I guess the /s wasn’t as blatant as I thought it was

But really, from Canada’s perspective, it is free market choice. The products have a price that they’re not willing to pay, be it fiscal or idealogical, so they’ve opted to not buy them. It sucks for the sellers in the States who have relied on Canadian sales, it sucks for the Canadians who don’t have the same access to products they want from the US, and it sucks for all of us little people who have to pay an additional 200% tax on medical equipment because it has pieces which can only be made on highly specialized machines in Japan. All because of an amphetamine-addled, semi literate, profoundly incontinent Neo Nazi.

The only winners in this game are the ones that are high enough above the waterline that they’ll weather the flood, the rest of us are headed down the drain.

Super valid points. Cortisol is one heluva drug.

I play on Arch with no issues. There’s a lot of guides with varying degrees of value and required skill, but I’ve found that easy mode is set it up is to run the program called Bottles and follow the wizard to set up the container and install all of the dependencies. It’s all automated.

There’s a little bit of jank when it comes to signing into Battle.net the first time, but after that it’s smooth. I’m all AMD in this build, but not super high end stuff and I manage 90+ fps with almost every detail setting maxed. There was a memory leak when I zone via teleport to anywhere in TWW, but I haven’t played since the last point release so I’m not sure if they’ve fixed it.

A little bit more than two cents, opinions on your list of distros:

Bazzite/Nobara: solid choices, but my experience is really limited with them. Atomic distros are really cool for any situation where you want to safeguard the critical system software from a user–enterprise, your grandma, your Minecraft nephew, etc. - - Nobara is maintained by Glorious Eggroll, a Fedora (or RH? can’t remember rn) dev who’s been critical to the rise of Linux gaming in the past few years. Look up Proton-GE, it can’t be overstated how important the work he’s done, free and on his own time, has been for Linux gamers.

Drauger: maybe someone else can weigh in on this one as I don’t have any experience. Looks like any other Ubuntu spin with a theme and some “gamer” apps pre-installed. Any time I see that, I prefer to just to back to it’s parent since I can just install anything it has on my own.

Pop! _OS: Cosmic desktop is pretty cool looking, but I prefer KDE. Very very small amount of experience here (maybe like 5 hours on my laptop before I jumped), but it seemed pretty good. Most of my drivers, including touch panel, worked right out of the box and Cosmic is cool. Not for me, but like I said, in this case I’d probably just go upstream to Ubuntu instead as I prefer KDE.

SteamOS Debian: bad idea. That project is not the same as what’s on the Deck (which is Arch based) and hasn’t been updated for several years. Not worth the headache, and you won’t get anything more than installing Debian and Steam aside from security issues. If you want the StramOS experience on something that isn’t a Steam Deck, Bazzite and Nobara are much better choices. Or even CachyOS, if you want to stay Arch-based.

Manjaro: Not a fan, at all. They claim to be Arch-based, but are more accurately described as Arch-related. Others are less willing to ignore the personalities associated with the Manjaro team, but I don’t really care about that. Whet matters to me is that they usurp, for lack of a better descriptor, the Arch repos for their own, which are not kept up to date with the same rigor. I’ve had system updates crash apps or nuke my system because of the mismatched revs of different pieces of system software causing issues. Plus there’s another middleman to worry about in the way of the dev and me. In Ubuntu’s case I let it slide because Canonical have a great track record with pre-release testing… Manjaro not so much.

I’d say that if you’re looking into Arch but aren’t confident in being able to go through the install, read up on the Archinstall script. Or check out Endeavors, you’ll get Arch with a graphical installer called Calamares. The installer defaults to installing their branding and a couple of QoL apps, but you can prohibit that by unchecking one box in Calamares.

Ubuntu: a great jumping off point for anyone looking to get into Linux. They’ve got spins pre-configured for pretty much all of the mainstream DEs, including some that are almost identical in day to day function as Windows. Based on the rock solid-est distro, Debian, with a ton of resources that go into dev and testing. My go-to recommendations for newbies when I can’t be present to troubleshoot things for them during/after installing.

