It will depend on the drivers that Audeze Maxwell supply? I can’t see any USB drivers for Linux beyond the dongle but they may exist.

However if they have a 3.5mm port then I’d use that. I have a Sony headset and while I don’t have any issues with Bluetooth, I do like to use 3.5mm analogue conenctions to save battery (even with noise cancelling on the battery lasts way longer off Bluetooth). I bought a long 3.5mm cable online and plug it into the front of my PC. No USB or Bluetooth faff, it just works, and at high quality.

However note that if you want the mic to work too it will depend on whether the headset’s 3.5mm jack is set up for both audio and mic (if it’s good quality it should be), plus you will need a 4pin 3.5mm plug and cable to pick up the mic from the headset and cable instead of the common 3pin audio only plug. At the other end if your pc has separate 3.5mm audio and mic jacks you will need an adaptor that splits the audio/mic into two cables to plug in to both jacks. If it’s a desktop there will be separate jacks around the back although sometimes the front jack may be a combined mic/audio jack, or you may also have one joint jack if it’s a laptop. If you do need to split the audio and mic then you can find these adaptors and also 4pin 3.5mm cables on ebay or amazon.

Edit: Just in case you’re not aware - an audio only 3.5mm cable has 2 coloured bands on the plug (splitting it into 3 metal rings or pins). An audio + mic 3.5mm cable has 3 coloured bands on the plug (splitting it into 4 metal rings or pins).

Edit 2: sorry look for 4 pole 3.5mm rather than 4 pin; you’ll see the better quality stuff when searching as pole is the correct term!

How familiar are you with Linux? If you’re new to it, pick something mainstream with lots of support and advice out there. I usually recommend Mint as a starter distro - it’s well supported, easy to use and doesn’t have the downsides of a distro like Ubuntu.

If you’re familiar with Linux then I’d recommend a point release distro and not a rolling release distro. Rolling release are cutting edge but that means much more opportunity for things to go wrong which isn’t a good thing to deal with if you’re new to Linux.

Beyond that, most distros dual boot well with Windows (although Windows is not well-designed and can occasionally break the bootloaders as others have said).

I’m on OpenSuSE and recommend it; it’s well designed with good tools in the form.of YaST. I’m personally not a fan of Fedora but I know a lot of people swear by it as a distro. Of the big distros I’d basically only really avoid Ubuntu because of how Snap is forced down people’s throats. I’m also personally not a fan of immutable distros due to the reliance on Flatpak and other downsides but your milage may vary.

Regardless, dual boot with Linux and Windows is a good solution. It’s how I got into Linux; my main PC still has a Win 10 partition which I don’t use but keep as a backup. My laptop and a living room.Media PC are pure Linux.

I’d say Win 11 in a VM is an alternative route for those few apps but I find windows is a bit laggy even on a decent PC. It’s perfectly usable - I’ve run Office and even windows at dual 4k without major issue, but there is a noticeable albeit small input lag and slowness in rendering the desktop that I found just annoying enough to put me off (even at 1080p single screen to be clear).

From reading it seems Win 11 does work fine if you pass through a discrete graphics card for it to use but that’s only doable if you have 2 GPUS. You might have that option if your laptop has a discrete graphics card as well as an integrated one. For me it reflects how bloated and poorly optimised windows is, but there are people who report getting Win 11 to work with high end games without issue although it takes some work. Meanwhile I can get Linux VMs on a Linux host to run at near native performance with ease.

There are free alternatives to Nitro Pro but if it’s an essential for you I’d try dual booting initially while.you test but don’t have to solely rely on VMs initially. If VMs do the job then wiping Windows will free up a lot of space and also stop it interfering in your Laptop set up.

There is nothing wrong with that PC but there is an opportunity cost to be aware of - upgrades.

A PC like that is static - you pay £600 and you get the PC, but after a few years if you’ve out grown it then you need to get a whole other PC. It’s the same with laptops.

