barrotes

I honestly think that's the contrary: it's the laziest choice possible when you want something to work immediately without thinking too much about it. Till like 7 years ago I made literally every script to do "personal" stuff in bash, because I wasn't quite good with any programming language and bash... was just there in my Linux machine, and I was already familiar with it because I was a long time Linux user. Sometimes you end up committing it on github and people start issuing feature requests, and at the beginning you are just happy that your work fits the need of other people and you don't want to rewrite it from scratch with a better programming language and end up over-scripting it. That's basically the story of a little program I made years ago. Now I don't log in on github anymore because I'm afraid people is still requesting new features...

The best Smart TV is the one that is just 24/24 HDMI connected to your old Linux laptop with a GUI tweaked to act as a Smart TV with an air mouse as remote.

Exactly my thoughts. To avoid out-of-regulation tweaking coudn't they just allow signed code to run? How can I be sure that this closed for, i.e. surveillance reasons? One can publish the source code and still prevent misuse afaik.

Yes our platform is developed on .NET Framework, adopts Microsoft SQL-server and it's deployed on IIS servers. These are old company choices related to legacy support for some customers that we (the "new" generation developers) are slowly pushing away with the help of system administrators. But till then I need to have a copy of the architecture on my laptop for debug/test. Of course things could be improved i.e. with a Windows Server VM into a linux PC, but with colleagues we try to keep stuff on our machines as much similar as possible to avoid conflicts.

I think that for the "casual user" distros (like Mint) the set up problem is not an issue if you can choose the PC before. For eventual friends that want Linux I always tell them to find a second-hand T-series ThinkPad. They have a fairly large second-hand market where you can buy one for even 200/300€, they are solid laptops (at least the old generations...), they fully support Linux. Sometimes someone arrives with an old entry level laptop that "doesn't work anymore" (translated: it suffers with Windows) and in those case it might happen that you need to to some tricks to make everything work, but these are usually just post-installation procedures, nothing to worry about after everything is set up.

I use it on my "corporate job" PC because our architecture is based on .NET and we are still forced to adopt it (at least until we'll definitely pass to .NET Core becoming a bit more agnostic). All I can say is that it's... overwhemingly slow... and it gets progressively slower while times goes on. Every time I install something new that I need it occupies more RAM and I'm forced to control it periodically opening the task manager and killing tray bar processes. People can say "well you could be more careful while installing stuff" but the point is that I am. Moreover the majority of times I need stuff I let the corporate sysadmins to install it on my machine. Options to avoid programs being invasive are hidden, you need to search everywhere to understand how to, let's say, avoid Microsoft Teams to load on OS boot. Someone should explain to me how it's possible that my forklift notebook is a T450 with a 9 years old 15W TDP i5 CPU with Arch Linux installed, and Firefox opens in 2 seconds, and my corporate PC is a fucking stove with a 45W i7 recent CPU and Firefox needs at least 10 seconds to open. And if I, a self-considered kind-of-technical dude, have issues in keeping a work computer clean (so without any game or "casual" program installed), imagine what happens to my less-skilled friend who likes games and needs cracked Photoshop: he will inexorably seek for help from me after things go progressively bad. It happened few months ago with a friend. I took his old T450 (another one) I made him buy to have a PC (now it's my second debian server). Now he has a second-hand MacBook and he's never been so happy. Can't be sure that MacOS actually works better because I avoid it too, but at least people are happy and (I assume) tries to solve their eventual problems alone.

I'm not up on gaming on Linux because I'm not a gamer (in last 12 months I played no more than 10 hours for that Stellantis game I found on Steam because it's natively compatible with Linux, and never tried emulation/whatever in last decade), so I guess you're right. But usually the need for advanced games is one of the (few) reasons that I consider enough to "allow" a friend to install Windows instead of going for MacOS. Anyway I'll try to catch up a bit about the state of the art of Linux gaming, just to give an alternative to anyone that seeks for any kind of help in that.

My parents (both over 80) daily use Linux Mint for a decade now. They don't know it, simply last time we bought them a PC I put it there, explained how to open the web browser, play solitaire/FreeCell/whatever other game they like, how to shut it down etc. I live in another city and I almost never had to adjust anything there in all these years, differently on what happened when they had windows (they unknowingly installed a lot of spyware and bloatware, I had to clean it up periodically).

Still, for me this is one of the few experiments that went well, probably because the only "complex" need they have is a web browser. Now if a friend (not a technical one) needs a new computer advice I tell him to buy a second-hand MacBook and enjoy. No one ever complained (in fact all compliment me for the choice). The vast majority of users is not like my parents, has some specific needs, like they need Microsoft Office, or Photoshop, or they play on PC and still don't want to face the challenges you need to overcome if you want to do everything with Linux. I would never use MacOS on my PC (not because it's not good, just because I'm a FOSS maniac), but it's the perfect operating system for casual users and even for many power users. The only rule I adopt for OS advice is "avoid Windows unless you are actually forced to use it (gaming, specific legacy programs etc)".

Not saying that $17 a month is a fair price, but we should not forget that "YouTube tier content" includes all the music. Its value is a solid 10$ a month imho.

This is simply beautiful

I was specifically thinking of France, and how you just have to ask for "une carafe d'eau", to get free water at restaurant. In most parts of Italy, especially in the south, you usually get free water at the bar, if you are ordering something else, and even if you don't order anything (just ask it kindly).

Maybe a dumb question, but what are the advantages of such products compared to just configuring a "plain" wireguard server i.e. on OpenBSD? I'm not a network expert and still it was pretty simple. Do these products offer more features? What kind of features?

Funny how everyone talks about the Chinese "great firewall" that blocks access towards some western platforms from China, and no one talks about "USA great firewall" that blocks Cuban citizen from acceding to a lot of services

He's referring to the actual website, which doesn't give you the option of reject profilation cookies (mandatory in Europe). I commented about another website posted here few days ago. It gets me mad too