Epic winning this case might just open that for them.

On the other hand, do they want to enter the mobile market? They’re a privately owned company, so they don’t have the same shirt sighted pressures to chase exponential growth endlessly, like cancer. They are already making money hand over fist.

Bluetooth headphones do this, too. It’s infuriating. Let me turn off battery saver mode, god damn it! (I assume this is on the headphones, not on Android, though?)

For some reason, TalkBack triggers this, too, so most Bluetooth headphones are useless for that purpose. Something in a recent update broke TalkBack in the Kindle app so it won’t read continuously the “old way” (that worked) and instead uses “continuous reading mode” that pauses just long enough to put Bluetooth headphones to sleep every sentence. And I don’t think Google cares because Amazon has implemented their own TTS system in the Kindle app that’s slow as fuck for anyone used to speed reading with TTS, but it’s the way everyone is recommending now for Kindle. I’ve switched to pirating books so I can read them in Moon+ Reader instead, since it works.

I knew about the Debian > Ubuntu ordering, but I take it Debian is still often used as a desktop environment, which is what I thought.

Oh, that’s very good to know. That’s a big limitation. That might make moving to Linux at all DOA for me. I’d likely need to do everything for work in a VM, but then what’s the point?

Unfortunately, I’m tied to Excel 2024. I make heavy use of new functions, like SORT that aren’t available in any other desktop app, and the web client doesn’t allow for VBA scripting, so it’s not suitable, either.

oh, shit:

The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoyingf

You’re right. I have a crappy work-supplied Windows laptop that has exactly that installed. It would be nice not to need to boot into that when I need to work on the server from home, but it’s not a deal breaker.

No other specific non-web-based software is needed for work, aside from the aforementioned OneDrive and Excel 2024.

Edit: Your last paragraph is exactly what I’m asking about; I’m capable of doing slightly involved tinkering, but it would need to be something that I can Google Fu through each step of someone walking through most of the steps. I don’t know it at all well enough to go completely “off script” and just tinker with confidence.

It sounds like you’re suggesting that going for something mainstream and getting it to work for games is likely a better option, particularly for someone with limited Limits experience?

Good to know! I use it at work for a server; ngl, my non-Bazzite distro search hasn’t been extensive, except getting to the point that I think I don’t want anything Ubuntu-based.

Thanks for the reply!

A few thoughts:

I was thinking Win 10 EOL won’t matter if the VM has no Internet access. Linux would sync the files for me, so the Windows VM can just run Excel (and maybe Word, since I’m setting up Office 2024 anyway) using the files synced by abraunegg’s onedrive, so it doesn’t need internet access. (Assuming there’s a partition format that works well for both Windows and Linux that I can use for onedrive, which I assume is a “solved” problem by now—i remember this being hard 20 years ago.)

And his package apparently works in Fedora 42 with docker, which I assume should work fine.

But yeah; maybe what you’re suggesting makes more sense. And that VM definitely would need web access, then, so Win 10 is a non-starter. The database work I do is likely easier in Linux, but that’s likely easy enough to get data files out of the VM for just that work, I would expect.

Another question now comes to mind; I’m going to look this up now; how hard is it to copy/paste between Linux and a VM? Edit: As I’d hoped, this is also apparently a solved problem and sounds easy to configure.

If Firefox continues to work, does that mean that it can be used as a workaround, potentially? I guess it depends on how the DRM works, if something like running it in a Firefox tab would work.

And surely blocking Firefox would be a bad move for Google since that would clearly be using monopolistic power in one market to gain advantage in another, right?

Depends on the item and your goals.

If you’re a “car person” who always wants to have the latest model, then maybe leasing a car makes sense. Every 3 years, you get a new car.

Phones are similar; there are some plans where you are expected to return the phone every 1-2 years. If you really want the newest model all the time, then that might be a good plan for you.

But for a printer, that only makes sense if you’re a business with medium print volumes and no IT budget. For home use, that’s insane when a cheap last printer will last decades. We have a B&W laser from 2 decades ago and a used colour laser we got for free/very cheap (the power button is broken but it otherwise works great). I’m guessing we pay about 1-2% of an HP subsription.

MAM has, effectively, no ratio requirements at all since it’s so easy to get points. There’s some system to reward seeding low-seed torrents and large-file-size torrents, and to stay in good standing you only need to seed for 72h. Hell, they give out freeleech tokens like candy, too.

If you start by downloading some low-seed books to keep the swarm alive, you’ll have enough points to buy VIP status indefinitely. And because of that system, basically everything on the site is available and downloads in seconds. It takes me longer to transfer audiobook files to a phone than it takes to download.

Isn’t a cracked (old, I think?) Kindle the only way to pirate KU/DRM titles? At least, that’s what I recall from the last time I looked into it. There’s a book I really wanted to format shift from KU since Google TTS was fucking up all the proper nouns, but I gave up. (It was an obscure book that isn’t available anywhere pirated.)

Isn’t it getting harder to find custom ROMs, now? Used to be basically everything was on XDA forums, but I’ve heard lots of custom ROMs are moving to they’re own websites/Discord servers/whatever.

Meanwhile, Steam is raking it in by continuing to offer a better product than piracy. The Steam Deck is making that even more true; it’s so much more convenient to have games in the Steam library than try to keep a repack updated with new patches/content.

Right, but pirating Disney-owned IP is more moral than paying for it. Disney is the number 1 company in the world for lobbying for copyright over-reach. Every dollar that goes to Disney pays for lobbyists who will continue to push for life-of-author + 90+ years, because life-of-author plus 70 years just isn’t enough time to control our shared cultural heritage.

Similarly for Nintendo and software piracy.

Paying for Disney/Nintendo media is immoral.

I don’t think you’re understanding how trivial this is to detect:

Set up an open WiFi network in an area without any other open WiFi networks. i.e. almost anywhere outside of dense urban areas. Then you don’t even need to inspect traffic, just look at connected devices in admin controls. No devices should be connected aside from your monitoring device.

There’s no way the TV manufacturers are going to risk the legal quagmire that would come from this when there’s no plausible way to keep it remotely secret.

Super easy. Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up. I know next to nothing about networking and I could set it up in 10 minutes, 5 of which would be finding my old router in the basement.

So I’m not going to give this a moment’s thought until someone brings receipts. It’s not hard to check if this is happening.

Fake news, as far as I can tell. Lots of claims this is happening, but nobody has brought receipts. Considering how easy it would be to catch, and how likely illegal it is to connect to and use networks without permission, this is definitely an urban legend.

The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the “smart” features into the TV increases the price. It’s actually the opposite.

By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.

The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.

You can stream remux releases using Stremio + Torrential + a Debrid service, like Real Debrid. 30+GB 4K resolution.

I only have a 1080p screen, so I’ve never tried it, but I’ve tested the download speed from Real Debrid for regular file downloads and it caps out my gigabit line, so it can definitely handle streaming remuxes.