The in- in inflammable means “to cause to be”. Like indebted or indent. Flammable and inflammable are actually subtly different words, they dont mean exactly the same thing although often used interchangeably now.

I’d recommend video streams from BBC, Sky News and Channel 4 all in the UK. Channel 4 is partnering with CNN for data and shared stories, and their UK election coverage earlier this year was well regarded. TV news in the UK has to be impartial by law so they will not take a side in the election. They will however voice opinions from both sides.

Having said that though all coverage will endlessly speculate all night on what ever result means because that’s the nature of elections and filling air time.

Regarding the Guardian, that is not regulated but it is a good quality broadsheet. It is left leaning and effectively supports Harris but it’s coverage will still be good quality and not as partisan in the style of US media. But expect it to be biased somehwta in Harris’ favour.

This is not open source? There is no license just a statement saying free to use for personal and commercial projects, but don’t redistribute or resell.

This freeware at best but if you contribute to this project it’s not clear who owns the work.

A prediction for the 2024 US election

The metaverse a resounding failure, Facebook has latched on to the AI hype train in hopes of making the company relevant. They’re basically put of ideas on how to feed the beast of “forever growth” the markets demand.

I don’t have specific experience with the tools you list, however on googling it looks like Ableton Live does work under wine. Wine is what underpins playing windows games on Linux too; it’s very powerful and effective.

You can install Mint into a VM environment on your current PC (such as Virtual Box) and see how you get on with software you really can’t live without. It won’t run as fast as real life in a VM but you should get an idea whether any tools you can’t live without can work.

As for OneDrive there are unofficial clients to get it working with Linux if you want to sync to your local filesystem. However Microsoft doesn’t officially support it beyond Web browsers, so if you want something slick and supported you probably would be better migrating to other solutions. You’d certainly be able to migrate with the unofficial clients but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on them long term as things xna break if Microsoft unilaterally changes something.

There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?

Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don’t need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don’t need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.

However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).

Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?

One significant difference that has been missed here is that Laptops can and often do run on the power supply, while phones usually use the power purely to charge the battery.

It’s a significant difference as the laptop needs a stable electricity supply to supply all it’s components or the laptop would crash. That means not only does the brick need to dissipate heat, but it also needs to be able to deliver a stable continuous DC current. So as well as a transformer and rectifier (that together convert AC to the correct DC needed) there are smoothers and potentially capacitors to ensure a smooth continuous output even if the wall supply is janky.

If you turn off the power at the wall / unplug you often see any light on the power brick stay on - that is because of the capacitors and there is still a small amount of energy available to the laptop as it discharges.

While phones are mini computers they are usually designed to always run on the battery. Even when charging, the phone draws it’s power from the battery and it’s in built circuits to smooth the current; there isn’t usually the redundancy in a phone to switch between different supplies in the same way as a laptop. There isn’t also the expectation that they need to run off the wall continuously by users (even if users might plug their phone in and expect to continue to use it, they will find their phone shuts down if its at 0% and they push it beyond what the recharging battery can supply; a laptop would be expected to run solely on the wall not shut off).

Things are blurring now with USB C power supplies for laptops - but you will find the plug itself has more of the electronics built in or some of the functions of the power brick have moved into the laptop to reduce charger bulkiness. Look at how bulky a USB c charger plug is for a Mac - they’re not simple USB chargers you’d use for a phone or tablet, they’re bulky because they are also doing the smoothing and stabilisation people expect for their laptops.

Tl:Dr they’re different sizes because they’re doing different things. Basic chargers purely charges a battery, while laptop chargers both charge a battery and provide good quality supply to keep a laptop running optimally.

Quick FYI - Exa is no longer fully maintained; there is a fork called Eza which is maintained. They couldn’t take over the original Exa repo as the original creator is unreachable. Eza is in many distros; I’ve installed it on OpenSuSe Tumbleweed with ease from the factory-oss.

https://github.com/eza-community/eza

Get a step counter and aim for 10,000 steps a day. First it makes you aware of how much (or little) you’re moving each day - you have a real number you can see and a target to aim for. Second it sets you a reasonable goal to achieve every day no matter how you’re feeling.

It’s good for your mental health as well as physical health. There is good evidence that people who do the equivalent of 10,000 steps a day are generally healthier on many metrics, and the benefits plateau at around 10k. And on a bad day, going out for a walk to hit your 10k can make a huge difference to your mental health.

It’s a simple, achievable but impactful lifestyle change that almosr anyone can make.

Edit: while you can get a step counter on your phone (including privacy apps like Pedometer on F-droid), I’d go for a dedicated clip on simple counter. There is something about a physical object dedicated to the task that makes a difference to me sticking to it. Also if you walk around without your phone a clip on device will keep on counting.

For the Flatpak apt upgrade how about “flapt”.

That’s rather simplifying history and not the main reason Netscape failed.

Netscape lost because Microsoft used it’s dominant monopoly position to bundle Internet Explorer with windows. By 1999 the writing was already on the wall - IE had already overtaken Netscape market share and was growing rapidly.

The Mozilla project and code base change was a gamble to try and fix the problems. When Microsoft released IE6 2001 they didn’t bother releasing another major version for 6 years as they were so dominant.

So while the code base change was arguably mishandled, at worst it accelerated the decline. Instead the whole story is a poster child for how monopoloes can be used to destroy competition. The anti trust actions in the US and EU came too late for Netscape.

