I am from BC. Sure not every Canadian is like that but this person totally exists.

I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.

I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.

But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.

But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.

But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.

Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.

That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.

You can install NVIDIA-580-DKMS from the AUR. Problem solved.

Almost entirely misinformation. Saying that Xorg only used one protocol is amazing. X11 has a billion extensions. It is unusable without them.

Saying that X11 had feature parity with other desktop operating systems is delusional.

But the craziest argument is fragmentation.

Wayland is already on over 50% of Linux desktops. The two most popular desktop environments default to it. The most popular desktop environment is about to remove support for X11. The most popular desktop Linux distribution is dropping support for Xorg in October.

The only popular distro that does not default to Wayland is Mint as Cinnamon is not ready. But it too will default to Wayland within a year at most.

Even Debian Stable defaults to Wayland now.

If you want to minimize fragmentation on Linux, use Wayland.

[edit: I had not read far enough. The absolute craziest argument is “enterprise adoption”. The most successful enterprise distro is Red Hat by a country mile. Number two is SUSE. Number three is Ubuntu. Red Hat and SUSE have both stopped shipping Xorg entirely. Ubuntu is removing it in October. The idea that enterprises want us to adopt Xlibre is next level detached and deranged.]

The Linux kernel is well over 30 million lines of code (lots of that is drivers).

This change shrinks the kernel by about 15,000 lines. That is not nothing, but it hardly moves the needle.

It is just one less thing to have to worry about and one less constraint to limit flexibility in the future.

Flatpak is literally installing a second Linux distribution on your machine, just without a kernel. All the dependencies right down to the C library are installed in the Flatpak environment. This why you can run a Glibc Flatpak on a musl distro.

Microsoft could support Flatpak “natively” on Windows. It could use the same kernel and GUI glue that WSL uses but you have no need of specifying a distro or getting to the command-line. The experience could just be that you go into Flathub, install and remove apps, and everything would just work.

Apple could do the same with macOS.

If they did that, Flatpak could be a universal app distribution method on all three systems. Devs would only have to create and maintain a single version if they wanted.

Microsoft will not do that of course. If it really was a brainlessly simple alternative application store, they could OS/2 themselves and loose control of the platform.

Too bad though. It would be cool. No reason it could not be done independent of Microsoft of course but it would never be as popular if it was not built in.

My concern with this take is that it positions the switch as all downsides. You do not get any of the Linux benefits, just the compromised experience on Windows. You may decide it is not worth it even before switching.

I have been using Linux since 1993. Maybe it is time to move on.

I have defended Red Hat a fair bit over the past year. Their level of contribution to the community is a big reason why.

It is clear though that their prominence comes with a downside in the paternal and authoritative way that their employees present themselves. Design choices and priorities are made with an emphasis on what works for and what is required for Red Hat and the software they are going to ship. The impact on the wider community is not always considered and too often actively dismissed.

Even some of the Linux centrism perceived in Open Source may really be more about Red Hat. For example, GNOME insists on Systemd. Both projects are dominated by Red Hat. There have been problems with their stewardship of other projects.

To me, this is a much bigger problem than all the license hand-waving we saw before.

I may actually give this a go.

With the addition of non-free firmware in Debian ( so better hardware compatibility ) and the rising popularity of Flatpak and Distrobox ( so access to newer software ), the advantages of Ubuntu are narrowing and the problems with Ubuntu continue to mount. Basing something like Mint directly on Debian makes sense to me.

I have been considering trying Debian with Distrobox / Arch to fill any application gaps. LMDE might fill that void instead.

Why sentence somebody that wants to live to die ( by denying them a transplant ) so that the organ can be wasted on somebody making choices inconsistent with survival.

All transplants have waiting lists. Getting an organ probably means denying one to somebody else.

The headline should be “Idiot sacrifices their life opening a spot for somebody smarter to live”.

If this is true, he and Starlink should be sanctioned. That is a pretty incredible contribution to the Russian war effort.