people's retirement money is now tied to Musky scams.

Now where have I seen this before...? Gosh, if only history had some warnings...

The thing to keep in mind, too, is that this isn't a console; it's a Linux computer with a focus upon gaming, so the comparison isn't exactly 1:1. You can only play games on a $1000 console. You can do much more with a $1000 computer that runs Linux and plays games.

Basically at my age I could really care less that I own these games anymore. I have my collection of the past and ill cherish it even more.

Great, so "fuck you, got mine?" Everybody else who wasn't born long enough ago to own physical games (or who can afford to pay inflated "collectible" prices) is just shit outta luck?

Apathy is the best outcome these ghouls could hope for. "I don't care if I own anything, and I'm content with that," is the rental economy the ultracapitalists so badly want.

It will get rejected by sensible communities, who care about power and connecting the center to their aquifer. Then it will get accepted by some tiny town in bumfuck nowhere who uses the same aquifer on the promise of tens of millions of dollars, more money than that town will probably see in decades, and a promise of temporary job creation.

Folk religions aren't necessarily controlling, for example, so I don't see why religions as a general concept need to be excluded.

We can get down to the details about certain varieties that promote power structures and prop up systemic inequalities, but religion ≠ authoritarian

Doesn't sell the information...so far!

It will always be powerful enough to be a gaming handheld, because it's an excellent emulation machine!

You know, there was a time when I kinda rooted for Windows. Windows 10 had come around and dealt with many of the sins of Win8, Edge was a competent browser, Cortana could be easily ignored, and Windows Defender was finally good at its job. Sure, the whole shift to have every app use WinUI was a bit clunky and piecemeal, but gradually modernizing from the older Win7 style made some sense.

Then Win 11 hit; it became obvious that WinUI "upgrades" were being used to hide key features from previous control panel stuff, those same control panels still exist with their older style alongside the changed controls, Cortana has been replaced with Copilot and shoved into everything, Microsoft collects even more "user metrics," and while Edge is still competent, it's affected by the previous two points pretty heavily.

Whatever Windows could have been, it did the predictable enshittification thing, and they deserve to lose users like me to the greener pastures of Linux.

You're still in the mindset of Microsoft/Apple. "The latest" doesn't mean software bloat. Hell, I just updated my packages last night, and the space they took up went down. Package updates typically bring improvements, and I'm always excited to see what optimizations they've added. Sometimes, major version changes (e.g. 5.4 to 6.0) bring big changes you might not want or need, but...

...nobody is forcing anything. You get to decide what gets upgraded and when. Arch/Debian isn't some overarching company dictating when updates happen and what gets updated. It's a community-driven project, mostly by hobbyists, and updates happen in a piecemeal fashion as individual package maintainers make improvements.

It sounds to me like you should try out both options in a VM. And if you're planning on Debian, be sure to give PikaOS a try, too.

Sweet. I'm set for life, and I'll get to be one of those devs that tells the bosses what I've decided to work on.

top of their fields

lmao as if they are some kind of great thinkers. Motherfucker, you just have an absurd amount of wealth and don't grasp that being born rich isn't the same as having intelligence or qualifications. I don't see any of y'all with Nobel Prizes, shut the fuck up.

The only thing y'all are experts in is ratfucking humanity.

You would run Windows software with Wine (Bottles is great for this). If you can find an older installer, you would (in theory) install it in a specific directory structured for Wine (called a wine prefix).

If software is too big or heavy, there's ways to manually install a specific package version on Arch, or you can tell pacman not to upgrade a package you have already installed by noting it should be ignored via a specific section of your pacman.conf

...then what have I been playing all this time on my Linux PC?

I would agree with that wisdom in general. I don't think any package manager would prefer a user piecemeal updates like that.

I'm not sure what you mean. There's a specific section in /etc/pacman.conf for ignoring specific or group/meta packages. You absolutely can ignore specific packages and run a typical pacman -Syu to update everything else just fine.

ETA: and you can upgrade a single package with pacman -Sy <package name>

Can confirm. I have an old 2015 laptop running Bazzite, and it still updates and runs like a champ (and though that's Fedora, it should be functionally identical to Arch or Debian for most things).

And the DoJ is trying to prevent xAI from having to go through a current lawsuit over their unlicensed gas turbines, because they power the data centers for Grok.

Brazen corruption and ineptitude from top to bottom.

Just more proof that there's two tiers of justice. "Wanna put solar panels on your roof? Better hope your HOA is cool with that. Fuck no, we won't buy back your excess electricity. Also, we're taking away the tax incentives and subsidies, and we hope you get turbocancer."

But we need Melon Husk to operate his unlicensed gas turbines, because we need Grok to tell us what to do in Iran. That's not a joke, btw, that's what the DoJ said.

The memorandum [stating that xAI should be exempt from this federal regulation and] filed by the Justice Department said that Grok is one of four AI models that support “mission-critical operations,” such as its recent strikes in Iran.

For arch I just have a snapper pacman hook to automatically create snapshots for my btrfs system so I can roll back if an update is just not working.

And if they go with CachyOS and choose Limine as the bootloader, it will be set up automatically! You can also install after the fact, as I did, but I agree that having hooks before and after package updates is very helpful and has come in handy a couple of times.

Yep. For example, Gnome migrated to Gitlab some time ago. Obviously it's not as ethical as Codeberg, but maybe it offers certain features that Codeberg doesn't (yet) have that they require. PikaOS is (was?) on Gitea.

For my part, I've left Github and will only do development on Codeberg. I'll still make pull requests to upstream projects that only exist on Github, but I have no control where those parent projects are hosted, and improving those projects is still a net benefit to everyone.