nyan

Hmm. Considering the number of packages in a Gentoo base system and what package.provided does, [anything]->Gentoo shouldn't be that difficult. Of course, whether "work your way through about twenty packages one at a time, then just uninstall the rest of the old system and reinstall everything using Portage" violates the spirit of the challenge is another question.

I'd say his number one fear is probably attack ads being made illegal.

There's a large swathe of people who want comfort food entertainment—unchallenging and similar to what they've enjoyed watching/reading/listening to before—at least some of the time. It makes sense that LLMs would be good at filling that need, since they can pretty much only generate more of the same.

Yet more proof that we are living in Bizarro World. Imagine travelling ten years back in time and trying to convince people this would happen.

Proper reform would require pulling out of . . . I think it's three . . . large international treaties with a lot more signatories than just the US. Copyright terms have been too long for decades, not just since the last trilateral trade treaty.

One thing we could do immediately without having to negotiate with anyone outside the country is abolish crown copyright, though. It wouldn't free up a lot of stuff, but it would be a start.

The peripherals were mostly dead before it reach the end of support in windows.

Not my experience at all—I have stuff 20+ years old that's still in working order. Maybe you're particularly hard on your peripherals.

Sure you can. You just can't win it.

We know. It's one of those things where a system was just allowed to sprout up without any thought being put into it, and now whenever someone tries to fix it, the vested interests howl like my cats do when you lift the sardines out of reach.

"Northern Ontario" begins around Parry Sound, for most purposes.

The political gradient is . . . weird. Much of the north proper actually leans orange when voting, but more for labour rights/rural rights/indigenous rights reasons than for support of LGBTQ+ rights. Down near Gravenhurst, I think you're mostly looking more at center-right. The best way to find out for sure what you'd be facing, if no one chimes in who's actually from that area, is to keep an eye on local news sources for a while and, given your specific concerns, talk to local Pride groups (from the looks of it, muskokapride.com would be one place to start).

Whether or not an older machine "runs well" is highly dependent on what you're using it for. I only very recently (like, after the new year) retired a 16-year-old laptop with 2GB RAM that was running Gentoo, when I got a good deal on something that would compile gcc in a reasonable amount of time rather than needing to be left to run overnight. However, most people don't need to compile large software on a regular basis, and the old machine was still doing okay in its role as a large-screen-coarse-resolution pseudo-video-iPod, ssh client, quick lookup device for Perl manpages, emergency Internet query device, and general backup/light-use system. Worthless for gaming and somewhat sluggish on the Web, naturally, but that wasn't what I needed it for.

I'd expect anything with 4GB RAM and 4 CPU threads to produce somewhat acceptable performace on most individual webpages (multiple Javascript-heavy sites might be a challenge, though, so stick to 1-2 tabs at a time), which would make the main issue most people would have with my old laptop disappear.

There are two concepts in UI design that often pull in opposite directions. They are usability (the ability to do advanced stuff easily) and discoverability (the ability to find unfamiliar functions in the interface without resorting to the manual/the Internet).

Command lines are highly usable, but they're not very discoverable. Most people have been trained to want the reverse—discoverable, but often not very usable—and so the command line scares them. It's less a logical reaction than an emotional one, although not wanting to waste time on something they feel they shouldn't have to deal with does figure in.

Thing is, Windows' "everything is in the GUI" is an illusion. If you have to fix ailing Windows machines, or even just make one produce anything other than the default telemetry-infested user experience, sooner or later you're going to end up mucking around on the command line or in arcane undiscoverable interfaces that are an order of magnitude worse than anything Linux has ever produced. Give me a command line over regedit any day. But most people outsource the repairs to their ailing Windows machines so that they don't have to touch this stuff themselves. For Average Joe, finding someone who will fix his ailing Linux box for him is more difficult, because they don't set up counters in the big-box stores that most people buy their computers from.

On the gripping hand, if you're trying to connect an older external device, you're more likely to get it working eventually under Linux (which usually keeps device drivers until they bit-rot out of the kernel tree) than Windows (whose drivers are version-specific and only get ported forward if the manufacturer thinks there's money in it). Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other, as far as I'm concerned, and device setup is a thing you should only have to do rarely anyway.