I knew as I wrote it that somebody would come along and say “Wine/Proton is not an emulator” but I didn’t want to get into the detail.

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

A lot of stuff runs with windows emulation as if it’s native. It’s the same method the steam deck uses and so Valve actively do work to keep it working. The main problem is games with heavy anti-cheat.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

Generally, yes. I think so.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

See above.

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

There’s .NET libraries for Linux, but things have to be recompiled to use them.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

The distribution maintainer will issue updates on a regular basis. Update procedure is different for different distros, but all have a push-button update scheme. It’s pretty solid these days.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Keep your system up to date with security updates, and you’ll tend to be fine. Smaller user base tends to mean that there’s far less malware. Antivirus isn’t necessary.

Obviously phishing scams don’t care what OS you’re on, so mind what you click.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

AMD ones are very solid.

Nvidia ones can be a pain from what I hear, but I don’t buy green.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

No.

That said… You can always wipe a disk when you install an OS.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

Download a few Live-USB images and try them out. You don’t need to install them to get a desktop and a browser up. You can see if there’s any compatibility issues with your hardware.

Whichever works for you, go with it.

I’ve put on a bit of weight since then, but I wouldn’t say that I’m giant.

You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.

Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader “LiLo” to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.

All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know

• what graphics chip you had
• how much memory it had
• which clock generator it used
• which RAMDAC was on the board
• what video timings your monitor supported
• the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode

This level of detail was needed with every little thing

• how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
• which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
• was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
• what speeds did your modem support
• does it need any special setup codes
• what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
• what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it

The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.

If somebody has been diagnosed with a mental disorder it doesn’t give them a free pass to be harmful to others. Their actions are still their responsibility. The diagnosis is there to help her explore options for managing her condition, getting treatment or medication. It’s not there to give her an excuse for being a bitch.

Yes you’re right, but then you get into the argument

• The data is corrupt
• The data are corrupt

I’m camp one because I treat data as a collective noun of data-items, not as a plural of datum.

They maintained it, but I think it was energy negative.

No, it’s rage harvesting nonsense.

I thought the ceasefire lasted hours. Didn’t think anyone was holding on to it.

This aspect of pipewire, the possibilities of routing audio and video between applications and devices, should be amazing. It’s not, because most apps try to do it themselves.

Give me an OBS where everything is a pipewire sink, and the result is a pipewire source. Give me Firefox that doesn’t talk to cameras and microphones, but opens pipewire sinks for inputs and sources for outputs (this bit is already ok). At that point I’ve got a full studio setup with remote interview capability perfect for podcasts, audio or video.

Maybe this is all coming together slowly and I’m out of date, but last time I tried it was so frustratingly close but not possible.

Sunday evenings.

Yes.

I’m 6’5" and broad but the number of jump scares I cause is ludicrous. Most people (especially women) seem to have no situational awareness to the point where they miss gorillas approaching them.

If it’s a stranger then I’ll try to announce my approach from further away. If it’s someone I know I’ll see how high I can make them jump.

Edit: just saw you label some of these people creeps. They’re not. This is a massive green light that they don’t want to accidentally scare you.

Famously, it didn’t stop the Nazis.

You emigrate to Italy and then you’ll be an immigrant from the US. One’s a verb, the other a noun.

Once you have Italian citizenship you’ll be able to live an work anywhere in the Schengen region. So a lot more options once you’re in.

Right, but sometimes you just need to say “I’ve read what you said. Sounds good to me. No need to keep discussing.”, especially when organising things.

👍

Also. If you do want to add an option to show the last few lines of the log using tail instead of cat will do it.

Rather than reading the whole log just to add a line to it, you can use >> to append to the end of the file.

function log()
{
	local changelog="/run/media/jamie/DUAL/changelog"
	if [ "$1" == "--view" ]; then
		cat $changelog
	else
		echo "$(date +%D:%H:%M): $1" >> $changelog
	fi
}

Scammers never let a good global crisis get in their way.

1. Rebadge a distro and say it’s fromm the EU
2. …???
3. Profit!

Set it and forget it, eh?

Any distro you like, as long as you stop futzing with it.

Seriously… they’re breaking because you change things. Linux machines stay up for years without issue. Stop breaking the install.

Don’t tend to have a terminal emulator of any kind installed on remote boxes. They’re headless.