This is great, Locomotion was a good game in its own right. Hopefully this will be an opportunity to change and fix the game a little going forward - its a game that never quite reached its full potential although already a good game.

Thanks for sharing! I’m going to download it and try it with my gog version. Its 80% off now on fog now BTW.

I disagree - Outlook is a walled garden of closed standards, and it makes users vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft or dependent entirely on their office ecosystem.

The recent outlook hack with senior accounts hacked and only being informed by Microsoft of the hack 1 year later is a good example.

Outlook is superficially good but essentially big businesses and organisations are locked in to a proprietary system for email and calendars and entirely reliant on Microsoft to keep their data secure.

I’m actually surprised Antitrust laws aren’t used to break up the Office 365 monopoly. Only the teams integration is being challenged but the tight integration between Outlook, Office and OneDrive is monopolistic. Other services could integrate in the same way if Microsoft was forced to open up its APIs, which would be good for competition and customers.

At the moment you pretty much have to go all in with Office or forgo major integration benefits if you want to use different cloud or mail services. Why do you need 1 single provider for office software, mail and cloud storage?

Well they said themselves why there is not a focus on desktop apps: web apps work well. I use proton calendar for my personal calendar. For work I use outlook. For both I access via phone apps or web browser on my desktop.

The big problem with calendar desktop apps is not the apps, it’s how they sync and share. You have either ICS or caldav.

The biggest problem is Microsoft Office. It partially supports ICS and is a nightmare to work with Exchange calendars. Most Microsoft clients (84% apparently) are hosted in Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft is removing EWS support in 2026 (which Thunderbird is working to support). Microsoft’s own Graph api for cloud access is limited preventing some basic desktop features.

So existing calendar software is fine if you use good services that support standards. Its bad if you’re locked into the proprietary Microsoft ecosystem. Mac calendar tools will hit the same problems in 2026 when EWS support is dropped.

There is basically no incentive to work on these tools with Exchange because its a deliberately walled garden. But Thunderbird and other desktop calendar apps are decent, they just don’t support Outlook/Exchange.

Its on businesses to challenge why Microsoft keeps their data walled within a proprietary system. Security may be an argument but that’s a little flimsy when you see how very senior outlook accounts have been accessed by hackers and Microsoft has been keeping it quiet. Theyve only started contacting people now to tell them their emails maybhave been accessed after a major hack last year. And were talking CEO level account access.

The thing about inflation is the food is not expensive, its the value of money that’s gone down. Its salaries that are way too low to afford the new prices. The food isn’t too expensive - employees are being underpaid.

Oxford University is older than calculus.

Unfortunately for many, even in this day and age, there is not much choice. I main linux but also keep Windows on my PC as there are still tines when something will only work in Windows. Usually work related or gaming (VR in particular for me) and in fairness its increasingly rare.

Many other users aren’t motivated to change. For Microsoft, its a bit like boiling a frog - if you turn up the heat slowly the frog just puts up with it. That’s what Microsoft is doing to its customers - a slow constant enshittification, seeing what it can get away with. Try something and it causes outrage? Don’t worry, just undo it and just try again in a few years! Many are already used to no privacy and being sold as a commodity that they don’t even question it happening on their own personal computer.

That is then not a technology ready for mass use. That would be McDonalds paying IBM to let it beta test (or alpha test it seems) its software for them.

And the only way to check the order would be to listen to each order and confirm the order is correct - so totally duplicating the AI’s job. It then becomes “what’s the point” for McDonalds?

AI tools at present are broken and not fit for purpose.

AI is and always has been a bullshit technology. Its no where near as capable as its proponents in tech industry have been claiming. Its all driven by greed to feed into a stock price frenzy but its the emperor’s new clothes. In the future it may be something useful but at present even the tools that exist are unreliable and broken.

Self Drive Cars is different, very much a Tesla issue rather than generalised. Tesla has a first move advantage but then Elon Musk blew it by forcing his engineers to cut back on sensors and tech to save money because he knows best. Other self drive manufacturers are doing well and even have licenses to test their fully featured systems in multiple locations.

AI is a generally crap technology (maybe in the future it will be something useful). Self Drive is a generally myself up technology, except at Tesla where they went for the crap unworkable version.

Regardless of the supposed motivations, this is mass surveillance on a scale never seen before. The EU wants to become China 2.0.

Unless you’re specifically wanting to play with a different OS then Debian again. Makes much more sense to be using the same version of Linux and all the software ypu use rather than potentially different versions.

Also it will be simpler to maintain as everything is the same.

If you do want to play / test another distro then Mint has a low learning curve. FreeBSD is more different but you could easily try it and switch to something else if you don’t like it. Its different but not so much that linux users would feel totally lost.

