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Pondering upon (the illusion of) different distros and its consequences - Thoughts?
  • Devils advocate - you might be getting extra layer of testing, by the "derived" distro testing community.
    I mean if they do any, it may be more focussed on the combo of setup and software you prefer.
    So a small reduction in risk of bugs?

    I thnik ubuntu did have a pupose in 2002 or whenever - it was a step foward in ease of install, and out of the box experience, esp. for noobs.
    Now most have that, including stock debian. even arch comes with the idspispopd script these days.

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    Doesn't matter how you try to justify it...
  • Fought over since before most "commodities" existed , and maybe most religions -at many scales from the world, to countries, to a sopt by the river bank, or the comfy chair in the living room - including by various human and non-human species.
    Pursuit of economic and political power though control/acquisition of land just has so much glorious and colourful heritage; it's no mere pleb of a commodity .
    Something most everyone could use just a little bit more of.

    Not everyone could use more cars and tangerines.
    cars and tangerines have a generally more competetive market of sustitutes.
    Land doesn't really have substitues.

    If i could build a house/farm out of tangerines without any land needed, i'd get your point,

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    Trump campaign donation page crashes after guilty verdict
  • you right they're not meaningless.
    In the hands of the right demagogue they can be powerful tools for creating and extending stimgatisation and division - and undermining society and weakening the grown-up methods of resolving social stresses.

    Daryl Davis arguably did try to get along with the kkk.
    There might not be many like him and it might be a drop in the ocean, but at least it isn't no-one who wants to try to do the difficult thing.

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    TIL in the Carboniferous Period, no fungus existed to decompose trees. They just grew on top of each other up and up.
  • Trees breed by putting their babies into extremely resilient, heat and cold protected stasis pods that can go centuries without care and attention in the right conditions - like suviving an ice age or forest fire.

    Human babies are wimps by comparison - most of them would die after only a few days left outside at 0 degrees C.

    Humans probably will survive too - but how many?
    Elon + all this 3 mates.

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    VLC Player
  • good cross platforms too.
    I've used it from win, osx, linux, android.
    It just finds the DLNA and CIFS shares from my nas so naturally in the library - better than thunar.
    I just wish my "smart" TV had it.

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    VLC Player
  • Yeah, though previously you did have k-lite codec pack, and media player classic (i'm talking win 2k / xp days)

    VLC did just dominate though.

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    what OS should I use instead of xubuntu?
  • just go stock debian xfce, keep it simple.

    It's what my 70 year old mother is perfectly happy with for several years since I told her to drop lubuntu.

    install flatpack +flathub f you want even more app convenience.

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    Gamers aged 55+ account for almost a third of gamers now, and that share is on the rise.
  • how'd they get from 26% in one segment to "almost one third" headline?
    Who the fuck buys this drivel for £3,000

    Surely if someone is buying research, they dont want to literally buy hype.

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    Global sales of polluting SUVs hit record high in 2023, data shows | Half of all new cars are now SUVs, making them a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis, say experts
  • Is there a souce for that?
    It doesnt seem consistent with this one
    https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport

    but this is limited to CO2 emissins, so i'm wondering what type of emissions are being counted is there any data on that.

    I had a quick look at the "all GHG" data in EDGAR and that also seems to shows road transport quite a lot larger than shipping.
    But I'd need to spend a bit longer looking at the data to figure out if i'm using it correctly.

    Could it be based on Particulate matter emissions??
    PM emissions don't do much if anything to directly intensify climate change - not like GHGs

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    Innovation makes useful things smaller - overconsumption makes them bigger and more meaningless
  • yeah in europe (obviosly it varies a lot cross-country and rural/urban) but lots of places with high safety standards , and high emissions taxes. Still lots of small cars around .
    Mostly due to parking in big-dense-cities though probably.

    US does come out badly on deaths per billion pax-km: 8 ish vs 3-5 for most euro countries

    So on the face of it small cars dont sem to correlate - but these data look a bit hodge podge, so not sure to read too much into it without knowing the underlying sources.

    Other factors like the "stroad" thing might be an issue.
    And a lot of European municipalities give the elderly free public transport, and have ok bus service, so many doddery old coots have a viable option.

    I remember that southpark episode about senior drivers, with the jaws music . . .
    Maybe not as funny when you look at that US death rate. To quoe Father Maxi: "No god needs complex irony and subtle farcical twists that seem macabre to you and me, all that we can hope for is that god got his laughs . . ."

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    [SOLVED] in ubuntu's recovery mode logged in as me on tty1, how do I copy the output of dpkg -l and history to a usb stick?
  • in case it's not clear from the comments . and sorry for repeating if it is, but this >> thing is a really useful terminal thing to know in many cases.
    >>
    will trap and redirect terminal output.

    So consider any old commmand and its output:
    echo abc

    This invokes the echo command and echo outpts "abc" to terminal.

    If we add on >> we can catch and redirect the output:

     echo abc >> blah.txt
    
    

    Will capture the output "abc" into the file.

    Note this is an APPEND operation, so run it twice to the same output file and you'll add more and more output to new lines at the end of the same file.

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    [Solved] Possible to lock a folder? To prevent it from being deleted.
  • +1 to this.

    You can reduce likelihood of any known risk with a preventative measure, in this case the permissions and ownership structure. That is good.

    Backup does not reduce likelihood of risk.

    It does something more wide-reaching, it mitigates against the bad outcome of loss (from most causes).So it defends from many unknown risks as well as known ones, and unexpected failure of preventative measures. It sort of protects you from your own ignorance and complacency.

    Shit - i'm off to do some more work on backup.sh.

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    Linux is still not ready to replace Windows
  • thanks, that might actually explain it.
    I always thought those fees were tiny vs the price of the os.
    But i guess they're probably only charging dell a small amount on a pre install.

    They could still put a codec pack in the store though and have the user pay a few quid for it - or whatever.

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    Linux is still not ready to replace Windows
  • Sorry i wasn't clear about my point - I'm pretty sure I could get windows to play a dvd if i really wanted to.
    But all i needed to do was prove that the dvd drive wasnt broken, and a live linux mint usb did that in 3 extremely "complicated" minutes.

    My actual question was more like:
    " how come - if windows is so simple and so much easier to use and set up for normal users - she couldn't do something she'd been accustomed to doing for years."

    The windows software centre or whatever it is was not keen to offer VLC, didn't seem to mention it, but it was very keen to tell her she could buy the film from MS store or something affilliated.

    anyway, it's ok, i think the next dude has given some interesting info.

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