However if you spend the £600 on a case, a motherboard, a cpu with a gpu, ram and storage you have a full starter PC. You can even save money by not paying for windows (built into the price of the mini PC) and get Linux for free. PCs are modular and any component can be upgraded and switched out at any time later.

So in a couple of years you may decide the PC is slowing down, or you’re out growing it, and you can swap in some more RAM or upgrade the CPU. Or you decide you can afford a dedicated graphics card, you can just buy the card and slot it in, and every £ goes into getting a great graphics card instead of starting again from scratch

Think of it like this: if you buy an all in one device you might spend £600 now and say another £600 in 3-5 years if you need to upgrade and fully replace it, and probably are still very limited in what you can get. A replacement will still have integrated graphics and still be behind cutting edge games, and just be a newer version of the same problem you have now. But with a full PC build you might spend £600 now for an OK PC and in 3-5years time you pay £600 just to add a great graphics card and have something way better than any mini PC. Or you spend £400 now and £200 in 2 years and £100 in 3 years and £500 in 4 years and gradually keep the PC how you want it without having to start from scratch. You end up with a decent PC now and gradually something powerful but without the upfront cost and without “wasting” money having to get a new device with a new motherboard, new cpu, new power supply, new RAM every time.You want an uplift .

It’s a crude example but the point is a full size PC can be expanded and switched up continously, and you can adapt it, and likely get something far better for the same money long term, while a fixed spec all-in-one device can serve a purpose for now but then needs total replacement when you outgrow it.

Building a full PC from scratch is easy - genuinely it’s plug and play, and only takes a bit of basic research to see what components are best to buy. There are loads of tutorials on how to put it together. Meanwhile your money goes much further over the longer term as you’re not having to buy a whole new PC everytime you need/want an upgrade - you can instead focus your money on the bits that need to change.

Even if you get a prebuilt tower PC now (ATX or Mini ATX) your money will go further AND you have something that you can upgrade and adapt. Although I think building from scratch is the best option as prebuilt Pcs are a false economy - they save money with cheaper components and you pay for labour on the build, when you can build it yourself for free and put every £ into better components.

Don’t be intimidated by building a PC - it’s nowhere near as difficult as it seems, and is an easy to obtain skill but worth learning as it’ll save you money, and allow you to fix and problem solve if you ever have problems in the future.

If.you have a PC now - even if it’s a pre build from a manufacturer - you can very likely open it up and start upgrading it now, and your money can go much further.

Brave is being forced to use Googles version of Manifest 3 meaning ad blockers and anti trackers are crippled in favour of advertisers and Googles ad business. Brave will be including 4 manifest 2 extensions in its backend but that’s it. They’re stuck because Google decided to screw over the entire Chrome based ecosystem.

Mozilla is implementing Manifest 3 differently so the original techniques for adblocking and privacy still work.

So the only choice is Librewolf. Sacrificing privacy and security for smoother animations and Web translation of pages is not worth it.

I find KDE works well with GTK3 and below, but GTK4 apps are set to ignore themes, which is a design decision on the GTK4 side. They invariably look completely odd and out of place as they often force the entire Gnome app UI as well as an unalterable theme.

And then Flatpaks also don’t generally follow system themes as they’re so sandboxed (although there are some work arounds, including making them consistent as flatpaks or allowing them access to the system theme folders to pick up themeing).

But anecdotally I’ve not had the level of title bar variability on KDE as that screenshot. Although admittedly I do tend to actively avoid Gnome apps as I don’t like the design philosophy.

Personally I’d be pissed off to be honest. It’s none of his business and this is crossing boundaries.

Being set up with random women you’ve never met and he himself likely barely knows is very unlikely to be successful. He’s also aggressive and rude about it. Why is he so angry you’re single?

This isn’t about the random date, this is about the way your dad treats you. You’re 22, not a child, it’s none of his business. How you react to this determines how he behaves in the future - if you don’t want him doing this again you need to tell him where to go.