Probably the most confusing thing for linux user trying FreeBSD is that Bash is not installed, and BSD uses sh instead by default. Bash can be easily installed and set as the default shell which will give a lot more familiarity. But otherwise it’ll feel like a familiar modern complete system, and you can use the same desktop environments you’re familiar with already in linux.

EDIT: You did say “backup” in your title. If that’s the main use case then definitely Debian again. If your laptop breaks or is stolen it makes sense to have a familiar system to pick up. Also important to sync and backup your data so it can be picked up on the other laptop. If backup machine is your focus then I’d say same OS and look more into data retention and retrieval between the two laptops, and ensure your important data is continuously backed up.

Yeah its just not a good show.

I just watched a scene where Michael and Mol were working together, then suddenly Michael decides to attack Mol, then they have a kung fu fight and finally Michael asks Mol stop and says she needs to trust her, as if Michael hadn’t just violently assaulted her. The writing is nonsensical.

Unfortunately that is symptomatic of the show as a whole and just one of many problems.

Also the constant deus ex machina, with the characters having a conversations where everyone finishes each others sentences. Its tiresome to watch. I really wanted to like the show but never could.

As a kid Amiga Workbench was my first desktop environment, and then later Win 3.11 in MS DOS.

I remember my dad toying with Linux but can’t remember which one (he did settle on SuSE though I recall). My first linux distros was Ubuntu.

Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.

Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.

So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.

People are still using twitter? Why?

It kind of makes sense except the vast majority of software in all distros is not being packaged by the developers, its being packaged by volunteers in the relevant project. Most software is being used on trust that it is built off the original code and not interfered with.

Its very difficult for any distros to actually audit all the code of the software they are distributing. I imagine most time is spent making sure the packages work and don’t conflict with each other.

The verified tick is good in flatpaks but the “hide anything not verified” seems a little over the top to me. A warning is good but most software is used under trust in Linux - if you’re not building it yourself you don’t know you’re getting unadulterated software. And does this apply to all the shared libraries on flathub? Will thebwarn you if your software is using shared libraries that ate not verified?

And while Flatpak is a potential vector to a lot of machines if abused, it is also a sandboxed environment unlike the vast majority of software that comes from distros own repos.

Also given the nature of Flatpaks, any distros could host its own flatpaks but everyone seems to use flathub. If they’re not going to take on the responsibility of maintaining flathub and its software then their probably needs to be some way of “verifying” packages not coming directly from the developers. Otherwise users may lose put on the benefits of a shared distros agnostic library of software.

I get why mint are doing this but i think its a bit of a false reassurance. Although from mints point of view they would be able to take direct responsibility for the software they distribute in their own repos (as much as you can in a warrentyless “use as your own risk” system)

If you look into the data Steam OS Holo s listed and it is 45.3%. Arch separately is second at 7.9% and then third is the Flatpak installs across all Linux versions at 6%.

The changes are more difficult to interpret as Linux is growing overall so changes between Linux distros are difficult. For example a small decline in overall share may still represent an increase in total numbers. While Steam OS is up another 3% points, other distros combined are up more - Ubuntu and PopOS combined are up 5% points. That suggests the Linux growth is split between Steam Deck and PC users rather than purely one or the other dominating.

Yeah wishful thinking but also a bit reassuring that this is then a meaningful if small shift. People are choosing Linux via steam decks or personally, and its been enabled via proton and wine rather than necessarily people fleeing win 11.

I do think win 11 changes contribute to people trying Linux more but I think it is Linux that is keeping people that is what has changed. I don’t see some huge move to Linux though - just its growing faster as it supports gaming well and is increasingly easier to use and maintain (which has been a long trend). But win11 being increasingly anti user can’t be a bad think for Linux long term.

You can keep windows and install Linux next to it.

The best way would be to add a new ssd or m.2 card to your pc and install Linux on that. Make that the main boot device and Linux normally will detect Windows and give you a boot menu where you can chose between Linux and Windows each time you boot.

Alternatively you can resize the windows partition and install Linux onto free space on your main drive. This is more fiddly and things can go wrong with this if you don’t know what you’re doing.

You can also boot Linux on an external USB drive but this will be slower and may guge you a false impression of Linux. You can also try Linux in a virtual machine like Virtualbox but again this will be slower and will give you a false impression of Linux as a daily driver OS.

I personally run a dual boot system - I have two m.2 nvme drives, one with windows and one with Linux. I barely use the windows partition now but I keep it around for rare work stuff or the rare occasion I have a game I can’t get to run in Linux. And I mean rare - booted Windows maybe 3 times in last 6 months.

Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google’s version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.

Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google’s hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.

True but ultimately this is about ownership - we don’t own our games. We license them - that is what is lost with Steam and DRM, and moving away from physical media.

GOG is an alternative in that you can download and back up the installers for your games (mostly) but even then do you own your ganes?