Sorry, I was not trying to put words in your mouth. I just usually hear, “Linux not good for me because it doesn’t support my setup well enough” when it should be “Linux not good for me because the manufacturers of my hardware don’t support Linux well enough”. Trying to put blame where it belongs in hopes of raising awareness to both users and manufacturers.

I also mistakenly thought you mentioned a newer Nvidia card when you are considering AMD. 🤦‍♂️ Good luck in your computing future!

It’s not the fault of the creators of an operating system that Nvidia refuses to write comparable drivers. Nvidia are the only ones with the technical knowledge of the GPU’s internals that is necessary to write the 100% functional driver. Open-source Nouveau drivers exist but are less functional because of this, its programmers have to try to reverse-engineer and do a lot of guesswork and testing, and for free.

Basically: If you value FOSS software at all, buy from manufacturers that are friendlier to FOSS software, or you may unknowingly lock yourself out of it.

Edit: Buying newer (especially of Nvidia) is probably a bad idea if you intend to run Linux. Older cards have had more time for them to fix the inevitable bugs. I run a GTX980Ti 😅 with the closed-source drivers on an Arch-based system and I’m honestly surprised a video driver update hasn’t seriously broken anything yet.

I have several Android devices that work without signing into any account. I get my apps from F-Droid and some apks extracted from my phone that does have a Google account.

Samsungs are annoying, with their regular nagging, begging you to also make a Samsung account. I would never buy one but I’m on-call with a work-owned Samsung and there’s one notification that can’t be disabled. It goes off every once in a while and makes me think I have a service call.

Windows, eh, I switched to Linux long ago, but there’s always alphabet soup edition (IoT LTSC) that is far less bloated.

In the worst-case scenario, yes… but the wording on the Windows dialog literally says, “There is a problem with your device and you should scan it” and then when you do, “Your device is ready to use, no problems were found.” This, after it was ejected and got the safe removal notification. 🤷‍♂️

The “vulnerability” was only that F-Droid wasn’t keeping up with their builds, leaving everyone who installed it from F-Droid out-of-date, during a period of known Firefox bugs being exploited.

That goes without saying… another user here says the drive can’t be larger than 8GB but I’m fairly certain I tried that, too.

Edit: 4GB FAT32 worked. It may have a 4GB limit. On a brand new multifunction business printer/copier/scanner.

My Canon photo printer can be converted to a tank-style with a drill and a highly illegal cartridge resetter. 😂

I heard Brother was good, then I spent way too long formatting different USB sticks in different cluster sizes and formats, and never got ours to work with any of them. Don’t buy Brother if you want that feature, either.

grub’s always been a hack. The first stage in 512 byte boot sector chainloads the second stage in the space between boot sector and the first sectors of first partition. Second stage chainloads the kernel. (This is my primitive gist.)

grub was never made for security, it just exists in a place where one would think security would be priority… but again, physical access = pwned, etc.

Not quite the same, but funny: I recently unlocked an HDD from a car head unit to prove to a friend that it was only storing music ripped from its CD drive (and the associated minimal CD title database)… Toshiba master HDD password is 32 spaces. 😅

Better replace your keyboard everytime you leave it unattended, someone could put a keylogger in it. Don’t forget to check for hidden pinhole cameras around that capture you inputting your passwords. Etc, etc. Those even work against an encrypted drive…

Jesus, the downvotes! Well, I thought it was funny! 😂

Even if you understand the commands, you need to trust the website because a malicious site can use JavaScript to copy something completely different into your clipboard, with a newline character at the end to automatically execute when pasted. (Is the newline exploit fixed in all shells? It used to fail in zsh but work in many others…)

One can also paste into a text editor to verify before pasting into terminal, but what noob is going to know or bother to?

It sounds like these are modchipped if they come with a USB stick of games (that the owner then burns as they wish?)

Aye, mate!

raises flagon of grog

I got it from techrights.org, author is a bit wacky but seems to have his heart in the right place.

Era of clown computing.

Didn’t Google and Nvidia just throw everything they had into a concerted AGI effort and fail?! 🤣

Choosy moms choose Dzhif.

Registration required.

Anyone know about family sharing “tools” as opposed to “games”? I bought RPG Makers but can’t share them because they’re classified as tools and not games.

The sudo who do what-you-don’t-have-permissions-to-do people.