I find that there’s an almost constant stream of updates, most of which I don’t care about. So I tend do the security updates once every few days, and do all the other updates (mostly for flatpak stuff) once every few months - unless there is a particular update that I actually want.

I shut my computer down whenever I intend to stop using it for more than a couple of hours. So that means every night, and some other times as well. Starting the computer doesn’t take very long. So I don’t feel like it is a hassle or trouble. Being completely shut down saves a bit of power; and there are other minor benefits.

One benefit is that it prevents accidentally waking the computer in the middle of the night, filling the room with light and noise while I fumble in a tired state trying to shut it down. (Not saying that happens often, but it has happened - and it is not nice.)

Thanks, WhirlpoolBrewer.

Even better, aspire to not use a car. Commute via bike or public transport.

Everyone has better things to do then sit in traffic, and its always tempting to blame someone else - eg. some old guy that you wish would have gone shopping at a different time. But if you are on the road in your car then you are traffic. You’re holding people up. You’re delaying people. And as the previous person said, you have no more right to use public roads than anyone else. So rather than wishing and hoping that other people will do something different, take initiative to do something different yourself.

You’re a liar. No one is that influenced.

There are a lot of people in the world. Some feel passionately enough about certain topics to write long lemmy posts. And it doesn’t stop there. Some people actually physically do stuff in the real world too! So if you think typing a few paragraphs of text is too much effort for any real person, then I suggest you try to broaden your social circle.

Yeah. The idea that tracking should require explicit consent sounds pretty good at first, but we now the result is that users are constantly nagged and harassed and annoyed until they finally “consent” - at which point everything becomes silky smooth.

So yeah, I agree that this kind of thing should be simply banned, to remove any inconvenience or confusion from the whole thing.

It’s not really an authoritarian impulse. It’s about collectively pushing back against a power imbalance. Supermarkets and large companies have a lot more money and resources than most individual people, and so they are able to leverage that power to make individuals do things that benefit the company but harm society. Laws and regulations are official organised ways of the general public collectively pushing against unwanted behaviour from powerful entities, such as supermarkets.

If it was illegal, there would not be a higher price vs a lower price at any particular store; there would only be the one price. And obviously all prices change over time for all sorts of reasons. So it doesn’t really make sense to say “everyone pays the higher price”. Higher than what?

Maybe it’s a bit unfair to say ‘part of the problem’. But yeah, it isn’t really helping.

Yeah, Australia has that law. However, in recently years it has started to erode a little.

Cashless one-tap card payments have become very popular, because they were fast and no cost. Pretty convenient… except that more recently there are now transaction fees associated with them, and the fees vary from place to place. … So when it comes time to pay, often the price is a couple of percent higher than quoted. It isn’t much, but it is does make it harder to know what you’re actually going to pay. And it also feels like a bait-and-switch, since it built popularity by being free and now starts to increase nickle-and-dime people.

Anyway, that’s all minor small-fry stuff compared to the tax-excluding price bullshit in the USA.

Products already aim to have attention-grabbing / attractive packaging. So I don’t think that is going to get any worse if general advertising is banned.

I’ve also been saying for years that unsolicited advertising is wasteful and harmful and unnecessary - and should be banned. (Well, it’s ‘necessary’ from an individual point of view, because you need it to be viable vs other products. But that would not be the case if it was banned. The massive work and resources spend on advertising are only necessary because of advertising. Killing it would free up those resources for something actually productive.)

There are obviously a lot of tricky issues and edge cases that would need to be ironed out for an advertising ban; but that doesn’t make it impossible. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be an improvement, and it’s not hard to imagine some basic guidelines that would work reasonably well. … That said, it’s complete fantasy that this would happen, because there is too much money tied up in it. The only realistic way forward would be a very slow gradual increase in weak rules about what kinds of advertising can be used.

Yeah. I also use Bottles for GOG / itch games that don’t have a native linux version. And I’m pretty happy with how it works. Things install smoothly and easily, and it has a very nice menu for the games I’ve installed. Here’s what it looks like:

However, there have been some hiccups along the way that might have caused less patient people to give up. In particular, it took me awhile to work out that although I could tell bottle to launch a windows .exe from anywhere on my computer, it would only actually work properly if I first move the exe into the virtual drive - which deep inside a confusing directory structure. (The “troubleshooting” menu option goes directly into talking about this issue; but even finding that menu option isn’t totally straight forward, especially if you’re just launching the exe from a file browser or something.)

Anyway, the upshot is that I like bottles; because it is easy to use but also very transparent about how it works and what it is doing, which I like. But I wouldn’t say it’s the best option for everyone.

You may not like a feature, which is fine, but a lot of people do.

Sure. I agree with that. But I think you’re seeing this in reverse of the point I was trying to make. My point is that you might think this feature is mission critical, but a lot of people do not. The purpose of my previous post was to imply that you are over-emphasising its importance.

I understand that you personally want a fancy clipboard with lots of features; but for me, I actually explicitly deliberately only want a single item clipboard. I want the predictable simple certainty of what is and what is not stored in the clipboard. And if I ever had a multi-item clipboard with a UI interface, I’d be calling that confusing bloatware and looking for how to delete it.

So I don’t think we should rank each OS by how fancy its clipboard is.

In which case average Joe needs people like us to push back against coercive bullshit so that it doesn’t become entrenched.

I’m never really sure if I should be using /mnt, or /media, or neither, or both.

That’s just one of many things that I find a bit confusing about the main linux directories. Windows has many directory oddities too though. I guess that tends to happen when an old OS walks the fine line of maintaining backwards compatibility and conventions while expectations, needs, and best-practices gradually change over time.

I did yes. But I figure either could work!

Maybe you should write to Valve about it, rather than giving slippery-slope arguments to people who have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

You’ve said your piece. Arguing about it further is not helping anyone. It’s fermenting hostility for no benefit.

Perhaps you should discuss this with the people you are talking about. No one is this thread is demanding increases in asset values or anything like that.

Firefox is a commercial product. Is it not?

Well, it’s partially a matter of semantics. Perhaps different people have different understandings of the word ‘commercial’. For me, I’d say that Firefox is not something a user pays for. It’s existence is not about making a profit, or strengthening a business, or anything to do with money at all - and therefore it is not a commercial product.

I agree that the engineers should be paid, and that browser development is very difficult. But nevertheless, Firefox historically has not been about maximising a profit - or even making any kind of profit at all. (Although it does seem Mozilla leadership are looking to change that.)