Ironically Microsoft was the receiving end of the same treatment when Google started pushing Chrome via it’s own monopoly in search. They made a better product than the incumbent but they pushed it hard via their website that everyone uses.

Genuinely, nothing so far.

I’ve tinkered with it but I basically don’t trust it. For example I don’t trust it to summarise documents or articles accurately, every time I don’t trust it to perform a full and comprehensive search and I don’t trust it not to provide me false or inaccurate information.

LLMs have potential to be useful tools, but what’s been released is half baked and rushed to market as part of the current bubble.

Why would I use tools that inherently “hallucinate” - I. E. are error strewn? I don’t want to fact check the output of an LLM.

This is in many ways the same as not relying on Wikipedia for information. It’s a good quick summary but you have to take everything with a pinch of salt and go to primary sources. I’ve seen Wikipedia be wildly inaccurate about topics I know in depth, and I’ve seen AI do the same.

So pass until the quality goes up. I don’t see that happening in the near future as the focus seems to be monetisation, not fixing the broken products. Sure, I’ll tinker occasionally and see how it’s getting on but this stuff is basically not fit for purpose yet.

As the saying goes, all that glitters is not gold. AI is superficially impressive but once you scratch the surface and have to actually rely on it then it’s just not fit for purpose beyond a curio for me.

Flatpak is supposed to be a sandbox, so if there is a vulnerable dependency then in theory any attack would be limited to the sandbox.

However, it depends on the software - some Flatpak need quite low level access to use, and in that case an attack or mlaware could get into the main system. And unfortunately Flatpak itself has vulnerabilities which cna negate the whole idea of a sandbox.

Flatpaks should be using up to date secure dependencies, but the reality is many do not. I would not rely on Flatpak for security. Even fully up to date Flatpaks can be insecure, and Flatpak itself have vulnerabilities that have needed fixing. And for many Flatpaks it’s not even clear who is maintaining them.

Flatpaks are useful for deploying software that’s just not available in your distros repos. But when deploying any software outside your repos - including App Image, build from source or 3rd party repos - you are opening your system up to security vulnerabilities. That’s the nature of installing 3rd party software. Flatpak offers some reassurance compared to some methods but it’s far from perfect.

If security is your prime concern, then Virtual Machines may be more secure route to sandboxing software (if done properly). Building from source would be the other option, as it means you take ont he responsibility for security by using the latest code including for dependencies. But there is no perfect option, it’s always about balancing risk vs convenience.

It’s also worth noting that software repos are also not perfect. But good distros invest a lot of time and effort in keeping them as up to date and secure as possible, usually via the hard work of volunteers.

It’s the “call me hand” emoji.

It is not the shaka. It’s the “call me hand” emoji.

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Then you have to trust the person you are communicating with has turned off windows recall. That has to be the starting position.

Tools will come to block or break windows recall but it will still be based on trust that the recipient is using them. Privacy centred apps like Signal wouldn’t want windows screen shotitng every message for example. There are many apps and tools including in the professional sphere that would not want their data leaking via recall so it will come.

Unfortunately it may come late in the professional realm probably after scandals break. Employers using recall data to investigate staff for example - it’s bound to happen eventually.

My own organisation, a huge health organisation, has opted in to CoPilot. It’s crazy in my view, even if our data is ring fenced in some way. I don’t want private patient information being used to train Microsoft shitty tools, or stored on their servers. Regulation and the law is way behind when it comes to this stuff.

So we’re now at the point where change is proposed to be imposed on poorer groups to save money for rich institutions, and done under the guise of it being “for the environment”.

For example, instead of slashing costs, this could have been sold as providing better quality, nutrition and value for the same cost. I.e. Spend the same but get better food for the money.

But no, they had to target financial greed and shitting on the poor, in this case students.

May be less Nobara and more KDE. I love KDE but 6 defaults to Wayland and that is not a good mix with Nvidia in my experience. I am on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed on my main gaming desktop and had numerous problems at the beginning of the year when KDE 6 launched but since switching to X11 have had no issues. I have tried Wayland a couple of times since KDE updates and it has improved but remains flaky in my view. On a separate home media PC I use Nobara with an integrated AMD GPU I’ve not had any issues with KDE and Wayland.

When it comes to immutable desktops, I like the idea but be aware they do have their downsides. Installing custom software relies on universal formats like Flatpak (which have their own overhead and downsides, and not all of the packages are “official”) and if what you want is not available then it can be a pain having to use virtualisation and containers for a less locked down system, especially if dependencies for software are complex. They can bloat quickly but storage is dirt cheap these days so might not matter to you. I still find it too much faff. These are not insurmountable and may be worth it if concerned about the security and stability benefits. For me that’s particularly problematic as I like to try out niche programmes and play with the latest versions of emulation tools. If you like to tinker then immutable can get in the way.

I must admit though, I am someone who is (generally) quite happy to reinstall if I break the system. However the purported stability and security of immutable systems does make sense if you want a good system that “just works”.

Overall, in my experiences with Nobara and separately KDE and Nvidia have been good, as long as you avoid Wayland. May be worth a relook if the immutable nature of Bazzite isn’t for you.

Edit: should say I did consider Nobara for my desktop PC but opted to try OpenSuSE first. I really like it and haven’t had issues setting it up for gaming so I’ve not bothered switching. But Nobara in my media PC in my living room has been super convenient as it “just works” when it comes to controllers and all the gaming set up, so I also haven’t bothered switching that to OpenSuSE. Both are good.