It’d be interesting project but it seems overkill and over complicatiion when the simplest solution is dual booting and giving each OS complete access to the hardware. Hypervisors for all your systems would be a lot of configuration, and some constant overhead you can’t escape for potentially minimal convenience gain?

Are you hoping to run these OS at the same time and switch between them? If so I’m not sure the pain of the set up is worth it for a little less time switching between OS to switch task? If you’re hoping to run one task in one machine (like video editing) while gaming in another, it makes more sense but you’re still running a single i7 chip so it’ll still be a bottleneck even with all the GPUs and that RAM. Sure you can share out the cores but you won’t achieve the same performance of 1 chip and chip set dedicated to 1 machine that a server stack gives (and which Hypervisors can make good use of).

Also I’d question how good the performance you’d get on a desktop motherboard with multiple GPUs assigned to different tasks. It’s doubtful you’d hit data transfer bottlenecks but it’s still asking a lot of hardware not designed for that purpose I think?

If you intend to run the systems 1 at a time then you might as well dual boot and not be sharing system resources with an otherwise unneeded host for hypervisor software.

I think if you wanted to do this and run the machines in parallel then a server stack or enterprise level hardware probably would be better. I think it’s a case of “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should”? Unless it’s just a “for fun” project and you don’t mind the downsides? Then I can see the lure.

But if I were in your position and wanted the “best” solution I’d probably go for a dual boot with Linux and Windows. In Linux I’d run games natively in the host OS, and use Qemu to have a virtual machine for development (passing through one of the GPUs for AI work). The good thing in this set up is you can back-up your whole development machine hard drive and restore it easily if you make big changes to the host Linux. Windows I’d use for kernel anti cheat games and just boot into it when I wanted.

Personally I dual boot Linux and windows. I barely use windows now but in Linux I do use Qemu and have multiple virtual machines. I have a few test environments for Linux because I like to tinker, plus a docker server stack that I use to test before deploying to a separate homelab device. I do have a Win11 VM, barely used - it doesn’t have a discrete GPU and it’s sluggish. If you’re gaming I’d dual boot and give it access to the best GPU as and when you need it.

And if you want the best performance, triple boot. Storage is cheap and you could easily have separate drives for separate OS. I have an Nvme for Linux and another Nvme for Windows for example. You could easily have 2 separate discrete Linux installs and a Windows installs. In some ways it may be best as you’d separate Linux gaming from Linux working and reduce distractions.

Linux works great for gaming in my experience. I have a huge games library and I haven’t had many if any games that don’t run. There are certainly some games that need some tweaking to get working or optimisation to run well. I generally have those problems with older games though as my library includes some retro games (games for Windows 98 being the ones I have to tweak most).

Mods certainly do work - I’ve modded skyrim and rimworld extensively on Linux, as well as Oblivion, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, Minecraft and more without issue. Proprietary mod managers may not work but they’re often the poorer ones that are really just tools to advertise and market at you.

The vast majority of game mods work inside the game itself, so if the game runs on Linux the mods will work. The exception would be mods that need to run as a Windows program themselves separate to the game exe. Those can also be made to work, it’s just a bit more involved. Those kinds of mods are pretty rare in my experience though. Mods that act as game launchers etc work fine too, but just need some tweaking to ensure they launch instead of the game exe.

Most games mods can be manually installed and big games even have their own Linux native mod managers - like Minecraft custom launchers and Rimpy for Rimworld etc.

I do still have Windows on my PC in case I need it but haven’t used it for gaming in well over a year. I have a desktop so having a spare drive for windows is not a big deal to me but I’m tempted to wipe it as I don’t use it.

The one bit that people do have issues with is Anti cheat software for multiplayer games. That’s not an area of gaming I do, but I have seen reports of certain games using proprietary systems that lock out Linux. That’s a problem you can’t get round except by having Windows available on your system.If there is a specific game you want like that isn’t working on Linux.

