DFX4509B

If this doesn’t help physical book sales, nothing will.

Because look who’s running it, that’s why. If Musk isn’t a full-blown Nazi, he’s at minimum a Nazi sympathizer, which is still really bad.

• ‘You can keep your old hardware, we won’t force you to upgrade.’
• ‘Your old GPU, yes, even your R9 Fury, still has a home here, don’t worry, we won’t leave you out in the cold unlike our competition.’

…Among other jabs at Windows in the spirit of the old Mac vs. PC ads, or to be more apt, in the spirit of Sega’s old ads picking on Nintendo in the '90s.

Also…

• ‘Linux does! What Windon’t.’

Void, and I really wanted to like it on account of not relying on systemd, but its package repos are too barren for me.

Like, Void’s repos are even more barren than EL’s stock repos before you add RPMFusion and EPEL among other third-party repos into it, and its AUR equivalent don’t help matters.

And Void’s musl port is even more limited than the glibc version because it doesn’t support multilib, so you can’t have Steam or WINE on Void musl, for example, while you could on the glibc version that supports multilib.

Canon’s recent paywalling behavior if other companies start copying them, would be a good argument for picking up film again if you don’t care about video capabilities and only need stills - due to film’s analog nature, it and the gear that uses it, is immune to paywalls/DRM, and you actually own hard copies of your shots to digitize at will to boot.

Also, don’t expect Kodachrome to ever be rebooted as its process, which was proprietary and thus died with that stock, was too complex to try and bring back in the present day (although some people have tried to reverse-engineer it to varying success before).

To add to this, the same advantages of being immune to paywalls/DRM and actually owning hard copies of your work that you can digitize at will also applies to, say, drawing using real materials vs. using a digital program - your paper and pencils/crayons/what-have-you will never be affected by paywalls/DRM as they’re analog in a sense as well, and you have a hard copy you can digitize at will.

This is just going to push people who aren’t locked into Windows, away from Windows, and Linux is making a pretty good argument for itself as a viable alternative atm, particularly for gaming.

Although another option would be to virtualize Windows on a Linux host too, that’s what I’m doing right now /w Win10 LTSC for general apps that aren’t entirely WINE-friendly, and then Win8.1 for some older games that aren’t entirely WINE-friendly, and the Win8.1 VM has my R9 270 being passed through to it over vfio-pci for graphics for that reason.

The Win10 VM is using VirtIO paravirtualized graphics because its intended use case doesn’t need anything more than basic acceleration as it was spun up mainly for running CUETools on for the things that app can’t do in Mono, eg. like transcoding FLAC images to Vorbis or Opus.

As for gaming beyond the few edge cases that don’t run well in WINE that are due to just being old code, I don’t play anything that has an anticheat so 99% of my gaming is easily doable in Proton.

It’s only on Linux though, for Windows, CUETools and CUERipper are some of the most powerful OSS tools for ripping CDs you can get.

Whipper is pretty much a text-based clone of EAC.

Good luck with that too, especially as GPL3 has a clause specifically forbidding tivoization built into it.

The type of thing RH is doing with the RHEL EULA in order to attempt to circumvent GPL2 protections? Yeah, that wouldn’t fly under GPL3.

The current administration is seemingly trying to kill the very concept of free speech and expression.

Good luck, especially if they try to ban people from ripping their CDs to FLAC as well, like, how would you even find out if someone is doing that, for instance?

Unless you somehow force a backdoor into rippers like Exact Audio Copy, CUERipper, or Whipper, the latter two being OSS, you can’t.

Even SCMS never phoned home to anyone simply because the capability to do that didn’t exist yet when that copy protection scheme was first implemented, and it only applied to dubbing a CD over to DAT, MD, or DCC over S/PDIF on consumer gear.

The Goanna browsers will run on pretty low-spec hardware, and there’s also h.264ify for sites like YT, unless Google blocked YT from loading on Goanna browsers.

That’s why I consider that tagline, ‘The Land of the Free,’ to be the failed punchline of a bad joke now. It hasn’t meant anything since before Reagan took office at least.

Not Just Bikes.

NJB’s praise of their infrastructure would have me sold on them if I could actually flee the US.

Puppy would fly on there, or even DSL 2024. Heck, both those distros would fly even on a Pentium 4 of all things.

PeerTube seems fine for a YT alternative (only because it’s pretty much either it or Odysee, that’s what happens when you have an effective monopoly on user-generated content like YT does, and PeerTube IMO needs to take off sooner rather than later given how ridiculous YT’s censorship has gotten lately), and then of course Lemmy (this platform) is looking really good so far as a Reddit alternative and I’ve only been on it for a day now, ditto for Pixelfed as an Instagram alternative.

And then of course there’s Mastodon for a Twitter/Facebook alternative.

Also, Matrix seems fine for a Discord alternative, but moderation is all over the map.

Assuming it’s not completely useless for this purpose, you could load FreeDOS on it and use it for playing older PC games.

MS-DOS 6.22 would be sub-optimal as it was designed with 486-era and older hardware in mind and since it doesn’t support FAT32 and only supports FAT16, you’re limited to 2GB partitions, while FreeDOS is actually designed with newer hardware like this in mind and supports FAT32 and thus larger drives.

Free speech and expression is one of the many previously-thought-to-be-inalienable rights that are in the current administration’s crosshairs. If I could flee this country for, say, the Netherlands, I’d do so in a heartbeat, unfortunately I can’t.

deleted by creator