These are the times that try men’s souls. They are also the times that put the “Fuck You” in “Fuck You Money."

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Cake day: March 3rd, 2025

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  • That is precisely the reason for the existential dread this has brought to my life as I ponder what kind of world will be left to my kids when I die.

    I can’t even rest assured that people in power after Trump will not be Trumpists, and even if I could be assured of that, I’m not at all sure we’re going to get all this shit fixed before whatever the next catastrophe is.

    I expect to die of old age in a world where we have not yet returned to at least as good as where things were when Trump took over. (and there was already a lot of fucked up shit then.)

    And as someone who has spent nearly six decades rooting for humanity in most ways, I’m pretty fucking disappointed that we dropped the ball this hard on this one.





  • I recently started using Qobuz also. I was impressed that there are Linux apps, including a (3rd party) downloader that lets me download FLAC. (Otherwise I think you need to use their app in Windows or Mac to download FLAC - the web downloader only let me grab MP3.)

    However, although I have loved it, my use case is different than yours, so not really apples to apples. I have a media server running in a VPS, so ethical downloads are my primary requirement. For Download --> Self-host --> Self-stream they are a perfect fit, IMO, though I’m sure there are others.

    I like it because I’m not buying music from Amazon, or Spotify, and that it’s DRM free, primarily. I will also buy from Bandcamp sometimes. (To be fair, some amazon music can also be downloaded DRM free, but I think anyone reading this probably already knows that. I can’t remember if FLACs were available to me never or rarely, because I didn’t use Amazon music much.)

    Despite that, I’m watching this thread with interest, because I’m certainly open to other options.







  • Proton developers are working on Wine code. Their patches go upstream. If you are using Wine, you have benefited (massively) from the sea change that has occurred (directly and indirectly) as a result of the development of Proton.

    I remember the naysayers predicting that Gabe would never in a million years make the required investment because the state of Linux gaming was (in their assessment) that terrible.

    And now we’re having argue about whether it actually did anything for us? In the comments about an article about how much it did for us?

    That’s not an argument I’m having, I watched it happen.


  • Do you know what I did last week thanks to Proton? Installed EndeavourOS on my freshly purchased laptop, installed steam, and installed a bunch of Windows games. Then I played them. At no point did I wonder whether they would run.

    Now, you may think being able to do that isn’t something that is going to get more people using desktop Linux (or that it hasn’t already done so), but as much as I’d love to agree with you, then we’d both be wrong.

    I say this as someone who used to care about convincing other people to use Linux. (Before shifting into “you can lead a horse to water…” mode, and now I just don’t give a shit.)

    However, what I gained from that experience is this: In twenty years of being Linux-only on my personal desktop, the number of times I have read the phrase, “I’d love to use Linux, except for [some statement about a game or games]” is astronomical.

    Now, is Proton going to make desktop Linux the best choice for everyone? Clearly not, duh. But it is remarkably disingenuous to suggest that it’s not had a massive benefit to the Linux community and ecosystem as a whole, including, and dare I say especially, desktop Linux. It is flat out impossible to imagine that a substantial portion of current and future Linux users aren’t people for whom Proton solved what they considered to be a substantial barrier to usage.



  • 100% it can, and worse yet, it can be scraped and analyzed like this by Meta, or Reddit, or your nearest fascist dictator.

    But that’s also pretty much the entire internet in any forum or social media platform, so although I don’t like it, I figure that’s more or less just part of using the internet.

    To me it’s much like the whole “There’s no expectation of privacy in public.”

    I hope it doesn’t take AI to figure out my attitudes when I regularly proclaim that there are no maga in my life more than required by various pre-existing obligation, Luigi Mangione will be remembered as a folk hero, Trump will one day be shown to be ALL through the Epstein files in all the worst ways (as will many Dems and they should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law), and most Democratic leadership is 100% owned by the oligarchy too, as evidenced by things such as their support of Israeli genocide and how much more urgently they are fighting Mamdani than they are Trump in many cases.