lol, sorry but in what world do you live in? NONE of the OS “just works”.

I’m sorry but this is such a trope. I watched someone using an up to date iOS phone. That thing is LOCKED down to no end, countless people claim that Apple are some kind of UX geniuses … well you look somebody trying to do anything as complex as watching a video on this and it’s a damn struggle.

Sorry for going on a rant here but the very concept is a lie. It’s like Windows being easier to use, it’s absolutely not BUT people have trained, at school (sigh) or at work, on how to use it. They somehow “forget” that they went through hours or even days of training and somehow they believe it feels “natural”. That’s entirely dishonest but why do I insist on this so much? Because it’s unfair to then compare Linux distributions to things that do not exist!

What “just works” but STILL is not perfect or flawless, is SteamOS on the SteamDeck not due to any “magic” from Valve but rather because :

• the hardware is very limited (basically selected to work well for it)
• the use case is very limited (start Steam, play)

and as soon as one start to tinker with SteamOS on SteamDeck by replacing part, adding USB-C devices, remote the r/w restriction on the OS, etc then again “just works” becomes “worked at some point”.

SteamDeck, so yes.

On desktop, SBCs, servers, etc Debian.

FWIW more than a decade ago someone post “Complete list of Minecraft clones!” on r/Minecraft and they were then more than 3 dozens, at least. Also a 2s DuckDuckGo search yields https://github.com/OpenCraft-Studios/OpenCraft namely an open source alternative

So… regardless of one’s opinion on it being piracy or not I’m wondering WHY even do so. WHY even “pirate” (or not) something that is basically a 1st year developer student weekend program. It’s really not that complex. It can be really fun though! But… why support a dude who, already rich, sold his independent studio to a gigantic closed source for-profit corporation who now sells studio? Why not have a functional equivalent and NOT promote that thing?

Anyway, IMHO yes it is privacy, that doesn’t meant it’s immoral though. It can also be moral to pirate… and yet less moral than supporting free and open alternatives that do exist.

My 2 cents

turns off SteamDeck sorry, what’s a “terminal”? Isn’t it at the airport?

Jokes aside… yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that’s fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It’s not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.

So… finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.

There are warnings so my bet is that there is an edge case where

• one runs apt and receives NO warning
• the system keeps on doing other tasks, e.g. user copies a large file on the same filesystem or log files just increasing
• user runs apt upgrade BUT now apt would warn except it’s not run again

so basically concurrency that makes it unpredictable, except if apt was the only process writing on the filesystem (which it never is).

reinstall curl/apt-transport-https (manually via dpkg if needed)

That’s the trick, local installation via dpkg of the missing package itself (that you got another way) required to let apt get work.

Oof… it actually happened to me and it’s not 1 problem but 2 namely :

• you ran out of disk space while updating
• AND one of the messed up packages is one that is required for the upgrade process, e.g. curl or wget (sorry can’t recall which it actually is)

so that leaves you in a terrible stable. You can still clean up this mess BUT that’s tricky. Basically you have to

• actually find out what’s taking up space (often old kernels) or “just” give up on data temporarily (basically you move your /home, or part of it, to a USB stick) via rescue mode (you need to be familiar with the CLI) or remount the disk on another working system
• get the actually missing packages via another working system then install locally (typically dpkg on .deb files but NOT apt get because that requires connectivity and thus packages you do not have anymore) the bare minimum you need then finish the update.

For me it was on a small temporary system (e.g. RPi for HomeAssistant) so it was basically easier to recover from a recent backup after formatting.

It’s annoying but it’s actually not that bad.

Edit: clarified on the broken state and dpkg vs apt get

You’d have settings for when to stop seeding, e.g. 1:1 ratio minimum, duration of the track xN, etc with a reasonable default. Suggestions welcomed.

I would recommend against a new player when existing scriptable ones like vlc and mpv already exist.

Instead what I would do is a plugin for either, eventually repackaged as its own player (if somehow installing the script itself is too much for some) for which the script would

• include a very small torrent client
• point that client to the torrent (which AFAICT is still not public, so for now a reconfigurable URL)
• include a search function that when it fails, proposes to search within the trimmed cleaned torrent metadata then does the torrent download then plays.

Because they literally wrote the book on lock-in https://fabien.benetou.fr/ReadingNotes/InformationRules and they tried with all their might to stop free software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists so beside the money and power they have been strategically at it for decades. Dependency is deep in the product.

