You mean ReactOS?

GUIs are an awesome tool. Humans as a species have 5 senses, and instead of limiting computers to the narrow portion of sight needed for typing, they make full use of both our visual and aural senses.

That being said, they add another layer of abstraction away from the hardware on top of the already very abstract userspace utilities that abstract away the kernel that abstracts away the machine code that abstracts away the hardware.

All of which is to say that “Just Works” is shorthand for “I don’t want to actually learn how this complex tool that I’m using works, I just want it to do everything I think it should be able to based on my lack of understanding, and do so in the way that makes sense to my ignorance. And I want it to do all that without learning why we do some steps (and then I’m going to complain about how little sense it all makes).”

That mentality is what allows predatory software companies to not only take advantage of their customers—by hiding shady practices outside of the GUI, and drawing attention to and manufacturing outrage about inconsequential “features” (like ads on the start menu)—but also exist in the first place. Pushing back against that “I shouldn’t have to learn the tool to use it” mentality is one of the ways we keep scam artists and spyware dealers out of Linux spaces.

They mean redact it from the screenshot you posted. It’s in the beta tester blurb at the bottom

Not any moreso than learning any other OS. I’d just argue that it’s the case if you’re averse to research, reading, listening, watching, or just generally learning from others… or if you’re delving into unknown territory

Personally, i’m a learn-by-doing type of lady, so I’ve fucked up my share of devices (I’m allergic to reading unless it’s fiction), but I have yet to mess around in the kernel (it’s on my todo list, for my LFS build which is TBD)

You can use both, you don’t have to limit yourself to only one document/image manipulation program

Because GIMP already can make bitmap shapes

GIMP has shape tools like MS Paint does.

Also, why not use those programs you listed instead, if GIMP isn’t getting the job done.

>2025
>Not using Plan 9 for distributed computing

ISHYGDDT

Wrong tool for the job anyway.

GIMP and photoshop have always been photo editing tools first and foremost, which means they are meant for working with bitmap graphics, not vector.

Want to work with vector graphics? Use Inkscape.

Would you look at that: Inkscape already has very robust shape tools

Edit: before I rip my hair out: As explained elsewhere in this post, GIMP already has shape creation methods for bitmap. I assumed people were refering to PS’s vector shape capabilities because… GIMP already has shape creation methods for bitmap.

Yes, it’s part of the default tool set of a lot of programs that are not GIMP; don’t like it? Use those programs you listed instead. Or implement it because it’s FOSS. Or throw some money at the devs—who are creating something for you for free while you whinge about the things they haven’t done for you—so you at least have some right to whinge.

Can someone please guide me into installing it the safest way possible?

1. Get the installation image you want to use. Fedora has a lot of different flavors, I think they call them “spins,” so it’s important to know the difference and choose the right one for you.

2. Install it on a VM in VirtualBox. Play around with it, figure out what all the installation steps do, don’t be afraid to break the VM.

3. Play around with the VM in fullscreen just to get a feel for it. Don’t blame the OS for performance issues, that’s probably just the resource limitations of a VM.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary to find an OS that is comfortable enough to be your daily driver.

5. Use a program like Rufus to make a bootable USB out of the installation image.

6. Run the installer like you practiced. MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE CORRECT HARDDRIVE, DON’T OVERWRITE YOUR WINDOWS DRIVE. Otherwise, besides MAKING EXTRA SURE ABOUT WHICH HARDDRIVE YOU INSTALL IT TO, use defaults for settings you aren’t sure about.

I want to install Fedora on a separate drive and keep my windows drive completely intact (Need it for work).

I cannot stress the above warning enough: formatting the drive is the one step in installation that cannot be undone. If you format your windows drive, you cannot ever recover that data anymore.

Since it’s work related hardware, I have 2 pieces of advice; you should follow one or the other:

1. Don’t. Don’t fuck around with work hardware. It should be a separate PC that you literally only ever use to get work done. Whether it’s owned by a company or you’re self-employeed, mixing your hobby/leisure/gaming/tinker/daily driver with your work computer is a baaaaaad idea. You will get something all fuzzed up, you will try to fix it by reinstalling the OS or otherwise doing disk formatting/partitioning, and you will end up corrupting windows.

2. Okay, so you decided not to heed my warning because you like gaming (or whatever) too much and can’t afford a separate desktop/tower rn. i get it, I did the same once and lived to tell the tale (i do have separate machines now, fwiw). In that case, before you install fedora, simply disconnect the Windows drive. Yank it right out and don’t reinstall it until you’ve got linux up and running just how you like it. Not just after the installation, but after the configuration. Then there’s no chance you accidentally format/corrupt your drive.

Preferably I would like GRUB to ask which boot option I want to use if my linux drive is set to be my boot drive and to boot straight to windows if its my windows drive set to boot.

If the installer gives you the option, simply install Grub on the same drive as Linux. When you select the linux drive in your BIOS’ boot options, it will run grub, which will give you options, including booting into windows if you want. When you select the windows drive in your BIOS’ boot options, it will use the windows bootloader (which boots straight into windows, unless you have multiple windows installations).

Openwrt is just as easy to use as any commercial solution, the one difference is that it doesn’t come pre-installed on most hardware. Find the right hardware, and installation can literally be as easy as running a single command from the command line.

