I'll probably catch a lot of crap for this, but here it goes. I've read a lot of posts lately regarding conversions from Windows to Linux and I was surprised by an extremely common theme. So many of them were warned against using Ubuntu by their Linux-using friends, so they installed one of a number of other user-friendly distros such as Pop, Mint, Zorin, MX, etc. It'd mostly work great, but an issue with a driver or some weird bug would eventually bother them enough to hop to another distro. The new distro wouldn't have the issue that bothered them, but it'd have some other issue that would grow to annoy them. After hopping distros several times, they'd say they "finally broke down and installed Ubuntu and everything just worked". Others never made it that far and went back to Windows.

I have absolutely no loyalty to any distro and I don't care what anyone else uses either, but I can't help but wonder how many people gave up without ever installing Ubuntu because their Linux-using friends told them not to bother with it. Most of the hate against Ubuntu seems to revolve around ideological issues that the average beginner couldn't care less about. Perhaps being pushed into using snaps, systemd, and other such behavior may eventually push them away from Ubuntu, but by then they will probably be comfortable enough with Linux to fix the issues they'd encounter in other distros.

Anyway, I guess my point is that when we recommend distros to beginners, I think it would be best to put our ideological differences aside and recommend the distro with the highest chance of success for new users. And at the moment, that still appears to be Ubuntu. You may now proceed to call me an idiot for saying something positive about Ubuntu.

If this keeps up then how are my fellow nerds and I going to smugly declare we "only use Linux" with an air of superiority?

We'll start identifying by which distro we run. And if one distro starts to dominate, we'll identify by which DE we run. The vast choices Linux provides offers a nearly-infinite number of ways to satisfy our urge for tribalism.

Epic Games has suggested changing the SVID behavior to Intel Fail Safe in the BIOS settings of Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI motherboards

This seems very similar to a setting JayzTwoCents complained about over a month ago.

TLDW: Some motherboard manufacturers are setting BIOS defaults that push the hardware too far.

How about letting creators decide if they want their videos to be used to train AI instead of deciding across the board for them? Perhaps a robots.txt equivalent for AI which lets creators opt in.

I make business decisions

Everyone makes purchasing decisions, not just people "in business".

I don't spend my money on payback for a corporation's previous "sins" like cashing in when they have the best in market products

If that works well for you, then great. But the reputation of a corporate brand is important to many other people - it's why advertising is such a gargantuan industry - and it's why committing "sins" can have detrimental effects on a corporation for many years. Consumers don't easily forget about being mistreated and they have little recourse to punish corporations for their behavior today other than avoiding that company's products.

You can buy what they sell at the price they ask or not.

Or you can buy from a competitor now that there are other serious options in the market again, aka "voting with your wallet". And those votes can be payback for prior transgressions when Intel had no significant competitors and rested on their laurels. I fail to see how your statement refutes the OP - not buying products from a company can very much be a form of payback.

He's failed in every war aim

He's gained about 20% of Ukrainian territory so far. Sure it's far from the 100% that he sought, but in his mind 20% is far more than 0%. And all he had to do was trade the lives of hundreds of thousands of people that aren't him or anyone he cares about. And he just "won" about 87% of the popular vote for re-election. We can't defeat our enemies if we do not understand how they think and I don't think many of my fellow westerners understand how Putin thinks. In order to do that, we have to recognize that he's a true psychopath who has no problem throwing endless numbers of his own people to certain death just for the benefit of gaining a relatively modest amount of territory. Any rational person would consider the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to be a terrible loss but to him it's just a currency he uses to trade for land, and any gain whatsoever is a win despite the cost since he's not paying with his own currency (his life). So in his mind it's not the "win" he wanted but it's still very much a "win". And that doesn't even begin to cover the growing normalization of Russian aggression without direct western resistance, which will only further embolden him.

Is it like Proxmox?

We will use discarded human embryos and comply with both domestic and international rules

Do the parents of these "discarded embryos" know that their embryos are going to this Dr. Moreau wannabe? I mean do they actually know or is it shrouded in legalese and buried in the middle of page 47 of the Terms of Service?

I stopped watching the NFL this past year. I'm not sure if it's due to gambling, but in the past several years it kept feeling more like watching a WWE match than a genuine contest. I don't know if it's always been like that and only my perspective has changed or if there really is something to it, but the games seemed to have more of a backstory to them, the refs seemed to get a lot more involved in each subsequent postseason, and some teams seemed to be propped up as heroes while others portrayed as villians. Either way, my life hasn't changed much by abandoning the NFL, so I don't regret it for a second.

While some people truly like vinyl, my guess is that most people are buying it because it offers the largest and most detailed artwork and then proceed to listen to the digital versions of the songs. It's really tough to play vinyl on your phone or in your car.

These up-to-date sources [masteringthemix.com] beg [musicguymixing.com] to [veniamastering.studio] differ [weraveyou.com].

I was going to say the same thing, albeit without as many links. With that said, the best vinyl I've ever heard just barely approaches the levels of CDs but with all of the downsides of vinyl and almost no other perceptible benefits.

The loudness war began in the 90's [wikipedia.org] and was hitting its stride in the early 2000's when streaming was still in its infancy. Streaming may be contributing to the entrenchment of over-compression, but it had nothing to do with its genesis.

Please reread his post. He wasn't suggesting that streaming caused the loudness wars, but instead the opposite. Streaming sites got together and introduced a "loudness penalty" which normalizes the songs in a way that makes them sound even worse if you upload an overly-compressed track. Your first link mentions creating separate masters for streaming which is done almost exclusively to get your music as loud as possible without triggering the loudness penalty. I believe the loudness penalty is applied at levels lower than what CDs can typically handle, so streaming tracks may actually have more dynamic range than their CD siblings.

I'm not surprised at all that Apple modified the behavior of a command-line utility to do something their way, especially since they've had the mentality that they know better than their users for quite some time. However, it really bothers me that they didn't change the version number. Who knows how many poor bastards will be banging their heads against the wall trying to troubleshoot why curl on their Mac isn't acting like the same version of curl on their other devices or the same version that they built themselves. This is a pet peeve of mine: any time you change any code, you modify the version number. At best Apple was being lazy and at worst they're being deceptive, but neither is a good look.

And that is the expected behavior you will get with all standard calls to curl. But from the summary, when a user specifies the "--cacert" option to curl, the user is explicitly stating that they only want to trust the cert provided by that parameter.

Then everyone's new EULA is "we can do anything we want with your data".

They effectively already do whatever they want with your data by changing the terms later. At least requiring them to say it upfront would force them to be remotely honest about it.