Fucking politicians. All the same ain’t they.

Edit: …is what they are thinking.

1375…

We can work with metals, so we can probably make boilers.

I invent steam power 400 years early.

1 in 10: Not sure

2 in 10: Average 3 in 10: Great

If you all could just try to not take the rest of the planet with you, that’ll be great.

…most kids…

Most kids? ⁠(⁠⊙⁠_⁠⊙⁠)

No, we say “FUCK! It’s cold”.

I knew as I wrote it that somebody would come along and say “Wine/Proton is not an emulator” but I didn’t want to get into the detail.

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

A lot of stuff runs with windows emulation as if it’s native. It’s the same method the steam deck uses and so Valve actively do work to keep it working. The main problem is games with heavy anti-cheat.

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

Generally, yes. I think so.

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

See above.

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

There’s .NET libraries for Linux, but things have to be recompiled to use them.

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

The distribution maintainer will issue updates on a regular basis. Update procedure is different for different distros, but all have a push-button update scheme. It’s pretty solid these days.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Keep your system up to date with security updates, and you’ll tend to be fine. Smaller user base tends to mean that there’s far less malware. Antivirus isn’t necessary.

Obviously phishing scams don’t care what OS you’re on, so mind what you click.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

AMD ones are very solid.

Nvidia ones can be a pain from what I hear, but I don’t buy green.

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

No.

That said… You can always wipe a disk when you install an OS.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

Download a few Live-USB images and try them out. You don’t need to install them to get a desktop and a browser up. You can see if there’s any compatibility issues with your hardware.

Whichever works for you, go with it.

Errr no. The two largest populations on the planet are in direct competition.

For a peacekeeping force to be sent, there has to be peace.

…but what are we actually trying to measure here? The miles travelled, or the wear and tear that’s caused by the wheels spinning?

Do they exist anymore?

Interesting that it’s just a cost of doing business in China as well.

Obviously. How much?

I was more meaning “on what scale?”. I assume he wasn’t a few hundred short.

He was fined €240M? What had he done?

The safety violation will be that the ammunition wasn’t stored in the proper storage bunkers and was therefore vulnerable to an attack setting off the whole lot.

…and then an attack did just that.

I’m the picture of health

I’ve put on a bit of weight since then, but I wouldn’t say that I’m giant.

You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.

Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader “LiLo” to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.

All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know

• what graphics chip you had
• how much memory it had
• which clock generator it used
• which RAMDAC was on the board
• what video timings your monitor supported
• the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode

This level of detail was needed with every little thing

• how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
• which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
• was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
• what speeds did your modem support
• does it need any special setup codes
• what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
• what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it

The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.