BananaTrifleViolin

I wonder if the world will ever standardise to one or the other?

The . for decimal separator is used in English, as well as China and India but apparently that is only 35-40% of the global population. The , is used for 60-65%. Although the figures may not be accurate as a lot of countries seem to use both, with . used for international business, and internationally published science tends to be published in English?

Probably never be standardised as it’s probably too difficult to switch now? 1,000,000.00 and 1.000.000,00 are clear because of the use of three 0s for thousands etc, and two 0s for decimals. But 1.001 and 1,001 are much more ambiguous and would definitely need context as to which system is being used - is it 1 thousand and 1 or 1 and one thousandth?

A few reasons. One is there isn’t much flat land; most of it is hilly and even mountainous and covered in thick forests. The flat areas are occupied with farms and towns but the space is small and not enough for big cities to grow. The hills and mountains are heavily forested and there has never been a big enough population to need to encroach on them. It’s also not great for building and farming, unless grazing animals.

The other big reason is there are no natural deep sea ports in that region. It’s either marshy or the estuary of the river Colombia. Small fishing towns would be fine, but not big industrial ports that drive city growth (or did in the past). Meanwhile, Portland sits further back up the river with plenty of flat land and access to the water, so makes a natural port. And Seattle sits on the bay further north and is coastal, and a good port.

The dynamic got set up of big cities further back, and those areas never really grew. Once the land became part of state forests, then that restricts growth even more.

EDIT: Here is a topographical map showing in blue the flat land: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/world/?center=38.54817%2C-119.79492&zoom=6

This laptop is more than capable of running SNES emulation; its 1GHz quadcore, and 4gb ram.

SNES is an old system which had 3.58Mhz CPU and 128kb ram; you’ll be able to emulate it without much issue on that laptop. BSNES has low requirements (like an Athlon or Pentium 4, and 512mb ram, and Open GL2), although if you have problems then Snes9x and ZSnes are less accurate but lighter weight. RetroArch is pretty convenient way to deploy emulators and has BSNES, Snes9x and Snex9x_Next cores to use.

A lightweight Desktop Environement may help make the laptop feel snappier; Xfce or Lxqt. If it feels slow then you want a minimal desktop which doesn’t have overhead like compositing. Also don’t use flatpaks especially if you multitask; use native apps as flatpaks have some overhead.

Mint as a distro is fine for installing lightweight desktop environments, and if you wanted you could install Linux Mint Xfce edition from scratch.

Libre Office is maintained by The Document Foundation which is based in Germany. So from a governance point of view it’s already a European hosted open source project.

Also for online collaboration platforms, Libre Office isn’t really a good option. It is an old, sprawling codebase which doesn’t lend itself to being ported to being a server based collaborative platform. It has actually been done but hasn’t flourished, hence alternatives like OnlyOffice.

Also this is more about OnlyOffice’s issues - the lack of transparancy and true collaboration with contributors, the proprietary code used for mobile apps, and it being based in Russia which is geopolitically problematic especially if part of the idea is “Euro sovereignty”

Native English, very basic German from school.

I want to learn another language but can’t decide which.

Its an interesting build and cool, but this seems overpowered and overspecced to me?

From his reddit post he’s hosting: Immich, Nextcloud (file sync across all devices), Frigate NVR (Coral AI detection + Home Assistant integration), Plex (with full *arr stack), pfSense (firewall, DNS, DHCP, WireGuard VPN, ntopng monitoring), Vaultwarden and Pfblocker. He says on the Youtube video: Plex, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Immich, Nextcloud, Frigate, and more.

Does this really needs 4 Lenovo PCs (1 used as the router) to run all this? Maybe he has multiple users and is going hard on the Immich and the security camera set up (including video processing?). Even then I just can’t see how this would make full use of all this hardware?

Tech seems to often seems to follow the Pareto Principal of 80:20 split; where one company dominates and gets at least 80% of the market share. In tech its often more extreme and 90% domination often occurs, and is even expected by investors.

It’s debatable where this is cause or effect - e.g. whether tech would naturally move to such dominant splits or whether this is actually the effects of bad regulation allowing monopolies to form. I personally favour the latter but thats irrelevant.

So in the space of “forums” Reddit has taken a dominant position. In some ways it gets away with this because it’s regarded as “social media” and as such is no where near dominant, with Meta dominant (Facebook, Instagram) and big players like TikTok etc. But in terms of the forum style discussion platform it really is dominant. It’s so dominant that people who host communities on there seem to unquestioningly believe Reddit when it says it owns them and all it’s content.

Lemmy, MBin, and PieFed show that actually anyone can host their own instances of Reddit like forums, but Reddit does still dominate as a single location hosting and controlling lots of other peoples content.

I blame social media. We have moved from shared media and expertise presented to us (including it’s faults) to listening the loudest and most obnoxious voices in the echo chamber of your choice.

