kadup

Yep! Okular is amazing, and it’s available on Windows too. Install it for someone and they’ll never bother you again about PDFs or EPUB documents, it’s performant and everything works: printing, resizing, selecting text, searching, signing, adding comments. Never worry about paid PDF software or shady slow apps that keep trying to gatekeep features.

Honestly, there isn’t much to it when setting up Linux for elderly people - in fact, I find it less troublesome than setting it up for a teenager.

Most often the issues regular users face with Linux are related to installing packages from external sources or broken updates. Elderly people tend to not do that.

Set up a stable distro like Debian, Linux Mint or Ubuntu LTS with KDE Plasma or Cinnamon, install LibreOffice, Okular and a browser with strong ad blocking, and any other applications you think they might need. Enable a simple firewall, hide the root / folder from the file browser’s sidebar, and you’re done. Perhaps set up scaling to make everything bigger on their monitors, disable mouse acceleration and set the speed slightly slower than usual.

I wouldn’t bother with immutable distros, Flatpaks are nice and all until permissions turn using a simple app a confusing chore with broken interactions.

The Coca-Cola thing is just a widespread myth. Red was already used for Santa and Christmas in general before Coca-Cola’s ads.

Ah yes, so we went from “no DRM whatsoeverr!” to “there’s DRM but on a DLC I don’t care about!”

I see. Sound logic, great argument. Sounds like GOG is amazing then, they’re probably doing great with their current business model! No, wait…

you value Steam’s honesty

Both are multi-millionaire if not billionaire companies. There’s no way to attribute virtues like “honesty” to corporate entities.

But GOG is a much worse store than Steam, lacking features Steam had a decade ago and, most importantly, being loudly indifferent to how the games work on platforms other than Windows. Any gaming thread gets flooded by GOG fans talking about how we should support them anyway, because they’re great and anti-DRM… Except I’m telling you they aren’t, if their own games are at risk of being pirated they add DRM, if somebody wants to publish games protected by DRM on their platform they allow it. That’s not anti-DRM.

Steam’s DRM is disabled by default, and Valve is aware it’s trivially easy to bypass and said multiple times they don’t care. That’s just as “anti-DRM” as GOG if we go by their actions, rather than their marketing claims.

Don’t fall for marketing claims when they themselves are using DRM, it’s ridiculous.

anti-DRM policy

What anti-DRM policy? They included DRM into their own game, what kind of policy is that?

“I have a strict, non negotiable anti-beer policy! Except every weekend when I drink a 12 pack! And sometimes in social events! And at night to take the edge off! Sometimes on Wednesdays too!”

Did I ever claim Steam is a “strongly DRM free platform”? Did Steam ever sell itself as the non evil alternative due to a quoted “lack of DRM?”

If you’re trying to follow my argument, you’re not doing a good job.

strong DRM stance

They have allowed content protected by DRM into their store four times already, which is not surprising, given GOG is owned by CD Projekt Red who included DRM into their own DLC for Cyberpunk, including on GOG. That’s not “strong” in any sense of the word.

So in other words, they sell you the “feel good” anti-DRM narrative but quickly look the other way when it’s good for business. At that point, might as well purchase on Steam, where DRM is common but optional and Valve actually cares about making the games platform-agnostic, easy to backup, easy to share, etc.

EDIT: cool downvotes, doesn’t change the fact that GOG provides software protected by DRM on their “strongly anti-DRM platform”. There is no amount of downvotes in this world that can change this reality.

The N64 is got objectively better graphics - being able to do perspective correction, having actual awareness of the fact that 3D objects have depth (z-buffer) and floating point precision. It’s just extremely harmed by the low storage of the cartridges.

The PS1 can barely do 3D, being forced to calculate polygons but having no idea what to do with them, with warping geometry and textures deeply distorted.

I don’t disagree, but it’s pretty weird that Americans always try shifting the blame or motivation around rather than admitting their own questionable behavior.

US being authoritarian? “Must be related to them Russians!”

I don’t think the US threatening to take over other countries is somehow related to Russian imperialism.

It’s quite literally the same old US imperialism that has always existed, only less sugar coated.

There’s a difference between tech geeks and tech bros.

The tech bro is selling you NFT web 3.0 AR experiences, the tech geek might be learning Docker to self host a Lemmy instance, not because he needs to, but because it’s fun.

Both have always existed: one was selling you some horrendous domain during the .com bubble, a plot of land on Second Life or even a perfect marriage based on a secret algorithm running on his Commodore 64, the other was busy playing muds and learning how to make free calls by ringing weird tones into a public telephone.

We know they do, actually.

All US companies provide the NSA with backdoors. All modern AMD and Intel CPUs have the ability to run remote code signed by their manufacturer and snoop into memory.

Put the two things together and now you know.

Double check if Secure Boot is disabled, xone and xpadneo have known issues with secure boot.

That’s a loophole that can be used indeed, but keep in mind zero calorie products actually do exist. As in, they have zero calories at all.

Frequently these artificial juice packets are truly zero calories because they can be made with a simple acid, some food coloring and an artificial sweetener that can’t be absorbed or digested by your body.

Such a product does have calories in the physical sense (you could combust them) but they have zero calories from a physiological sense.

To be fair, cheating on a MMO is very different from cheating on a precision FPS game.

If you do pixel perfect inputs on a MMO it barely matters. If you do pixel perfect inputs on a FPS you can win an international tournament.