I am truly and deeply saddened to hear this. My condolences to his family.

vim or vim-enhanced is one of the first things I install on any distro that doesn't have it included by default. I have been using it for decades and am so used to seeing Bram's name come up on the screen whenever I start the editor. His work greatly enriched my programming experience over the years and I am sure for countless other people as well. I don't know what to say except a heartfelt "Thank you, Bram".

This is especially funny for me because here, in India, “getting a banana” means you got nothing / got fscked over :)

I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.

The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.

It'd be even better if all these subreddits indefinitely go dark. As someone who grew up using the "old" internet with Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists for discussions, I am happy that decentralized way doing things might be adopted again.

This is true. I work in a related field, and my company and almost all of its clients are falling over themselves trying to identify what can be already replaced with AI.

Systematically processes are being broken down to identify activities that are "cognitive" are can be done by AI, with the goal of eventually replacing the human workers with AI almost entirely for those tasks. All these companies, including mine, are super profitable for most part but that is apparently not enough, and everyone fears being left behind and their share price tanking if they don't adopt AI too. So there's a mad rush to get it done everywhere.

In my region (India), for a while, there seemed to be plenty of laptops available with Linux installed as an option. Then again in the last few years that seems to have withered down to almost none, sometimes even if the same model is available with Linux in some other regions. I am not sure what changed. Perhaps some deal with Microsoft. The good part is that the fact that they do support Linux elsewhere on the same laptop configuration generally means its easy to get it up and running yourself even if it does not come pre-installed.

In any case, as an old-timer, it's very impressive to me how much hardware Linux supports nowadays without any drama at all. Not to mention all the progress made in software especially in supporting Windows-only games, which is truly magical work by the Wine / Proton teams. As far as I am concerned the "Year of Linux Desktop" is here already since I can use it daily without missing absolutely anything at all from Windows.

Interestingly this may piss off more people than the real issues. Most people didn't seem to care at all about the API / 3rd party app support issues as long as they got their Reddit doom-scroll fix. But I bet whole bunch of these will be upset at having an ugly pixelated icon on their phone, muhawhaw.

He plans to make moderators popularly elected to more easily vote them out.

I totally second this idea. The last time we tried to get the internet to seriously decide on something we got Boaty McBoatface.

Hopes the next frontier will be subreddits as businesses.

Even better. All posts in these subs can be advertisements, perfect.

He does not want Reddit employees to take on the work. Moderator hours were valued at 3.2 million last year, 3% of reddit’s revenue.

Yeah, don't even spend 3% of revenues as a cost of doing business. The soon-to-be-community-elected mods will do it for free. Super.

So if I understand this correctly they will hard fork RHEL. So it won't be a clone going forward in the way Alma / Rocky currently are. The advantage for RHEL users in moving to this fork are that they get an enterprise distro that's well-supported by another large enterprise Linux company (SUSE) instead of RH. SUSE can probably offer them some cost advantages too to sweeten the deal. For SUSE, this is a great way to get people to move away from RH and use this or eventually one of their other distros.

Is that it? I am all for it and so should RH because this is what they wanted people to do instead of creating clones. I hope this works out for SUSE and they do even better in the future. I am going to be rooting for them.

Personally, I came here for the ads

Initially at least, the subs I saw were talking of going dark only for a couple of days, with only a few stating that they will go dark indefinitely. If everyone is on board now for indefinite darkness then that's great!

"World News" indeed

And it's US only. Great idea to encourage the site to have an even more US-centric point of view on everything.

I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.

The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying "two tickets" was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say "deux billets" to produce instant results.

Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P

so what does Linux have that I need?

That should be the other way around, no? What do you need that Linux has (and Windows doesn't). Otherwise it's a case of "solution in search of a problem". You presently do not seem to have a need as you have mentioned, so ideally you should leave it at that and continue using Windows.

What can motivate me to migrate?

While as I implied above only you can answer that authoritatively for yourself, a few examples of what other people seem to like about Linux might help perhaps -

• "Free as in beer", so not having to spring for another license if you build another rig
• "Free as in Freedom", which matters to many but not necessarily everyone
• Better environment for development
• Less susceptibility to malware (not necessarily because of inherent security, but also because Linux is not targeted as much)
• Heavily customizable, at the kernel, desktop environment, other software-level
• Choice of software update mechanisms as well frequency of updates depending on use-case
• Reviving of old computers where Windows would typically struggle to run
• Community participation, though this can be a hit or a miss depending on where you hang out and who you interact with

... and so on.

What is a good Linux to have for a desktop + steam?

There are many, but I generally recommend Linux Mint or Pop! OS for this use-case.

As the others have mentioned, I found out about Lemmy through multiple posts on Reddit. So at least at the time, a few days back, mentions of Lemmy were not being blocked / banned.

About promoting now: I think what would be better is if the supportive sub mods at Reddit made a community (or sublemmy, or whatever it should be correctly called) here first, and then posted a link to it on their blackout page on Reddit.

All that being said I am not sure I want a lot of the existing Reddit horde to invade Lemmy, but I guess I can't have my cake and eat it too.

Is this a smart idea?

For Roblox and Minecraft, a TV should be perfectly fine and in fact excellent. I will go out on a limb here and say that even for most 'real' games a TV is fine. The latency associated with TVs is most noticeable in FPS games. For other genres like strategy, third-person adventure games etc, I do not think it matters as much if at all. Many people, especially those who have not used a low response / gaming monitor, do not even notice a lag at all (Note: You will find many such people in real life but never ever on the internet). It would be nice of course if your TV had a "Game Mode" which lowers latency, but it may not necessarily be there in a 10-year-old TV (though it was not that uncommon even back then, so do look for it in your TV settings).

Regarding programming on the TV, I think the situation is slightly different. Using small text in general doesn't work for me at all on a TV. Most TVs, other than OLEDs or recent non-OLED ones, don't seem to handle text well enough in my experience. There's either ghosting or some other manner of artifacts which makes the text harder to read compared to a monitor (apart from the distance from TV involved). I commonly see this issue even with office televisions used for mirroring laptop output. Maybe playing around with sharpening and other settings might get it to work well enough though and it really depends on the specific TV in question.

Overall, I feel you should be fine, at least for gaming, but probably for programming as well. I have a couple of gaming rigs hooked up to my living room and bedroom TV's and I quite enjoy gaming on them. The much larger screens and ability to lounge about while gaming more than make up for any perceived or actual lag for me.

I hope your kid and you have a great time with your new setup. Have fun! :)

Personally, I would have preferred if they would have embraced KDE instead and dedicated resources to improve KDE even further. KDE is pretty darn good already, especially over the last year or so with all the bugfixes and feature improvements.

In any case I am happy System76 is moving away from Gnome at least, and coming up with a full-featured DE of their own rather than having to maintain hacky extensions on top of Gnome to make it usable. As a bonus, the Iced toolkit should see improvements and perhaps become the goto toolkit for Rust GUI development.

I thought you were kidding, but then I looked it up on the net and it seems this is really a thing. WTF Microsoft!?

Nah, over the years I have seen many discussions sites rise and fall, and you tend to get over it. Slashdot, Fark, Digg, and countless PHP-based boards for instance. I am happy that there is a real possibility that a decentralized mechanism for discussions is catching on again. To me it's somewhat like Usenet back in the day, but prettier.