worse by modern reviewers for lack of QoL/UX features, controls, presentation style, etc, or even just be scored lower because in modern times it would lack the novelty it had at the time it was released.