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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • You either misread or ignored what I actually wrote, so maybe give it another look. Specifically, I said the issue with Linux in the early 2000s was lack of software support, not now.

    For the record, there is plenty wrong with the way Linux handles external drives, at least UX wise. For one thing Dolphin mounts them differently than a mount command, which is insane. In the case of Samba shares it also mounts them in an entirely different location, which is extra insane. And the whole thing keeps a distinction between drives included as part of the system and external drives, even if the external drives are fixed, so if you want to add your extra hard drives to the navigation path for software you either have to go messing with fstab (which is both risky and terrible UX for newcomers) or manually click them every time you reboot your PC.

    By comparison on Windows any time you mount a drive it just gets a drive letter and as long as you don’t remove it it stays there. Samba shares, optical media, USB drives, hard drives… doesn’t matter, mount it as a drive letter, navigate to it consistently for the foreseeable future. It’s just better.

    Oh, and when digging for solutions to my issues I found some of the same problems I’m encountering reported as bugs in threads from 2020, with the same workarounds being suggested in threads all the way from then to now. So your definition of “swimmingly” may not be the same as mine.

    And you’re wrong about Linux being less of a hassle now, too, anecdotes aside. Although I’m not surprised, given that your parents probably aren’t trying to game on a modern HDR monitor. “Everything works on a browser” isn’t a good argument for Linux. It’s a good argument for getting your parents a tablet and calling it a day (which, incidentally, is what I did with mine and I haven’t had to troubleshoot it, either. Chrome is Chrome).


  • I did take a look there. I had it working before it broke.

    I disagree that the growing pains are steadily going down, too. Maybe I’m just old, but to me the golden age of Linux “just working” is definitely not now. It was the early days of Ubuntu where the hardware itself was simple but the drivers were already new enough to be fairly standardized.

    The thing that killed Linux getting bigger then was the lack of software support. Who knows where we’d be if those early “easy” distros had better, more hassle-free translation layers available.

    Now? This is a mess by comparison. You have Nvidia with a near-monopoly on GPUs pushing proprietary features as a selling point, crazy multi-GPU laptops with a bunch of custom drivers, weird form factors, touchscreens, pens, arbitrary framerates and resolutions… it’s complete chaos. I’m not surprised Linux struggles to keep up (and Windows buckles under the pressure), but it still makes it harder to swtich.

    Anyway, let this be a note that the handling of third party FSs and external mounted drives in Linux should get much better and Steam should start giving non-SteamOS distros some love, because some of these library bugs are old.



  • Alright, you made three comments, I’m not responding to each of them. The response is the same anyway.

    For one thing, the idea isn’t to find the “best FS”, it’s to find the best FS to share across a dual boot setup. The common suggestion is, in fact, to stick with NTFS. Which is broadly correct, it does seem to be the better option among those available. For the record, this isn’t about the quality of NTFS anyway, the same issues apply when using other cross-platform FSs, which is why I volunteered the info that I tried other FS options.

    That is not a ridiculous use case, it is not an edge case. Another self-contradicting frequent recommendation among Linux cheerleading places is to start migrating with a dual boot setup and Steam absolutely supports importing pre-existing libraries from mounted external drives. Hell, this is a fundamental piece of functionality on the Steam Deck, even. I haven’t gone off spec for any piece of this. Every part of this setup is supposed to work.

    This isn’t using a cellphone as a hammer and being shocked that it breaks, it’s using it as a camera and finding out all the pictures are out of focus. Using supported features in supported drivers and applications is not user error just because the implementation of the features is buggy.

    This is an exhausting conversation every time. People insist that Linux is finally ready (it is inevitable, someone said) to take over for Windows, but when people bring up legitimate technical issues the answer is consistently that oh, well, this works fine on AMD cards, and HDR isn’t that important anyway and who needs surround sound on a PC anyway, and why would you possibly want to share 100GB game installs across two systems in the first place?

    If your answer is that dual boot setups just aren’t viable, then great, but that means Linux itself is not viable for a whole host of use cases, including mine. I suppose that’s the ultimate takeaway here. Which I find, let me be clear, a shame.









  • All the examples you provide already have alternate hosting methods they publicise aggressively. LTT has Floatplane, which they own, DF offers Patrons higher bitrate alternative to their videos for download, GN pushes people to their website (although that’s different and not really monetized) and a whole bunch of other creators banded together and made Nebula as an alternative to Youtube.