We really do need social media regulation; instead of them being dopamine engines to fuel advertising there needs to be some semblance of control and exposing people to more than their chosen echo chamber or preferred content. It’ll be difficult to do, but doing nothing is patently leading to the breakdown of our societies all just to line the pockets of American tech billionaires and shareholders.

I’ve not had this issue around batteries? Is there specific hardware you can give as an example? For me laptop batteries last longer and I’ve replaced Windows on a random laptop, not researched anything hardware wise.

Note, Windows has a “trick” of defaulting to “balanced” mode on Laptop installs (even when plugged in I’ve found), which basically means your hardware is throttled unless you turn it off but this trick does make the battery seem to last for ages. You’re actually not using the rest of your hardware at full potential in this situation. Many users seem to be unaware of their power profile setting in Windows. Meanwhile, in my experience Linux installs tends to default to a performance power profile unless you specifically change it yourself (for example balanced or battery saver while unplugged etc) but again this may depend on your distro’s default settings.

In KDE the power profiles are in the Settings > Power Management section and in the task tray. Same will exist on Gnome, and I know it exists on XFCE as I’ve used it’s power profiles before too.

Thanks for sharing this! This was new to me but makes modding Steam games so much easier.

A little more difficult for GOG games but not much; definitely much better than the manual approach.

So 113k released between 2016 and 2025 is about 12600 a year. We have only been told that 5863 games made more than 100k last year, not what their total lifetime revenues are. Bearing in mind games generally make the most money in the first year of release (of course there there is big variation and there is a tail but mostly), then very crudely as much as 46% of new games could be making at least 100K in the first year. That’s an overestimate for many reasons but 5% is also a huge underestimate as the figure is using at all games released across 9 years and diluting the the 1 year figure we have. Also we need to bare in mind how much of the Steam library is slop and not an actual fully formed game, or is place holder entries for things like demos and even DLC.

The real figure will sit between those two extreme limits, it’s not going to be as low as 5% but also not as high as 46%.

I find it strange how in the US “moderate” involves frequently invoking Christian faith. Here in Europe that’d be seen as right wing conservative behaviour.

So this is one where actually it really makes no sense for the US to attack Iran - this comes down to a bad president making impulsive decisions. It certainly benefits Israel. Trump seems to think he is untouchable after attacking Iran last year and kidnapping Venezuela’s president. This war seems to be him shooting from the hip and not being restrained by those around him from making very bad decisions.

From a US strategic point of view, it can’t achieve regime change in Iran by bombing the country (it’d need troops on the ground) and it has low supplies of air defence munitions thanks to selling stocks to Ukraine and also using up some supplies in it’s 2 day war against Iran in 2025. Going to war now is foolhardy - Iran just needs to prolong this war beyond a few weeks and the US will be in trouble. It will need to pivot to a defensive posture to protect its allies in the region as defenses run out, which will be tough and cost US servicemen and women’s lives. It will also cost a fortune to prosecute this war without any real benefit.

US allies in the middle east have been drawn into a conflict they certainly didn’t want, global trade will be disrupted by closing the Strait of Hormuz (a very major shipping route), oil prices will spike and could stay high if oil infrastructure is damaged in the war, air traffic will remain disrupted and the gulf states economic hub plans (building up Dubai as an Economic centre etc) will be damaged. It’s possible this could even tilt the global economy to recession, or even precipitate an earlier end to the AI stock-market bubble.

This war is looking like a major strategic blunder by the US; more stupid than the Vietnam war (which was at least thought-out by strategists). Its likely the Pentagon was against this war, but sadly Trump and his clown-car cabinet are pulling the shots. It’s a war that’s goals cannot be achieved, yet will costly the longer it runs.

Data has value and this data is particularly valuable to Valve and its competitors. So Valve share the raw data which has gross numbers but they don’t share the useful data. The useful data is the processed data - the corrected and weighted data based on the other information Valve has about its users and install base. That way can weight this months survey responses to expected proportions of the whole user base and see actual user wide figures and trends.

What Valve shares is akin to a polling company sharing the raw data from the people who completed a polling survey. It’s relatively meaningless and even misleading until they correct the data to weight it to make it representative of the whole population.

So this month there were 1.15% fewer linux users in the survey pool, not 1.15% fewer linux users overall. They will correct the data to see an actual proportion of Linux users. For example: they have data on every use of Proton and every install of Linux versions of software; and how many times each user installs a game (occasional vs heavy users). They don’t share that but they can use that to help correct the data and get much more accurate picture - one they don’t share as it gives them a commercial advantage.

Christ Trump looks at death’s door in the photo.

I prefer XFCE for lightweight uses (e.g. VM or raspberry Pi) and KDE for normal desktop use.