Mint: all of the benefits of Ubuntu, plus out of the box proprietary software. Nice if you want an even more polished out of the box experience than Ubuntu. Again, they get a pass on the extra software they bundle in because it’s all been tested to hell.

Other notes: I run Arch, not because I feel like it’s a flex, but because I like rolling release models better than incremental ones. I don’t like waiting for stuff if I don’t have to, but I don’t install anything too wild either. I also don’t like reinstalling my system when a big update comes out… not an issue often these days, but it wasn’t atypical when I switched over a decade ago. Worthwhile to mention there are rolling release model flavors of the distros above: Linux Mint Debian Edition, Rolling Rhino (Ubuntu-based with a heavily customized XFCE interface), plus OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Sid (close enough at least).

Incremental releases are nice too, because every once in a while (1-2 times a year, normally like October and April, or a little bit later), Ubuntu releases a big update. Usually that just means a lot of neat new functionality and stability. If you’re cool with it, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’ll often be behind on a lot of software, which can be frustrating when you’re at the “I know this mouse lag bug is fixed in the new version of blueZ but it’s not going to be in the repo for 3 more months…” stage. There’s also the potential of nuking your system on a major update, or just losing personalization you may have put dozens of hours into.

I know this is petty, but I don’t care. Why is it that these people always have the most generic, first-gen AI created names and the most fucked up faces? I know fascism doesn’t inherently attract the best, brightest, and most interesting but come on. It’s like they just hit random on the Oblivion character creator and said “Brooke Rollins with the fivehead? Looks good to me!”

Free market baby!

If only we had a way to predict this exact scenario.

Except when they play uncle touchy like Matt Gaetz and the Shitstain-in-Chief

Literally Shitler

For sure, you never lose your right to complain. But be fair to yourself too, even if you complained incessantly, you stuck it out (and what is a Linux user without incessant complaining?).

The point is what you said though, they could very easily solve an issue that could be preventing a large group of potential users from adopting… because the maintenance team doesn’t want to update the installation guide or the file names. Again, it’s a very Linux thing for them to take that position. And that’s why I end up recommending an Ubuntu spin to people, even though I think the whole package that Mint presents is nicer out of the box.

I love Mint. It’s still my favorite Debian-rooted distro, even though I moved on from it more than a decade ago. But their refusal to adapt their install image to newbie-proof it frustrates me so much. I can’t think of another mainline distro that’s given me any problems in creating install media or installing, and that makes it impossible for me to recommended Mint to anyone who won’t have me over their shoulder during the install process.

I commend you for sticking to it and figuring out what the issue and fix were. 90% of users would have given up, reinstalled Windows, and went on Reddit to complain about how shitty Linux is.

Good notabot.

I keep coming back to KDE time and time again. It’s so easy to mess with, I can set it up exactly how I like it without much effort, and it always looks good because someone else did all the work making themes and widgets I use.

That said, I love XFCE, I’m just trash with CSS so it takes me forever to get it how I like, and on my Surface I can’t get the scaling to work so everything is beyond tiny.

Oh I think it’s a great idea, and I love CA. Unfortunately, I don’t live there so I wouldn’t be able to reap the rewards. Though if it were really going to happen, I know there’d be a lot of chuds selling cheap and running for the midwest so I’d definitely make the move. Right now my job has me anchored on the other coast so I only get to be in CA for a couple of weeks a year (incidentally, for work).

I guess it’s just another type of… Draft dodging.

Ooh that’s a tough one. I mean, CA, NY, and MA are all pretty good choices. But I think CA would be the best pick if you could only get one. Though MA would be a surer bet on the referendum outcome, I think. Lots of people in northern CA are redneck AF.

Dammit, now I’m gonna have “da da de dah dah dah da dee dee dah” looping in my head all day.

Doesn’t change the fact that I’d be happier than a pig in shit if my (already blue) state was annexed by Canada.

