I assume you are right. So then I ask myself, for my own occasional use, would a standalone version of Photoshop from 2015 cover my needs?

Yeah, I think it would!

I was always a much heavier user of Lightroom than Photoshop anyway. I still need to choose between the FOSS options there.

I picked up a great little test along the way: type the word ill or illegal followed by 100, using a capital I in illegal and mixing an upper case O and a zero in the number.

Ill10O

Can you clearly tell all these characters apart in your editor font?

I am all about Fira Code, myself

Eww. Maybe it’s not really true and Microsoft just wants to remind us that big corporate AI is so legit that all the software you use all day was “helped” by it.

But really for me the issue is the company, not the AI. If I read an article about AI generated code making it into the Linux kernel or some gnu/kde/etc utilities, I don’t think I would worry much because those changes will be reviewed by cranky old nerds who care about the functionality of the software first. I have no such confidence in Microsoft’s processes.

I have to assume that headline is written to be palatable to Trumper clicks or something.

Looked unbeatable on the economy? And I’m supposed to take the author seriously as an educated adult human who professionally writes words about important things? As far as I could gather from a glance at the article, him being “unbeatable” was that he promised to magically fix all economic woes and people believed him. Again. So that makes it a strong issue for the GOP if you are dead inside and trying to write the news like everything is normal.

I have been working for many years to find the right balance for me.

Currently, by day I am a software engineer, but in my off time I am basically a recreational farmer — as in keeper of animals, not gardening. Though, plants are often involved in service of the animals.

I live in suburbia and am pretty ideally located as far as local resources and infrastructure. So I brought a little bit of the wilderness to me. Currently spending a bunch of time on my koi pond.

Well you can do that today. Find a tree out in the middle of nowhere and sit under it without any electronic devices. Then you are oblivious to all that stuff.

There is much wisdom buried in what seems like a simple comment here.

Even if you aren’t in the middle of nowhere, you can find or create your oasis.

Every once in a while I will try something like degoogled chromium because hey it’s probably a bit faster or works in a few more places.

But then nope, right back to librewolf. It works on everything I need it to work on, and I use the browser all day. I use Linux at work so all the Microsoft suite like outlook, teams, and onenote are webpages.

Looking at it like a team sport is pretty silly, yeah, but I’m still willing to use Steam just the same. No billionaire or successful corporation is “my” people, but doing business with the ones that are decent to their customers seems fine.

Gaming generally involves paying money for proprietary software anyway, so that’s not a realm where the existence of any DRM is a showstopper for me personally. Any per-game DRM with heinous kernel-level shit such that it won’t run on Linux at all, that stuff is fine to just not exist in my world.

The performance of Jellyfin is so much better in my experience. That and the FOSS benefits won me over quickly, and I have had a lifetime Plex pass for years.

The downside is that you have to do a little IT work if you want to share with family in an easy (for them) way and use https. For sure, it’s a thing, but for me as a non web dev it was worth it.

Now I can give family and friends a URL, login, password, and one or more app suggestions depending on their device and type of media. And all of them seem to have snappy performance while not showing my people ads or hitting them up for paid services.

From what I’ve watched & read, it’s usually depicted as the freeze plug melts and the liquid salt flows into multiple small holding tanks below it. That way the fuel mass will be physically separated, which helps stop fission on top of any other mitigations like lining the containers with neutron absorbers, etc.

Make Memes Analog Again!

Yeah it primes the minds of the conservative base to blindly accept that protesters = civilly disobedient = doing illegal stuff = criminal = bad other = subhuman barely worth your contempt.

I’ve said this before, but being an elected politician should be treated as a position of service, not of status and excess. If you want the office for the right reasons then having some downsides to taking the power should be no big deal.

colossal bureaucratic failure

Failure, feature, who’s to say?

Mint is Ubuntu with the icky proprietary Canonical stuff removed and with an extra layer of polish.

Mint Cinnamon even has a windows-like desktop/taskbar-like setup out of the box. I don’t know of any reason I might recommend somebody replace windows with Ubuntu rather than Mint.

Well, considering I’ve read complaints for years about how it’s legal for Congress to insider trade, and how we’ve all seen Trump get away with dozens of existing financial felony convictions plus having nuclear secrets laying around in the shitter, in very much doubt anything will happen regardless of how criminal it was.

But if it ends with more sycophants in his orbit behind bars, then I guess that’s still a positive.

Yeah, that’s the unfortunate truth. He can destroy lives, destroy our standing in the world, destroy our natural resources and climate, and betray to his heart’s content. But once he starts messing with the slope of rich people’s lines, that’s when I can see his own side get ready to remove him from office.

Headlines like this, man. On one hand, good, I always like to see people thinking clearly and basing their thoughts on, you know, observations of the world.

On the other hand, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? It took until April 2025 for them to fear that he’s not acting rationally but rather on ideology? And these are people who see themselves as fit to manage other people’s money!

They probably care less about whether it is true, and more about whether they can get their buy in before everybody else.

That’s such a nice thing about Linux and FOSS in general. The issues you run into are different than what you may be used to with Windows, but at least the system and its developers aren’t working against you.