Yeah the Act shows the wilful stupidity of politicians who pass legislation without understanding the areas they’re legislating on. It’s a nonsense act that tries to look like it is “protecting children” and is performative nonsense for MPs to pass moral judgement on things they don’t agree with.

But in practice it’s a security and privacy nightmare, it’s restricting and interfering in the freedom and rights of the majority of the population all to satisfy a stupid moral panic, and it makes the UK look like a backwards state.

A lot of it comes down to convention and convention is often set by those who did it first or whose work dominated a field. The whole mathematical notation system we use today is just a convention and is not the only one that exists, but is the one the world has decided to standardise to…

Rene Descartes is usually regarded at he originator of the current system. He used abc for constants and xyz for unknown variables amongst other conventions.

Sequential letter sets are easy to use as they are easily recognised, and convenient as a result, plus are generally accepted to have non specific or less specific meaning. For example:

a²+b²=c²

That formula is a much simpler concept to get round using sequential leffer than:

V² + G² = z²

Under the common system, when you don’t use sequential letters it also implies much more specific meaning to the individual letters, and that can introduce ambiguity and confusion.

When writing a proof there can be many many statements made and you’d quickly run out of letters if you didn’t have a convention for accepting abc are variables and can be reused.

We also do use symbols from other alphabet sets, and alpha/beta/gamma is commonly used trio. But in mathematical notation there are a huge range of constants and symbols now that many have been ascribed specific uses. Pi for example. So you risk bringing in ambiguity of meaning by moving away from the accepted conventions of current maths by using other sets.

Even e has specific meaning and can be ambiguous if you need to stretch to 5 variables. When working with e it’s not uncommon to use a different string of lwtters in the latin alphabet to avoid confusion if you need to use variables

And we don’t stop at 3; abcd etc is used.

This feels more like an anti-dad joke. The kind of joke that would tear a family apart. It’d cause arguments around the table about what a joke is, and probably ultimately end up in divorce for the parents and a 20 year schism between father and child that would only end when forced to reconnect after a family tragedy.

All of these can be run on any Linux distro. Dropbox is probably a better choice than Google Drive as Google drive doesn’t have an official Linux app (but you can get it working beyond just using it in a Web browser if its a must).

I’d go.with Linux Mint as it’s well supported but any point release distro will serve your needs well. For example Fedora KDD or OpenSuSE Leap, Debian etc. I wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu.

I personally generally recommend Mint as a good starting distro. It is widely used, which means lots of support readily found online. It also has some of the benefits of Ubuntu without having the Snap forced on users. It also generally works well on a wide range of systems including lower powered systems due to its selection of desktops.

Your laptop is decent and I’d personally be running a slick desktop on that, specifically KDE. But alot of that comes down to personal preferences, and Mint isn’t the best KDE desktop as it’s not a main desktop for it (although it is available).

However once you get to grips with the basics of Linux I think other distros offer better more focused benefits for different user groups. There are lots of choices such as Gaming focused distros, rolling release vs point release distros, slow long term projects like Debian vs bleeding edge focused projects, immutable systems etc.

I personally use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed because it’s cutting edge, but well tested prior to updates, with a good set of system tools in YaST, and decently ready for gaming and desktop use. I also like that it is European. But that may not be a good fit for your specific use case. Leap, the OpenSuSE point release distro would be better - a nice KDE desktop with a reliable release schedule and a focus on stability over cutting edge.

That’s not entirely true. Snap is a good reason to avoid Ubuntu as you’re not given the choice whether day to day apps like Firefox are a native app or snap app. You can only have snap versions. The lack of choice in having a slower less efficient version of apps forced on users without official alternatives is a good enough reason for people to recommend avoiding Ubuntu.

That is regardless of all the commercial and proprietary concerns people have.

That does not apply to Ubuntu based system like Mint where users are given choices and still benefit from other aspects of the Ubuntu ecosystem.

