I used to get very upset by this, but I’ve taken great solace in seeing how their power and influence are waning.

Every now and then I need to make a presentation, and LibreOffice Impress to Microsoft PowerPoint isn’t that good. I resort to Google Slides for now.

It may not be your thing, but personally I’ve had a lot of success with RevealJS. You just write HTML (or even Markdown) and it automatically builds your slides for you such that they run on any browser. You can make it as complicated or as simple as you like (I’ve done some wild stuff with CSS) and everything can be versioned in git and published to anywhere that supports static files.

Here’s a reasonably professional-looking presentation I occasionally give about Kubernetes if you’re interested.

Are you using GNOME? If so, I remember there being an extension for that.

You might like Krita a little more. It’s far more powerful than Paint, but its interface is very familiar.

I would be less concerned about the GPU driver and more about the entire distro. Like most distros, Ubuntu has a release cycle where versions of everything are deprecated over time in favour of newer ones, and to expect that the entire OS will be fully supported in 10 years may be asking a bit much (I’m not sure if even their LTS release goes that far).

On top of that, Ubuntu could go bankrupt or get bought out, or simply enshittify (more than it already has) in that time. Expecting Ubuntu specifically to be supported on your laptop in ten years is anyone’s guess.

However, what you can be reasonably sure of is that Linux will continue to support your system, GPU and all, for a very long time. I heard a kernel developer once say that due to the kernel’s modular design, there’s support in there for stuff just one or two people in the whole world use.

As someone else has already pointed out, FOSS support for hardware generally gets better over time, and a GTX video card is ubiquitous. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of those floating around on laptops, servers, and homelabs for a lot more than ten years.

You just might not be able to stick with Ubuntu. The older the hardware, the more you might have to lean toward the more technical distros that make it easy to customise the kernel or that favour old hardware. I like Gentoo for this job, but even Ubuntu or Debian have paths to do compile your own kernel for example.

This might be useful: https://ffmpeg.app/

You can also do this with New Pipe.

Sadly, no. That game is definitely keyboard-only. Though I have played successfully with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse in the past.

Some games just don’t lend themselves well to a controllers based input.

Don’t think too hard on it. Just use git. For example, I have a repo called handy-scripts that hosts all my dotfiles. I just check that out into ${HOME}/projects/handy-scipts and then symlink everything from where it’s expected to its corresponding place in the repo.

As you make modifications, remember to occasionally do a git pull --rebase && git commit -m WIP && git push so that all your devices are synced up.

While the Deck is capable of running some big AAA games, I personally find that it shines in the low-power, “chill” games that you can play for a while, put down, and come back to when you’ve got some more time.

I’m a big fan of RPGs, so my #1 recommendation is Sea of Stars. Dragon Quest: Builders is also good, along with it’s sequel, which is arguably better.

A good multiplayer game with endless hordes of monsters vs. your magic is The Spell Brigade.

You may not know this, but the Deck can also be plugged into a TV or monitor, and with the help of a USB-C hub, can support a keyboard and mouse too! If you go that route, then I can’t recommend Dyson Sphere Program enough. Ooh! and Timberborn! It’s both adorable and beautifully designed.

If you’re more of a 3rd-person shooter type, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is fan-fucking-tastic (my favourite series of all time) and it’s currently on sale for £5. There are 3 games in the series, and make sure you start with the first one! You don’t regret it.

Finally, note that you’re not bound to the Steam store if you don’t want to be. If you install the Heroic Launcher for example, you can get DRM-Free games from GOG for example. Sometimes you’ll find that games are available on both platforms, but cheaper on one of the other, and GOG games don’t come with controls on how many people can be playing it at the same time.

16: I’ve had more headaches getting multiple monitors to work in Windows than I ever have in Linux. Try connecting 2 monitors of wildly different resolutions in Windows and witness the abject failure of windows to handle that elegantly. Your mouse can slip off into a “void” where no monitor exists, and yet your content can just disappear to, dragging the mouse between monitors slips the cursor way off and to the right, screenshots are a mess, etc. etc.

17: I only play games in Linux and I never use emulators… unless it’s for things like SNES.

18: I don’t know what you’re getting at with this one. Software is way more shareable in Linux. You just say “it’s in your package manager” or “install this Flatpak”. Windows and Mac on the other hand have half-assed app stores and a culture of "just go to ${URL} and click “download, ok, ok, ok” which inevitably leads to stuff breaking and no discernible way to determine what failed 'cause your machine is full of rando installations.

