Of course, but that requires both sides to actually want that. The rest of UK will not want this to work for the same reason that the EU didn’t want Brexit to work, it gives other nations ideas about leaving. Even the SNP doesn’t really want it to go perfectly because they’ll lose their scapegoat that has given them power for over 15 years.

Look, I supported Scottish independence last time round, i cannot stand the UK government and it’s inevitable direction towards Farage and his bullshit. I don’t know how cutting off our best possible trading partner, the only one we currently and will ever share a border with, England, in favour of the EU will actually help us. I can’t remember the figures but our trade is something like 90% with England, but England doesn’t rely on us for anything, so they’d be immediately in a stronger position at the negotiating table. I really don’t know how I’d vote now. My heart says yes to independence, my head says no.

Besides all of that, the SNP have been dangling this carrot for years, I’ll believe it when I see it. We’ve heard this many times since the last referendum.

Why would the turnout cause an earlier election? Starmer is the only one with the power to do it and he has over 4 years before he’s required to call it. People made the same comments about every one of BoJo’s scandals and there still wasn’t a general election until long after he’d gone.

Well nowadays they just conveniently lose their phones or access to WhatsApp and aren’t punished at all.

Looking forward to the video of the workshop, shame it’s not up yet

I’ve never known any of my immediate circle of friends and family to have any interest whatsoever. Windows 11 has been the nail in the coffin for one, the steam deck has piqued the interest of another. Year of the Linux desktop is a pipe dream but any step towards greater adoption is a great thing.

I heard a journalist use similar language to describe skibidi toilet recently like it was just the one video. You’d think journalists would know better.

The thing we should be more concerned about are the parts that Steam haven’t opened up, for example Steam input. However they’ve done everything as openly as possible for the move to Linux and I applaud that. If steam goes away or stops being so open, we still have proton and wine and other projects that mean we’re not locked in to a Steam-specific OS, so we avoid the android problem there too.

By design of the ruling parties, not because universal healthcare is impossible

The ELI5 version is that developers can make a lot of assumptions about what a Windows pc means and what features are available. A while ago if you had videos as part of a game (for example a cutscene) it was actually played through Windows Media Player, which was virtually guaranteed to be present on the user’s computer. Sure you can play that video with other tools like VLC or Quicktime, but you couldn’t guarantee they were installed, so Windows Media Player was a safe bet. Nowadays that’s not how video is handled but the point remains for a few other things. For example if I need to load an image, maybe a background, I would look it up using the windows filesystem, so probably something like C:\Program Files\Steam\common\mygame\images\background.png. That’s not the same in the Linux or another os. Also the piece of software that handles loading images might be different, which means how we execute that load operation is probably different, and so our Windows-focused version of our game just doesn’t work.

Fortunately nowadays that’s a mostly solved problem with Steam investing a lot of time into Proton, what they call a “compatibility layer” that basically translates all of the windows-specific stuff to work in Linux. That’s a very simplified explanation but you get the idea. The games that still won’t run have kernel-level anticheat (Valorant, Helldivers 2) or are so dependent on things only available on Windows that even Proton can’t fix it. Some anti-cheat software doesn’t run properly so then you can’t go online, like Warhammer: Vermintide 2. That’s mostly a commercial decision rather than technical, they could make it work they just choose not to.

The fact Microsoft isn’t mentioned astounds me.

The issue for me as a potential advocate to my immediate circle of friends and family is that I don’t want to become the only source of tech support. Now realistically they’ll probably have fewer issues, but as soon as they want to fix something they’ll have to come to me. No they won’t Google things, and if they do they won’t understand it.

Well after looking further it’s actually the processor isn’t supported in general so Linux it is! It’s going to be a hard sell to my partner who doesn’t like using office 365 on the browser because “it screws up templates”. If even Microsoft’s tools screw up I can’t imagine libre office would do any better so that’s an even harder sell… Sigh.

I think my limiting factor is TPM 2.0 which I believe isn’t supported by the device but is required by windows 11

In my case my partner has a Windows 10 surface laptop. It’s perfectly functional and does what she needs it to do, but Windows 10 is dying next year, so I need to find some solution that is user friendly (meaning GUI-based in this case) to maintain her access to her OneDrive, or we throw away a perfectly good laptop to buy a slightly newer one. Besides the e-waste it’s just a waste of money. It makes some business sense, why make it easy to move away from windows? Except it also sucks on anything that isn’t a windows desktop, so they just expect people to put up with a subpar service essentially because their business users don’t have much choice. Dropbox was better 10 years ago than OneDrive is now, in terms of platform availability and usability.

Note: I’m aware we can access OneDrive and office via a browser, however it’s not the same as native and feels clunky. Throwing Linux on it and using a browser is probably going to be our solution if I can’t get rclone to work in a way she’ll be happy with.

We have rules?

The semantics of this title makes my brain itch

Yeah it certainly is a hell of a lot cheaper if you’re copying an existing game scene for scene…

I haven’t heard anyone articulate anything compelling about consumer-marketed AI so please tell me! There’s loads of really good uses of AI (medical imaging seems really promising) but the ones I know about are so specialised that I can’t see why I would need “AI” in my day to day.

The main draw to the CLI for me is portability. I’ve been a dev for ten years now and used tons of different editors on different platforms and while each one had a different way to describe the changes, how to commit, or how to “sync” (shudder), the CLI hasn’t changed. I didn’t have to relearn a vital part of my workflow just because I wanted to try a different editor.