If you’re trying to avoid reading documentation and messing around in settings, good luck finding a privacy-respecting commercial solution with secure defaults that’s still simpler than openwrt’s LuCI. And I mean that, good luck. Plwase share if you find something that works for you.

I did read the commit, and I loved the part where Andreas Kling said:

This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.

As his reason for dismissing it. Because the commiter was trying to use idiomatic language for a builtin account. But it must be “politics” because pronouns amirite.

That also ignores all the other points brought up about his questionable values.

I don’t feel guilty for not participating in the cancel culture of the internet.

There is no such thing as cancel culture. This is what the Free Marketplace of ideas allows: “your ideas are shit and I won’t support you and I will let others know.” That’s not “cancel culture,” that’s just how society fucking deals with toxic ideas that harm communities.

As somebody who also identifies as LGBT

Then put the bare fucking minimum into acting like you’re part of a marginalized community, and stop rushing to defend online chuds who support that marginalization from being critiqued. Seriously weird simp behavior.

The biggest issue I see is that most of the tech is someone’s IP. If it’s not patented, it’s copyrighted or trademarked. Otherwise, it should be a doable PoC with old parts and a barebones firmware. I don’t need my FOSS printer to contend with Xerox, I just need it to poop out a page when I hit print.

I’d also love to see a FOSS page description language that could dethrone Adobe’s PostScript and HP’s PCL as the standards.

The issue is that he’s politically polarized into believing that the word “they” is inherently “political.”

It’s great to hear he doesn’t partake in dehumanising others for their past behaviour/statements

1. Calling someone out for doing shitty things isn’t “dehumanizing,” you fucking disingenuous hagfish.

2. All documented behavior is necessarily in the past. Do you mean we must assume he’s changed based on no evidence? Or is their some magical timeframe beyond which certain beliefs must have changed?

If you’re feeling attacked by people calling out Andreas Kling and Brendan Eich for their irrational prejudice against people who aren’t straight and cis… Good! It means you have enough self-awareness to realize you fit that category too, so now you have the option to change that. Or you already have made that change, but still feel guilty about who you used to be—in which case I, a LGBT, give you permission to stop feeling guilty and move on with your life! Just stop jumping to defend assholes with paperthin excuses that sounded good when they were brought up in their “apolitical” echochambers

Unfortunately—99.999% of the time—“apolitical” just means “I haven’t taken the time to consider my deeply held values and how they show through in my day-to-day life and I want to stop hearing from people who challenge my worldview,” not “I would like to not have this space devolve into discussions about governance nor economics” (which is also a political statement when you consider it’s a community leader saying no one is allowed to question how they govern the community).

E.g. why the fuck are pronouns “political”? Just because certain pundits have vilified anyone who uses less common ones to refer to themself? That just means any topic is potentially political, and all it takes is some asshole making the community you and your loved ones belong to part of their political agenda for your PR to be dismissed. “Sorry, that kind of usecase is common among Straight White Males™, and I don’t want this project to be made unnecessarily political.”

Some people have no self-reflection, and it shows when they say shit like this. Only a matter of time before Kling claims people calling him out for being rightwing “pushed” him into the rightwing (because he realized the values he aleady held aligned with theirs, but lets conveniently forget to mention that part).

Just use one of the FOSS front-ends: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme-ov-file#youtube

Yet another micro-celebrity whose 3 section wikipedia page has one third of it dedicated to “Sexual misconduct allegations”

Pedophilia has a longstanding history in the music industry. Priscilla was 14 when she met Elvis, Lori Mattix admitted to sleeping with rockstars as early as 14, Sable Starr admitted to doing so when she was 12, both were part of an infamous group dubbed the “baby groupies,” it was so prevalent that it disgusted Danny Elfman into writing “Little Girls” about the record execs he had witnessed participating in pedophilia. There’s at least a dozen examples I could pull from recent times just off the top of my head, but they’re all more niche and less likely to catch people’s eyes.

Phones abaolutely do listen, but not to audio via the mic. When Apple and Google tell you they respect your privacy, they mean they don’t harvest data directly from a live feed of the mic nor camera; they still scan your files in some cases, and they harvest your browsing history, and read your text messages metadata, and check your youtube watch history, and scan your contacts, and check your location, and harvest hundreds of other litttle tiny data points that don’t seem like much but add up to a big profile of you and your behavior and psyche.

So your friend was at a pub quiz with a couple dozen other people, and his phone knew where he was and who was nearby. A statistically significant portion of the people there were not privacy conscious and googled “Lord of the Rings runtime” or something similar. All that data got harvested by Google and Apple, and processed, and then the most recent and fitting entry from some master list of customers’ sites’ articles was pushed to all their newsfeeds.

Humans don’t understand intuitively how much information is being processed through nonverbal means at any given time, and that’s the disconnect large companies exploit when they say misleading things like “noooo, your phone isn’t listening to you.”

But it’s totally not privacy invasive, because at no point along the line did a human view your data (/s)

track pad

it’s okay, we’re gonna make a plan and get you to safety. Pretend you’re ordering a pizza. How many people are currently holding you captive?