For me MATE isn’t quite light enough for lightweight when XFCE is there, and no where near attractive or pleasant enough for day-to-day use when RAM/CPU use isn’t a bottleneck. KDE is certainly more resource intense but up to 1gb of RAM and 1-3% CPU idle for a full featured, slick desktop environment is worth it.

I don’t really see the appeal of MATE unless you strongly want a GNOME 2 desktop. In which case, yes it makes sense. Although ironically you can make a very close but modern take on GNOME 2 with KDE with modern bells and whistles if you’re willing to customise KDE - it’s that flexible.

So I started by dual booting; it’s not a bad way of doing things although Windows likes to mess with bootloaders.

Optimal way is have physically separate hard drives/NVME cards, Windows on one, Linux on the other. The Linux bootloader should detect windows and point to it’s bootloader as a menu option without issue.

Make Linux the default OS and only switch to Windows when you really have to. I haven’t used my Windows install in like 1 year? I kept it for gaming but everything I want works in Linux. I even have a Windows VM in Linux for using Office if I need to for work (used it a few times in a year and beat having to restart into windows)

I’d wipe the windows drive but I just can’t be bothered right now.

I recommend a KDE distro to start as it’s very flexible - it can mimic windows and also be wildly different if you want. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but I’d recommend OpenSUSE Leap as a stabler point release distro when starting out. I know longer recommend Mint as I find Cinnamon tired and there is so much old and bad advice on tweaking or fixing issues on Mint that it is actually potentially detrimental to being secure and safe.

Unfortunately the old favourable terms are gone and won’t come back. Too toxic in Europe and only 1 country would need to veto it to stop it. Iit’s very unlikely the UK will rejoin in the near future as the Common Agricultural Programme remains broken, and signing up for the Euro would remain very toxic. Those are the two big exceptions we had. And of course, free movement of people remains politically toxic in the UK, and we’d never get an exception to that.

I was strongly in favour of remaining, and I’m leaning in favour of rejoining but I’m not massively keen. The reason being Europe was very politically controversial in British politics for decades and Brexit dominated politics for years over all other issues. I am in favour of rejoining the customs union; but even that will be a big ask in the UK and in Europe.

The right wing in the UK are against regulatory alignment and “taking orders” from Europe. And our broken first-past-the-post electoral system gives them disproportionate power in this country. European neighbours would rightly be risk-averse for signing a deal with the UK which another right wing government could just come along and tear up.

The UK should focus on electoral reform before ever considering rejoining the EU. We need true representative democracy, instead of the joke elections we have had such as Boris Johnson getting a huge majority in parliament. He got 44% of the vote and got 56% of the seats, forcing his version of Brexit on the country. And within that parliament the right wing had power within his party because there were enough of them to deny him his majority - their deal or no deal. So we got a hard Brexit. And any deals other governments make can be unpicked in the same way - a small extreme right wing minority can dominate the discourse.

So forget rejoining; push for proportional representation. Our democracy is backwards and stuck in the 19th century.

Yes, Krohnkite on KDE auto-resizes window tiles and keeps the screen full. It’s a default setting (monocular view) but can also be turned off.

To use krohnkite you can add it from within KDE - go to Settings > Window Management > KWin Scripts. Then top right select “Get New…” and type K in the search box and it’ll be one of the top options.

It works well but you may need to log out and and back in after enabling it to see some of the changes. Also you will probably want to change other KDE panels and layouts to fit how you want to use the desktop in a tiling set up (and there are plenty of widgets available and window animations to add - like Geometry - if you want to a specific tiling set up and look).

KDE is incredibly customisable, but for tiling it may take a little work to get it exactly where you want it. Also worth backing up your settings folders once you’ve got it how you want it (Konsave for example, or manually)

The DE is very important to me, and for me that is KDE. Tbh I find Gnome horrendous to use - too locked down, too uncompromising in it’s design. If you like the paradigm then I imagine it’s decent - certainly looks very slick. KDE on the other hand is very flexible and has been easy to tune it to exactly what I want.

But i’d say switching DE shouldn’t be a “barrier”. Almost all distros support multiple DEs, and Gnome or KDE is a common choice.

When is comes to VR, you can set up an alternate X11 session which only runs Steam in gamescope mode, with minimal or no desktop environment. /usr/share/xsessions/ contains defined X11 sessions; you can manually add one that literally only launches one program via a .desktop file pointing to a script (e.g. launches steam in gamescope mode with a specified resolution). Or you can install a very minimal DE such as OpenBox or i3 and set that up to autolaunch Steam in a window or big picture/gamescope mode. This way whenever you want to VR, you log out of your Gnome desktop session and then login to your “Steam” session, and almost all resources are available for Steam and games with minimal overhead. The minimal DE route is probably the better route just because of options to get out of crashes and problem solve. Either way, this route bypasses the Gnome / and general Wayland issues with VR.