My comment was just advising people to be media-literate and consider the source, though I also said that this in itself doesn’t make the article questionable (I actually think it’s quite credible). And I linked to Wikipedia’s article about this news website. I wasn’t trying to defend Israel or be controversial, and it was a bit of a surprise to see this get deleted.

Do SSDs do that automatically in the background, or is all the data I’m not actively refreshing gradually rotting away?

The problem is that USB flash drives don’t keep their data intact for very long when they’re powered down. It lasts long enough for everyday use, but not even as long as a hard disk for archival.

USB sticks and SSDs are no good for long-term storage. The data on them degrades rapidly if they’re not powered up. Spinning disks last longer. So your process would be better done with those.

Huh? USB is a connector, not an archival format.

It’s a shame their capacity lags so far behind current hard drives. And not many drives for these discs are still made, so what are the chances of them becoming unreadable just because no one has equipment to read them?

The thing about the far right is it tends to get out of control and ends up eating its own. Politicians give it momentum and by the time they want to put the brakes on, it’s no longer theirs to stop.

MintPress News is pro-Iran, Syria and Russia (Wikipedia). But that doesn’t mean what they say here is false, just that we should approach it with our critical faculties working.

$20 per month would be enough to discourage me. It’s another relatively costly computer-related subscription and I already feel like I’m losing a battle to keep those minimal. There would have to be some very clear benefits for that price.

Tumbleweed surprised me with how it receives constant, up-to-the-minute updates yet somehow doesn’t ever seem to break.

It also surprised me with how much I like KDE. I had used it way back in the day when it was a bit complicated looking and ugly. These days Plasma makes the whole experience nice.

Every device I have just has a couple of blue ones and a couple of black ones, perhaps some orange ones and some USB-C ports, and good luck figuring out what they all can do. No symbols anywhere.

I have set up OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a couple of my machines with Windows 11 in a KVM virtual machine. Windows runs at a perfectly good speed in this setup, and I use it when I want quick access to proprietary software that only runs in Windows. It’s simpler and more reliable than messing around with Wine. It can be a little more complicated if you want to share folders between guest and host, but there are several ways you can achieve that.

Yes, in addition to MS Office, MacOS is particularly used by a lot of people who work in art or music, and none of the programs they use professionally for that will run on Linux. You can’t just go it alone with free software when all your colleagues expect you to use proprietary tools. And what people like about MacOS is that it is reliable for running these programs with a minimum of fuss, has a solid low-latency sound system (for musicians), and has easy access to Apple features like cloud backup. Imitating its desktop brings none of that.

Shed a tear, if you wish, for Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jenson Huang, whose fortune (on paper) fell by almost $10 billion that day.

Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.

So we know these things work on one person’s computer (theirs) but not on another’s (yours). Such anecdotal experiences are not a reasonable basis on which to judge any OS, positively or negatively.

I suspect it’s not an optimization to make every post you see interesting. For one thing, we tend to find intermittent rewards more fascinating and addictive than reliable ones. For another, if you have to scroll further you’ll see more ads. But if you make it too boring people won’t scroll at all. So the algorithm probably tries to make it just interesting enough to keep people scrolling, but no more.

A feature that has been shown to actively put people off your product. But in the end these companies would rather have investors than users, and it’s the investors they’re marketing to.

I’m in the same position. I prefer free software but there is none that does what Affinity does. If it goes subscription-only and they shut down the bought versions, it will have to be piracy time.

Are they? When they bought it they explicitly promised that they would not change the licensing. And no one believed them. Affinity was the only true competitor to Adobe products with equivalent functionality for a reasonable one-off payment instead of an extortionate subscription. I was so happy to find it - software that actually feels good to buy and use, Of course they’re going to ruin it.

If that happens, no point making anything, since your stuff will get stolen anyway

From a capitalist’s point of view, yes, but we need a society that enables people to act from other incentives than making money. And there are plenty of other reasons to make things.