The “they have played us for absolute fools” line always gets me laughing, even when I don’t fully get the setup.

Default? I think the first thing I did once I settled down with my current setup was find a background of my own liking, not something curated. And it’s all mine; no one else has it.

For those that care, all zero of you, it’s a bunch of frames from a cool star field animation, timed to rotate to the next every few seconds or so. Because I could not find anything that would simply play a video as a background, I made something that worked. If that’s not Linux level, I don’t know what is.

One of my random Linux boot-up sounds is the WinXP boot theme.

When GIMP’s version 3 came out, it got a lot of great reviews. I can’t tell you what’s different or better, but in using it myself since then, it doesn’t “feel” as daunting. Very subjective, but definitely try it out again; it might work for you this time around.

Oh no…

“I’ll remember THAT, it’s such a trivial thing.”

WIndows will install it. Running it correctly… different story.

The message was not to land there. Clipper is doing a bunch of flybys (to minimize the time in Jupiter’s radiation belt and extend the life of the probe). We’re good.

I’ve used VLC in WIndows forever, but it started giving me glitchy behavior in Ubuntu. Tried to upgrade to see if it was an old version/Snap thing, got frustrated with it not working. So I went through all the lists of Linux players, tried most of them. I like Audacious. It’s not perfect, but it works well, and I can deal with some of the minor things that are more preferences than problems. That’s all I wanted.

Learned this from a work injury. Even waiting a few hours before you get stitches to pull the gap closer together will leave a scar, albeit a small one. The body doesn’t have time to wait on your slow ass; it’s repairing right away (once the bleeding stops).

It’s still a few years away, but so excited for the Europa Clipper to get to Jupiter.

Ha, I’m not on here. Wait, that’s probably a bad thing.

How is #6 only GIS and not also normal for many gaming rigs?

This is how the meme should be used.

They saw things. Terrible, horrible things.

It’s not necessarily garbage, but it sure isn’t curated either. Throwing everything into the blender and hoping the mechanism will usually spit out good info is a scientific spinning of the roulette wheel. Sometimes the odds are pretty good. Sometimes they’re horrible, and you should know better than to expect anything but.

But AI has become the shiniest hammer, and every damn thing is a nail now.

so 42.

The early ones were easier. The one I had needed to do some mess with a grounding screw and some other stuff that I forgot (there are websites dedicated to the procedure guidelines and which requires what), and like you say, it’s not going to be able to do much anyway. Such a contrast with throwing Kubuntu on an old MacBook, and 10 minutes later it was better than new.

It’s true that most people just want instant on functionality with no need for major changes beyond colors and backgrounds. Totally fine too, for many that’s all they need. But as a “power user”, which would mean anyone that needs more than a portable browser, I was very disappointed to find that’s all that ChromeOS is (twas a used one in the family). And then when I researched putting actual Linux on it so it could do more… good god they locked that shit down hard. Not even worth that rabbit hole. And that was the intent of Google.

It’s either saying it out loud, some inside joke that shouldn’t have been made public, or they don’t get the point of themes and morals of stories.

Trying, but things are pretty stuck here now.