That link is for Piefed.world; run by the same team that run Lemmy.world

There are other piefed servers which may have different email requirements. But the most likely reason Piefed.world requires real emails is to prevent bots making fake accounts and also reduce the risk of bad actors making numerous accounts to avoid bans. As it’s hard to get multiple real emails it makes it hard to make multiple anonymous accounts which is unfortunately a tactic of trolls.

You can of course create a dedicated “private” email account on an official service and use that to sign up if you’re worried about sharing your primary email account. A lot of people do this online to have a legitimate email but essentially in it’s own silo separate from other personal emails.

Yeah I totally understand that, I’ve played around with immutable distros inside virtual machines and they’re interesting. Also if you like tinkering, Linux is a great OS.

If you do go immutable have a play with KVM - Kernel Virtual Machines - they’re easy to set up and give near native speeds for guest virtual Linux machines (or decent performance for other OS like Windows) It’s a great way to play with Linux inside a sandbox while keeping your host clear; but also a very useful way to run custom software in a flexible Linux guest while on an immutable desktop. E.g. Create a Mint VM to run something that’d be a pain to set up on Silverblue.

Immutable desktop plus KVM guests might be the best of both worlds. Even if you don’t end up on immutable distro, KVM is cool tech that has really advanced in the last few years. It’s better and more powerful than VirtualBox imo, and I use it a lot even on my rolling release distro (I have a VM to run work Microsoft Office, plus a few Linux VMs for a torrent stack and just for tinkering).

So I’m a sceptic when it comes to immutable desktops. What you gain in stability you sacrifice in flexibility and control. If you want to use software outside of Flatpak and your distros repos, immutable can be very annoying to work around.

If you want more control and flexibility, a standard install with a Long Term Support distro will be fine. I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed; I wouldn’t recommend that as it’s a rolling distro but I would recommend OpenSuSE Leap the point release distro. It has good user tools in YaST, it’s secure and it’s reliable, and it has a sensible update schedule. It is also a decent distro for coding. It has multiple versions of Python available which I believe are configured to coexist well, deliberately to make coding and version control easier.

I’d avoid anything directly Ubuntu related due to the reliance on Snap. But Linux Mint is a good variant which has loads of support available online if you want to ease back into Linux. Make no mistake, although it’s user friendly, it’s a full distro and capable of being as powerful as you want.

If you really do want to go down the immutable route, then probably Fedora Silver blue and variants is the way to go at the moment. I second the Kaionite recommendation - KDE is great. It’s well established and popular in the space, so there will more support out there should issues arise (most commonly installing something not in the repos and not on Flatpak). Immutable distros from other big names aren’t really there yet in terms of the user base as far as I’m aware.

Clementine hasn’t been updated since 2016. The fork Strawberry is a safer bet; actively maintained.

Elisa is a modern music player from the KDE project. It’s quite slick but not always the most intuitive - some options are hidden away in menus to keep the main interface slick.

It definitely has Repeat One.

Otherwise Strawberry is probably the best bet. It’s not the slickest looking in terms of modern UI design but it’s rock solid and still actively maintained. It’s basically the continuation of Clementine (which is largely untouched since 2016) which itself was a continuation of Amarok.

I like Strawberry but I do find the UI a bit jarring in the modern era. It’s feature rich and stable though.

And yet we’ve had numerous terrorist attacks in the UK involving explosives. That is both northern Ireland related terrorism and Islamic terrorism.

We just had the 20th anniversary of the 7!7 bombings of the London underground where 3 separate suicide bombings detonated.

Such events are thankfully rare and very difficult to pull off, but unfortunately it only needs to happen once to be a “success” for terrorists. While the police and intelligence services have to stop every single potential attack to be successful.

Sadly I think OP is right. There will eventually be a successful terrorist attack involving drones. After which, attitudes to drones will harden.

It’s very difficult to get explosives and it’s very difficult for terrorists to get a explosive to a target. Unfortunately drones make the both potentially easier.