Because this here is for support. That there is for evangelism.

It’s not thinking. It’s just spicy autocomplete; having ingested most of the web, it “knows” that what follows a question about the meaning of a phrase is usually the definition and etymology of that phrase; there aren’t many examples online of anyone asking for the definition of a phrase and being told “that doesn’t exist, it’s not a real thing.” So it does some frequency analysis (actually it’s probably more correct to say that it is frequency analysis) and decides what the most likely words to come after your question are, based on everything it’s been trained on.

But it doesn’t actually know or think anything. It just keeps giving you the next expected word until it meets its parameters.

I’m a newcomer to Linux (only about a year in), but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Mine wasn’t at all. Steam has done a lot of work to make this seamless so that more games can be played on the Steam Deck. Check the Proton DB to see what your gamea look like.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

I have very little experience with this, but probably. Linux users tend to be tinkerers.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

Same answer for both: There’s Wine, and a whole bunch of setup scripts that can get even stuff like Adobe Creative Suite working with it. Worst case scenario, there’s VirtualBox for the one or two apps you might need to run Windows for. But I find that the open source options, while they might have a learning curve, tend to be substantially better than either of those options.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

More or less, but you can pick and choose what updates you want to install and when. Most distros have a package manager that’ll let you update the kernel, the drivers, the middleware, the desktop environment, all your apps, and even the package manager itself on your schedule, from one interface. You can also just ignore it and never update anything, though I wouldn’t recommend that.

How does digital security work on Linux?

Very well. It’s much more locked-down by default, for one thing.

Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?

Quite the opposite. Open source projects are well known for being less vulnerable out of the box; Linux in particular is used by huge companies as a lightweight server OS, so it has a lot of highly-paid people committing security fixes back down to the open source project.

Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Antivirus is a bandaid on Windows, provided because the OS was written with certain naive assumptions that let attackers get access they shouldn’t have. On Linux, those assumptions were not made. No application can be installed without your root password, for instance; downloaded files can’t even be executed without specifically making them executable; and access to edit system files is restricted by a very robust permissions system.

All of that, plus Linux’s much lower market share, also means that no malware authors are really wasting their time trying to write Linux malware. The attack vector just isn’t worth the extra effort.

So no, there’s no integrated antivirus; but for most users in most situations, it’s not needed at all.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Your mileage may vary significantly, but anecdotally it seems like most architectures from AMD and Nvidia have good support.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

Maybe, but like with Windows, I assume you have to really go out of your way to do so.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

I’ve only used Ubuntu and Mint. Mint has so far been the easiest and most user-friendly of the two. It’s also regularly touted as the best for newcomers.

Ah yes, the recommended oil checks on a famously electric vehicle. /s

I get what you’re saying, but more likely is that nobody would ever notice. Which also seems unlikely, since we’re quite an oversharing culture.

Huh. TIL. Neat!

Well that, uh

That certainly was a comment

Whew, yes sir

Definitely a collection of words there, yup

Actually, Randall Munroe did the calculations for his “What If” series. It is net positive in cost over a long enough time, which means that it will eventually be net positive in emissions, assuming it lasts long enough.

Fair point.

If that was a real thing, at least in charges strong enough to harness for work, surely we wouldn’t ground sensitive electronics to metal water pipes. And metal fuel containers would be spontaneously exploding all the time. I can’t find any evidence of this phenomenon anywhere but in this article. Can you provide a source?

Charge separation is a real thing. It’s the opposite of how an LED works. It’s not very efficient in that direction, but it’s real.

It works with electrons being excited by photons, though.

What that has to do with the interface of water and air, I can’t figure out.

Remarkably, I was just reading some old xkcd "What If"s during lunch, when I happened across this one (third question).

tl;dr: at 2012 energy costs (and assuming perfectly efficient turbines), capturing kinetic energy for electricity on a house’s footprint in the rainiest place in the US takes about a century to be worth the cost of manufacturing and installing it. That’s in the best-case scenario.

Edit: turns out OP’s article is about charge separation, not driving turbines.

That’s not nothing. It’s almost nothing, but not literally nothing.

Sure, but then you’d also expect to hear about Teslas with odometers that massively underreport the distance, too. Or that fail altogether. And while no one would be likely to report the former, the latter might be a bigger deal.

They’re not good, but they are easy to win…if you have all the manufacturing facilities and are okay with plunging your country into depression for the sake of absolutely no benefit whatsoever.

Wait, what’s the definition of “win” again?

So now we see whether Trump gives in or makes up bigger and bigger numbers. “900%! 1,776%! A BILLION PERCENT!”

He’s like a 4-year-old king being used by his regent to consolidate power.

It feels longer than that to me (weren’t people talking about America’s influence when discussing our entry into the world wars?), but you’re absolutely right: it took decades to accrue, and it’ll all be frittered away in weeks.

Of course, Trump’s no stranger to bankruptcy caused by mismanagement.

I also wonder about stacking them, particularly in places with a lot of rainfall.

“Take over the world” might be a bit of hyperbole. I’m talking mostly about his desire to take over Greenland, to take back Panama, to annex Canada, to be put in charge of Palestine, etc. Of course, this too is Trump trying to enrich himself; how many Trump properties would end up being built in Greenland if the US ended up with it? How much would shipping companies pay him in kickbacks if he took the Panama Canal and offered them priority passage? How much money would he and his cadre make by decreasing regulation in Canada, or getting access to Canadian oil fields? And, of course, you’ve already heard of his plan for the “Palestinian Riviera.”

He wants to “take over the world” in the sense that he wants to rule over more swaths of land and extract the value from them, and in the sense that he wants to tell Keir Starmer to jump and hear him say “how high, sir?”–but yeah, I agree, he doesn’t seem to have the desire to actually do any ruling.

Definitely a Russian asset. I think that’s more or less clear at this point. But the acts he’s taking seem more…stupid than calculated right now. I don’t think it’s his goal to destroy America (though it’s certainly possible that his handlers want that); I think it’s his goal to enrich himself, and he’s just not too bothered by the prospect of destroying America in the process.