Yeah this is the way. Debian stable has outdated packages, debian testing has broken packages. Ubuntu is difficult for beginners because of snap. Linux mint is the perfect just-works debian-based beginner distro. Same for DE: Gnome is hard to use, KDE is bloated and unstable, and XFCE is too minimalist/diy/quirky for beginner users (you need to add a panel applet in order for the volume keys to work? Huh??). Cinnamon is the perfect middle ground between resource usage and features.

Make sure during installation that you create a 4 GB swap partition too

Or at least as large as your RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.

Whatsapp to messengers is what internet explorer was to browsers lol. Slow, bloated, unfree, universally hated, but still somehow universally used

There are many things you can complain about when it comes to signal, but overall it’s a huge improvement from unencrypted messengers like discord and definitely a step leap in the right direction

What desktop environment? KDE, right? Just make sure you aren’t using the encFS backend for your vaults, it’s insecure https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm

I don’t use KDE, so they may have already dropped support for encfs, idk. Just wanted to leave a warning for you/anyone else

but I do have encrypted directories for my sensitive data

What do you use for encrypted directories? Ecryptfs?

This sounds like a great thing for deaf people and just in general, but I don’t think AI will ever replace anime fansub makers who have no problem throwing a wall of text on screen for a split second just to explain an obscure untranslatable pun.

Lmao these losers are paying for brave search results? Just go to search.brave.com its free hahahaha

/j

If GRUB is too confusing, just uninstall it? You said you have a UEFI system, you don’t need a bootloader. You can just put the vmlinuz and initramfs onto the ESP and boot into it directly. You can use efibootmgr to create the boot entry, something like this:

efibootmgr \
	--create \
	--disk /dev/sda \
	--part 1 \
	--index 0 \
	--label "Void linux" \
	--loader /vmlinuz-6.6.52_1 \
	--unicode " \
		root=PARTLABEL=VOID_ROOT \
		rw \
		initrd=\\initramfs-6.6.52_1.img \
		loglevel=4 \
		net.ifnames=0 \
		biosdevname=0 \
		nowatchdog \
		iomem=relaxed \
		"

• --disk /dev/sda: What disk is the esp on?
• --part 1 What partition number (counting from 1) is the esp on?
• --index 0 At what index in the boot menu should the boot entry appear?
• --loader Path to the vmlinuz file. These are normally in /boot, you have to move it to the esp yourself
• root=PARTLABEL=VOID_ROOT this is the linux root partiion. I’m using PARTLABEL to identify mine, but you can use pretty much anything that /etc/fstab supports
• initrd=\\initramfs-6.6.52_1.img Again, you have to move the initramfs file from /boot into the esp. For some reason this uses backslashes, not forward slashes as path separator (double backslashes in this case are to prevent the shell from interpreting it as an escape sequence)
• The rest of the arguments are just misc kernel parameters that I use

Just search for EFISTUB for more info.

Tangentially related, but I love how http://ai is an actual website that you can visit. We’re so used to thinking of websites as <something>.<tld> that it’s really weird to see a website hosted directly on a top level domain with no subdomain.

I don’t know shit about fuck, but you explanation seems correct.

I do remember hearing that precisely because of the limitations of vinyl compared to CD, music is mastered differently for each medium. So the CD master of a certain song might be more compressed (dynamic compression, not digital compression) to make it sound “louder”, while the vinyl release has a wider dynamic range. So some people might prefer the vinyl version because it actually does sound different to the CD version.

Keep in mind tho, I might be spreading misinformation here.

Digital music can be taken as easily as it can be given.

Digital does not always mean DRM. You can pry my bandcamp FLACs from my cold dead hands. Physical media nowadays is more about the experience than functionality. Maybe there are snobs who claim that vinyls are somehow functionally superior, but generally the people who use vinyls or CDs or tapes instead of digital are really just looking for that physical experience in a highly digitalized world.

They have sound quality as good as digital

CD quality is actually superior to streaming services like spotify (I personally can’t tell the difference tho).

modular daemons

A message bus won’t magically remove the need for developers to sit down together and agree on how some API would work. And not having a message bus also doesn’t magically prevent you from allowing for alternative implementations. Pipewire is an alternative implementation of pulseaudio, and neither of those rely on dbus (pulse can optionally use dbus, but not for its core features). When using dbus, developers have to agree on which path the service owns and which methods it exposes. When using unix sockets, they have to agree where the socket lives and what data format it uses. It’s all the same.

It can even start the receiving daemon if it is not yet running.

We have a tool for that, it’s called an init system. Init systems offer a large degree of control over daemons (centralized logging? making sure things are started in the correct order? letting the user disable and enable different daemons?). Dbus’ autostart mechanism is a poor substitute. Want to run daemons per-user instead of as root? Many init systems let you do that too (I know systemd and runit do).