19: This is fair, though most high-profile stuff like CrowdStrike works for Linux now.

20: I cannot begin to tell you how much Windows and Mac don’t work. Like, at all. Just today I spent an hour on a call with another developer stuck in Windows trying to get a JDBC driver to work. The constant ambiguous error messages, useless documentation directing you to "just go to ${RANDOM_SITE} and install some-cryptically-named-executable.msi that craps out with error messages about missing runtimes… the whole operating system is hot garbage and that’s before you factor in the missing keyboard shortcuts, flaky monitor support, creeping AI, and ads shooting into your eyeballs. The only way Windows “Just Works™” is if you redefine “works” entirely.

#3 is what does it for me. There are few things more enraging than something I own refusing to do what I’m instructing it to do.

I suspect it’s because they allowed users to select multiple, 'cause if you add all the personal Linuxes together, you get 61% on their own.

Regardless, it’s actually looking really good for Team Free Software.

I am terribly jealous. Congratulations on finding a company with a (somewhat) sensible IT policy.

“My Time at Portia”: it’s not exactly the best-coded game ive ever played (weird geometry and animation bugs, and some of the plots feel half-assed) but the world is big, and complicated, and there’s lots of crafting and relationships, and overall Good Vibes. I built a bus stop last night and married a nice girl who sells flowers. I recommend.

It’s currently on sale on GOG for €3.

This is nowhere near the average Debian update experience. Debian is favoured precisely for its stability and simplicity, so if youre getting stuff like this, it’s far from average.

Those errors look like file corruption. Maybe they were partially downloaded or written to a flakey disk, it’s hard to say. I’d also echo the other comment or that Kali (and honestly Debian) are not well suited for gaming due to the distro preference for Freely-licenced software and favouring stability vs quick releases.

It’s fine if you want to experiment and “swim against the current” to do a thing with a tool for which it’s not designed, but turn around and complain as if this is normal behaviour is either dishonest or outs you as someone who doesn’t have the experience required to make such a statement.

Multiple disks with many moving parts, containing 80TB of data on magnetic platters flying at high altitude where they’ll be subjected to far more physical impacts, radiation, and cosmic rays than at sea level.

Yeah, it’s a risk.

Here’s a really amazing Radiolab episode about bit flips!

I can’t speak to Lunduke, but dhh is quite the piece of shit himself.

The bit of information you’re missing is that du aggregates the size of all subfolders, so when you say du /, you’re saying: “how much stuff is in / and everything under it?”

If you’re sticking with du, then you’ll need to traverse your folders, working downward until you find the culprit folder:

$ du /*
(Note which folder looks the biggest)
$ du /home/*
(If /home looks the biggest)

… and so on.

The trouble with this method however is that * won’t include folders with a . in front, which is often the culprit: .cache, .local/share, etc. For that, you can do:

$ du /home/.*

Which should do the job I think.

If you’ve got a GUI though, things get a lot easier 'cause you have access to GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer which will draw you a fancy tree graph of your filesystem state all the way down to the smallest folder. It’s pretty handy.

I was a Windows user as a kid in the 80s & 90s doing pirate installs of 3.11 and later 95 for friends and family. I got into “computers” early and was pretty dedicated to the “Windows is the best!” camp from a young age. I had a friend who was a dedicated Mac user though, and she was bringing me around. The idea of a more-stable, virus-free desktop experience was pretty compelling.

That all changed when I went to school and had access to a proper “Mac lab” though. Those motherfuckers crashed multiple times an hour, and took the whole OS with them when they did it. What really got to me though was the little “DAAAAAAAAAAA!” noise it would make when you had to hard reboot it. It was as if it was celebrating its inadequacy and expected you to participate… every time it fucked you over and erased your work.

So yeah, Macs were out.

I hadn’t even heard of Linux in 2000 when I first discovered the GPL, which (for some reason) I conflated with GNOME. I guess I thought that GNOME was a new OS based on what I could only describe as communist licensing. I loved the idea, but was intimidated by the “ix” in the name. “Ix” meant “Unix” to me, and Unix was using Pine to check email, so not a real computer as far as I was concerned.

It wasn’t until 2000 that I joined a video game company called “Moshpit Entertainment” that I tried it. You see, the CEO, CTO, and majority of tech people at Moshpit were huge Linux nerds and they indoctrinated me into their cult. I started with SuSe (their favourite), then RedHat, then used Gentoo for 10 years before switching to Arch for another 10+.

TL;DR: Anticapitalism and FOSS cultists lead me into the light.