They’re already saying that, and the right-wing constituents are eating up that fat turd like breakfast

I respect your opinion and agree on many points, and in many cases. I will contend with your argument that the military acts monolithically and wordlessly executes illegal orders, however, particularly because in its wording you apply a blanket onto 3 million people while failing to acknowledge the counter.

The military in the US is beholden to not only the Constitution and the laws of the country, but also the UCMJ, under which we are explicitly and implicitly prohibited from taking part in any partisanism or taking any action which would even imply that the military and Executive are at odds. We can argue the necessity and limits of that policy but that’s not the point here. The news will readily report on the sensational–“Navy Sailor arrested at protest,” “Soldier participated in attempted coup on January 6th,” but they can’t get clicks from “NJP article 134,” “Sentenced to Leavenworth 6 years following trial and holding in brig.”

Neither one of us knows what orders those pilots received. If they were directed to, and chose to, execute an order they knew to be unlawful, they absolutely deserve to be investigated, tried, and sentenced. Is that more than the victims of this atrocious act were allowed? Yes, but two fascist acts don’t cancel each other out. I can’t stress the point enough that this should never have happened, and we should be doing what we can to rectify it, but retribution is not justice.

But if they were lied to, told to fly from one airport to another per today’s schedule, and their listed cargo was just “personnel, materiel,” it’s not reasonable to lay blame on them like that. Likewise, it’s illegal for them to talk about what happened to anyone outside need-to-know unless it’s released in court, so we’ll probably never hear what actually went down.

Have people executed unlawful orders? Yes. Have they been absolved of responsibility? Sometimes, yes. Should they be held accountable to their level of responsibility, and are they? Typically, yes. That’s the biggest difference between police forces and the military, and my other point of contention with your argument.

I agree that when a Nazi sits at a table with nine people who don’t tell him to leave, you just have ten Nazis. But whereas the police will band around the Nazi to protect him because he wears the same color clothes, the military will eventually jail the Nazis when they’re found guilty of crimes. It’s just past the sensationalized news cycle so you have to look for it rather than being presented.

Not all of us are fascists, and not all joined because we wanted to blow up brown people. I wanted to be an engineer but couldn’t afford college when I was 17, and was offered a pretty good salary with benefits out the gate, plus the opportunity to have my degree paid for. Even during the Iraq invasion when i joined, I had no interest in actually doing anything related to warfare.

But a lot of the guys I work with, whether they’ve always been like that from the start, because they think it’s funny, or because they’re willfully ignorant, don’t think the same way. There’s also huge disparities between thoughts in the branches as a whole, as well as intellectual stratification in the branches. For example, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll find fascist ideals in the Army and Marines than the Air Force and Navy, but you’ll still find free thinkers in the more educated parts of the “fighting” branches and idiots in the ones focused on tech. The smart ones are worried, the dumbasses think it’s lulz.

I do find it funny (in a sad, sad way), though, that a lot of the people who have been openly supportive of the Fascists’ policies in the past now say things like “I don’t really pay attention to politics lol” or claim/admit that they don’t vote. Now that it’s clear that their ineptitude has led us to a place where the country’s soft power is nil, the benefits every servicemember enjoys are at risk, and they’re probably going to go up against China within the next couple of years, they’re suddenly not as vocal about their position. I can’t wait to retire and put this all behind me so I can focus on more important things. One more year and I’m done.

All that said, politicians really like to prop the military up as a huge, monolithic entity that always thinks, acts, and votes identically (and conservative to boot), and this simply isn’t true. Anyone smart enough to think past “brown people bad/MURICA FUCK YEAH” realizes that the military benefits program is the most successful socialist movement America has ever had.

I have to go to work so I need to cut it off here, but that’s the start of my rant. Thank you for attending my TedTalk.

Legal disclaimer: I do not speak for the military, the government, or anyone working in either. There’s your disclaimer, Whiskey Pete. I’m compliant with the words on your DODI now.

The only one I can’t get onboard with is Leavitt’s. That’s no way to talk about whores, comparing them to her. Have a little decency!