    My understanding is that the vast majority of those alternatives from successful, established creators are residual, secondary monetization windows when compared to Youtube advertising and sponsorships driven pretty much entirely by Youtube views.

    I do agree that Youtube is a huge aberration. Every other dominant streaming site is built on owned or licensed content, not UGC, and they’re largely supported by subscription revenue first, advertising second. Definitely not by third party sponsorships baked right into the UGC. It is what it is, though, and if it got shut down tomorrow I genuinely don’t know that independently generated content would survive in any form at all. Maybe someone would ramp up capacity to try to replace them, but most likely you’d see social media posts becoming the real replacement.

    Much as my feelings for Youtube are mixed, I don’t know if I can think of a realistic alternative that isn’t worse.


  • I read it. I disagree with your interpretation.

    It’s a DMCA issue in that the current set of regulations puts the onus on the poster and the effective enforcement on the platform.

    Sure, Youtube is way less zealous in protecting the rights of the genuine content creators than those of even illegitimate claimants… but that’s by design. If they make a mistake and enforce too strictly they will not likely get sued at all, and if they do the damages will be low. If they do the opposite on a large scale the threat, at the time the DMCA was being hashed out, was becoming directly liable for any and all copyrighted content they host by accident.

    The regulation isn’t fit for purpose and never has been. Google’s extreme lack of diligence in protecting the public domain (and whatever copyright exceptions are applicable) is a result of this. I don’t like Google or their practices in general. They definitely don’t spend enough on direct support, be it on copyright or on security issues. In this case, being honest with you, I’d err on the same side they do, even if there is a secondary issue with how little funding they put on required support and assessment of edge cases beyond their algorithmic solutions.



  • No, it can’t. It’s an ultraliberal fiction about a self-correcting market we know for a fact doesn’t play out in reality.

    This would require wealth to be roughly evenly divided, it would require enough supply to always have a supplier available who brands on whatever issue the consumer is trying to push on every market and it would require the consumer to research every issue and track it throughout the corporate ownership chain effectively.

    It just doesn’t work like that. The way it works is I don’t like to pay Microsoft OR Google for their crappy office suites, but the open source alternatives are bad and the people I work with require using those for compatibility reasons, so I pay both.

    What I can do, though, is set up a social democratic state where I don’t have to make an ethical or political statement with my choice of office software, I have a government in place that will fine the crap out of them for their infractions.

    And if that’s not working, my action can be placed on pressuring the government, for which I have way fewer constraints and way more agency.

    If it makes you feel funny to pay for a thing absolutely pay for something else. That’s all well and good. But don’t fool yourself and others by pretending it’s an effective form of political action or a moral responsibility. It’s neither.



  • We don’t have to agree to disagree, it’s measurable. You just don’t have enough capital to make a dent before large numbers and market forces make it impossible to have an effect. That’s why we have governments and regulations in the first place. “Vote with your wallet” is part of the anarchocapitalist fiction that free markets self-regulate by way of the public acting on them through their consumption choices affecting supply and demand. It just doesn’t happen, demonstrably.

    Real collective power is, ideally, enacted through those regulations under a rule of law. Governments made of people and acting on their behalf get to coerce rich assholes into following rules. It’s also collective action, like collective bargaining through unions enforced by a right to strike protected by the government.

    If your republic has failed to do these things it gets trickier and you get into the territory of forcing reform through protest, mass disobedience or general strike. And yes, in extreme cases eventually revolution, but man, people online sure like to misrepresent how quickly or effectively through revolution because waiting for revolution is easier than actually doing the work.

    I find Americans in particular are surprinsingly reticent to acknowledging this for a place that sacralizes both their foundational moment and several key historical landmarks, all enacted through these means. Nobody ever remembers the Great Burker King Boycott of 1972 or whatever. How is this even a debate.



  • I mean, Linux is at a relatively stable 1-2% of the userbase, I don’t know that looks like “taking over” any time soon, or that it’ll make MS change course. I also don’t want to have to reboot my PC each time I want to do something different, you know? Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.

    Well, sorta. It’s still what I use in a bunch of dedicated applications and small specialized devices. I mean as a desktop OS to serve as a Windows alternative.