Dave

I did try running Plasma on Mint, but it was never quite as good as on Fedora or as smooth on Mint as Cinnamon.

Honestly, I think I just like the simple uniformity of Cinnamon. It’s dull and predicable, but really, really solid.

Switched to Linux Mint about three years ago after being unable to take my perfectly good laptop from W10 to W11. Dual boot firstly, quickly becoming entirely Mint. It just worked. It was the first Linux distro I’d tried in about 20 years that I didn’t mess up in a week or so.

Recently bought a new laptop and decided to distro hop. Tried various flavours of Fedora, and a few others, but ultimately came back to Mint. None of the others worked quite as well as Mint does for me (though I really liked KDE Plasma, and Gnome surprised me once I finally discovered extensions!)

For some reason, Mint doesn’t provide access to the power profiles out of the box… no idea why. I just install a Cinnamon applet called “Power Profiles” and it gives me the same systray switcher as Fedora.

Fresh install of Mint was giving me about 2 hours battery life. By switching to Power Saver profile, I can get up to about 6-8 hours. I mostly only need to go to Balanced or Performance when gaming.

I’m starting to think that we need to see AI research in the same way we see biological weapon research - a visit from a SEAL team or a cruise missile for any identified laboratory. Smash the disks, burn all the print outs!

Okay, this is hyperbolic and unrealistic, but I agree with this lion-maned YouTuber - we are really not ready.

AI as a tech is game changing, but it practically demands at least UBI (and probably some form of socialism) as a prerequisite. We, meanwhile, are still electing conservative governments! The same arseholes that will label the legions of unemployed artists, actors, musicians, coders, admin assistants etc etc as lazy and cut their benefits.

Does anyone truly believe that a tech that can replace half of human jobs is going to create happy outcomes in today’s society? Or will it just make tech-bros and scammers richer, and virtually everyone else poorer?

Working from home has its pros and cons. Fortunately, in my experience, the pros are all mine and the cons are all someone else’s. That kind of colours my judgement.

Religion has certain self-reinforcing properties. Kind of like genes that make it more likely to propagate against other forms of information.

• Believing without question is better than questioning
• Not believing will be punished
• Virtue will be rewarded
• Spreading the belief is a virtue
• You should obey your parents

Combine that with young human brains being malleable, and religion tends to continue against all odds.

Clowns who think like this need to fuck all the way off… and, honestly, it’s up to older folk like me to make that clear. Younger folks are going to be fooled or scared into thinking like this and be unable or unwilling to speak up. We who have less pressing concerns need to have their backs.

That and the woke mind virus.

Why did its valuation tank after Elon Musk took over and started enacting his policies? Perhaps we’ll never know…

If, like me, you do a lot of Chromecasting from your browser, you’ll want to install fx_cast. You need to do a bit of manual installation to get it running, but it works great when you do.

Pretty much all of them… I have so many memories of old 80s computer games where all I remember is level 1. It appears that I was terrible and perfectly happy with that.

Difficult…

• Lamb Lies Down on Broadway - Genesis
• Misplaced Childhood - Marillion
• Prequelle - Ghost
• Oh, Inverted World - The Shins
• Ten - Pearl Jam
• Tubular Bells II - Mike Oldfield
• Vast - Vast
• English Settlement - XTC
• The Friends of Mr Cairo - Jon and Vangelis
• Appetite For Destruction - Guns n Roses

I had a similar need, and it prevented me from moving to FireFox for a long while. Luckily, I did manage to get fx_cast to work, and it’s been flawless ever since. In fact, I’d say it work more reliably than Chrome’s casting!

Phew… I was starting to think I was the only docked Steamdeck gamer in the whole universe!

Well, my problem is partly that I play docked, so every issue is magnified up to 50 inches… so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

I managed to get it to run at a fairly stable 30fps, but the settings were so low that everything looked pretty muddy and basic. You can turn off the FSR to get it to look less blurry at 800p, but it still looked pretty bad. Generally, everything just looked a bit unstable, you know? Hair was pixelated, lines were jaggy everything felt jumpy and gritty. I’m sure it would look better on the SD screen itself.

I also read that Act 3 onwards takes a further hit to performance… so at that point I decided to cut my losses. Shame… it’s the first game where I’ve genuinely felt the SD isn’t up to it.

I’m looking forward to it! I bought it on Steamdeck, but had to refund because I couldn’t get it to run decently… felt I would be doing it a disservice with all the compromises. So I’m not waiting for the PS5 release…

It’s weird, but the answer I came up with for ALL those categories… was Dark Souls. Even Sports.

Yeah, me too. From a consumer perspective, music streaming (not just Spotify) has managed to remain a worthwhile offering, the kind we all said we’d be happy to pay for if it just existed back in the piracy age…

Contrast with video streaming, where you now need to have five different subscriptions just to have a hope of watching half the things you want, where the content changes all the time and geo-limitations abound.

Take my extra quid, Spotify!

I did this in 1997 on the day that Final Fantasy VII came out. Just straight up walked out and didn’t come back for a few days. If I’m perfectly honest, nobody noticed. I’m not sure whether this means it was acceptable or not.

GBA Advance Wars… I missed it first time round, so I’m playing it through on my Miyoo Mini Plus. Absolutely perfect handheld game, ideal to grab for a quick half hour mission.