Agreed. I’ve learned most of what I know about computers by fixing broken stuff. Like you, my first serious daily driver was Manjaro. And after dealing with broken systems time and time again, I’m tired, boss. My daily driver for the last 2 years has been Mint and I love it to death for how stable and functional it is. But the lessons I learned along the way with other distros have been invaluable.

I’m a big fan of this one:

“Somebody that I used to Know” by Linkin Park

I’m sad to see that the original got taken down, but someone reuploaded it here.

The “small issue” you described is a logistical one that remains unsolved by bureaucrats, lawmakers, judges, or anyone else. “Bad actors ruin it for those who really need it” is the same “small issue” people use to argue against many services people genuinely need in order to survive.

“Deport them all and let God sort 'em out” is the course America has chosen, and it is the immoral course, as far as I am concerned.

we need more people processing immigration paperwork

Agreed, but it won’t happen, especially under this administration. They don’t want more immigrants, even “legal” ones. They say they are only against “illegal” immigrants, but let’s be real here. Lemme know when they sign into law some additional funding for hiring more bureaucrats to parse immigration paperwork. I won’t hold my breath.

When immigrants know the legal pathway is unreasonably slow and will not be improved in any way, there’s no incentive to do it the “legal” way.

I cannot, in good conscience, begrudge any family who illegally enters a country when they are fleeing violence or poverty in their own country (e.g.: they are from a country that is effectively run by drug cartels, or is in the midst of civil war).

“You need to fill out the appropriate paperwork before your family can be safe” is not an argument that will ever sway me. The bureaucracy takes too long in the vast majority of cases. People are scared and want a better life.

Some people illegally immigrate for less serious reasons, in which case sure, get 'em to fill out the proper forms. But I cannot support deporting people whose entire reason to illegally immigrate was for their safety and/or livelihood.

And please note that this position is wholly a moral one, not a legal one. I am a person with a moral compass, not a lawyer.

I follow Blender on Mastodon and, about a month ago, they started this campaign to see if they could double the amount of donations (from approximately 1% of users to 2% of users), and it’s been decently successful so far just by putting “Can you donate?” banners in more places (and posting memes about donating on their social media).

Here’s a short video they put out about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v7Uhoot4Qg

I think the funding campaign only lasts a month, so it’s probably about over (though donations are always accepted, this is just a brief social media campaign to increase development funds for FY2025).

Does the device show up if you open Gparted? Maybe it needs to be formatted. Though I guess it’d still show up with ‘lsusb’ even if it needed formatting.

I wanna say fwupd/lvfs manages firmware updates on Arch (and lots of other distros) these days.

You may be able to roll back the latest firmware update with fwupdmgr. What’s the output of fwupdmgr get-devices in your terminal? Also, what is the make/model of the ethernet port that is now on the fritz? You can search for it on the website here: https://fwupd.org/ in the “search for firmware” bar at the top, then you may be able to install the old version with fwupdmgr.

I’m not familiar with EndeavourOS, but I’ll ask a few questions to get the troubleshooting process started:

With the ethernet cable plugged in, can you access your local router config page (if you have one)? e.g.: 192.168.1.1. If not, what happens when you ping the router’s address in the terminal?

If you’re able to successfully ping/access your router, can you ping a well-known IP address such as 8.8.8.8 (google DNS) or 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare DNS)?

I think using Apple products involves paying money to a company who actively hurts you and limits your rights

Vendor lock-in and walled gardens aren’t an Apple-specific problem, though. I’m not saying Apple doesn’t have problems that they are particularly bad for, just that “paying money to a company who actively hurts you and limits your rights” isn’t unique enough to Apple for me to consider someone not “walking the walk” for buying their products. Most mainstream phone brands have locked bootloaders that limit your rights to affect the hardware you purchased, but I’m not going to suggest someone isn’t “walking the walk” with regard to their consumer rights for owning one.

I’m not much of an absolutist. One can only do so much. But Apple is putting unreasonable constraints on consumers, and it should not be tolerated.

I agree they’re putting unreasonable constraints on consumers. I do not agree with labelling those who do tolerate it as not caring about their rights or not “walking the walk” when everyone has different, if arbitrary, desires, goals, and limitations that are unique to them.

But if you care enough not to be ignorant and you still tolerate it, you might have a problem walking the walk rather than just talking the talk.

I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that people are only “walking the walk” if they take every single avenue possible to protect every single right they believe they have. I run Linux on every device I own, but the CPUs on those systems are still largely vulnerable to privacy violations from things like Intel Management Engine and other vectors caused by closed-source blobs in the firmware. Am I only “walking the walk” if I also go the extra mile to flash Coreboot or Libreboot to my devices?

If you believe in your right to privacy, you shouldn’t own a cell phone at all, should you? Even a dumb flip phone allows governments and other private entities with enough power or resources to monitor your location at all times.

I don’t think it has to be all-or-nothing when it comes to caring about your rights. I care about my rights, but might still have to deal with a Windows PC for select use cases.

I have friends who undoubtedly care about their rights and simultaneously own an iPhone. Does it make them a hypocrite? I don’t think so. I think it means that “caring about your rights” is situationally, and generally, really difficult to put into practice in 2024 and not everyone can go full RMS and completely forgo all cell phone use on principle.

Jokingly: “Linux is free if your time is worthless”

Though this tongue-in-cheek tagline takes the “free as in free beer” misinterpretation of the term “free software”, I’ve always found it a fun way to describe the time investment you’ll need to make if you’ve spent your whole life using Windows before making the switch.

I’m in a similar boat to you; whether the blobs constitute a security threat seems to still be up in the air. I read through the issue thread on github a few months back and it seemed the vast majority of the blobs were built by scripts contained in the repository, but some weren’t documented well, leading to uncertainty.

The comment by Long0x0 on Aug 05 lists a lot of the blob files.

There’s no way to srsly prevent a full-bloat browser from messing with its environment.

Can you elaborate on this? I’m curious as to what manner a browser like Firefox could be exploited in order to affect its environment outside of something like a sandbox escape.

You may be entitled to compensation! (although the deadline to submit claims passed in 2018)

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/if-you-used-to-run-linux-on-your-ps3-you-could-get-55-from-sony/

I loved the storms in BOTW. The rainy atmosphere and the mechanical effects were really well done.

In a similar vein, Majora’s Mask has a fantastic thunderstorm on day 2 of the cycle.

Overall I think this is well written. I agree with @poVoq@slrpnk.net that the section on picking an instance could be improved, since which instance one picks can be rather important, since federation/defederation is dictated by individual instances.

And a minor typo I noticed:

leaving Mastodon out to try

I assume that should be “out to dry”.

and connect to it with an iPad that has a Jellyfin client installed?

In my experience, you don’t even need the dedicated Jellyfin client. Just opening it up in a web browser works out of the box, so that’s potentially one less thing to download/install/manage for the clients.

That said, I’ve never tried to access Jellyfin from an iPad/iPhone/Mac so it might not be as seamless as my experiences on Android/Linux based devices. But I imagine they’d be fine; just test it out before you hit the road.

I always thought the messages left by other players in Dark Souls was such a cool mechanic.

They could be helpful, letting the player know to be wary of danger, or they could be completely disingenuous and trick the player into jumping off a cliff and dying.

I always labored over whether or not to take a leap of faith based on other players’ messages cause it was a toss-up whether they were being helpful or trolling, lol.