Please feel free to help right now. You can still move to the EU if you want to but if you take for example NLNet they fund open source work for anybody anywhere in the World, you “just” have to propose something that is new and needed with a focus on the Internet.

Funny I have the opposite experience.

I use KDE Plasma, Firefox, konsole, etc and sometimes, no idea when and why, I just pick a file then drop it somewhere else, including ON the terminal… and it works?! Like it brings the full path for that file and then I can compose with CLI tools, amazing!

I’m quite used to the terminal so I rarely use drag&drop (mv, cp, scp, rsync, etc just work) but when I do I’m actually often positively surprise that totally different software made with different interaction paradigms (e.g. GUI vs CLI) do work well together. Overall I think https://specifications.freedesktop.org/ is quite impressive.

Gosh… wish I could upvote twice. Feels like we just gave a low cost (for now) chainsaw to anybody who wish they had a pocket knife then say “There, you can cut anything with that!” and somehow they forgot they can just buy some OK stuff from Ikea or a nice artisan. The need to “build” anything without taking a minute to know, not even the state of the art, whatever already exist out there and “fix” it by “personalizing” it is nuts.

Let’s not “vibe code” anything when reliable solutions already exist!

AFAICT it relies on https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/blob/HEAD:/libavfilter/vf_scdet.c

Neat, made me curious, seems to rely on https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#scdet-1

Haven’t actually tried it myself but check https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#sponsorblock-options

I’m listening to podcast on a daily basis. I’m using Escapepod on a deGoogled Android phone.

Basically I pay for premium feeds, this way the author of the podcast get money and I don’t ads. One example is “Tech Won’t Save Us” via Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/techwontsaveus/posts?vanity=techwontsaveus and another is 404 Media.

How it works is that premium podcast feed have a uniquely generated URL that I then use on my podcast client. It then downloads the episodes from the feeds, no ad. It’s very straightforward.

No need for YouTube (terrible, part of Google/Alphabet) nor Apple (terrible as it’s doing everything possible to grow it’s closed ecosystem) to have quality content.

It’s all just speculations, both what you suggested and what others said.

You are on the right path with your screenshots but you might not be measuring the right thing.

So, you need a (paper) notebook to record objectively (not your biased feeling assuming a pattern that might not exist) when it happens and for how long. Only from then can you backtrack to WHAT causes it. Sure you can have some hypothesis (update related, screen attach/detach, BIOS, RAM, etc) but that should NOT lead to your data acquisition.

So you htop is nice but AFAICT it’s just about CPU and memory, it’s not about e.g. IO so consider instead iotop, in particular if one process is some indexing (e.g. locatedb). Theoretically if it’s not CPU/memory (which you are saying it’s not the case) then it basically just leaves IO, that can be again indexing, some heavy process that is bottlenecked on disk access, but can also be a bug, e.g. BT pairing/unpairing that happens faster than you can notice.

Think of this as a fun investigation that leads you to better understanding of your setup, good luck.

play around with local LLMs and image upscaling

FWIW I did that for a bit https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence and I stopped doing it. I did it mostly from FOMO and that, maybe, truly, it wasn’t just hype. Well I stopped. Sure most of those (then state of the art) models are impressive. Yes there are some radical progresses on all fronts, from software to hardware to mathematics underpinning ALL this… and yet, that is ACTUALLY useful in there? IMHO not much.

Once you did try models and confirm that yes indeed it makes “something” then the usefulness is so rare it make the whole endeavor not worth it for me. I would still do it again in retrospect because it helps to learn but… honestly NOT doing it and leaving others to benchmark, review, etc or “just” spending 10 bucks on a commercial model will save you a LOT of time.

So… do what you want but I’d argue gaming remains by far the best usage of a local GPU.

Well I get why you stick to a hardware device you like… but honestly that’s 15 years old. You can get something better and cheaper delivered to your door tomorrow.

I personally went down a similar path while discovering https://www.rockbox.org/ was still a thing, looking for old iPod or Archos I could refurbish, checking 2nd hand market, etc. As much as it pains me to say, unless you are a collector it’s not “worth” it. You can get something ridiculously smaller, with more memory, more features, etc for the price of a meal.

IMHO it’s better to get rid of Windows by purchasing new hardware that is genuinely interroperable by supporting standards.

Ideally you’d check something like https://www.hanselman.com/blog/how-to-update-the-firmware-on-your-zune-without-microsoft-dammit but it might be more work than you want to put it. Maybe your local HackerSpace could help though.

My point finally is that freedom is quite important and feeling trapped daily is not worth ~$50.