MudMan

Cool. So not totally screwed then.

It’s normally 1-2 days where I am (not the US, incidentally).

Still, I mean… pretty sure I can survive that long without a toaster (or… you know, go outside and buy one from a shop).

As screwed as a society with same-day online order delivery can be, I guess?

I have a minifridge I use for drinks (admittedly it’s a relatively large household). It has the advantage of having an easily accessible plug, so you can even easily run it on a battery or generator in emergencies. It’s not super cold, but it beats room temperature.

I’ll say that sounds way less crazy to me, being from a relatively rural area. I know multiple people with chest freezers on the side. Health regulations have made butchering pigs at home very impractical, but chickens are still fair game (if a lot more paperwork than they used to be).

You can’t hear it from there, but I am screaming in non-native English speaker.

Or, to put it another way, every single song you know released before 1995.

For reference on how this is different (and how it’s not) to previous instances, here’s mainstream-AF PC World magazine in February 2020:

Windows 7 was understandable before; now it’s a liability. With no security updates and a still-vast market share, Microsoft’s operating system will be a big, juicy target for hackers.

We recommend migrating to Windows 10 if you’re able to, and have a guide explaining your Windows 10 upgrade options (go.pcworld.com/10up) . If you perform only basic tasks on your PC—email, web surfing, and documents—then Linux is a viable, user-friendly option these days. We’ve got a Linux beginner’s guide (go. pcworld.com/lnxg), too, and better yet you can try it for free with no risk to your main Windows 7 installation.

You can probably still upgrade to Windows 10 for free (see page 103), too.

I don’t have APC’s issue on hand, but if anybody wants to share how that compares, do go ahead.

For some additional reference: https://vivaldi.com/blog/replace-windows-7-with-linux/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/01/14/windows-7-support-ends-today-here-are-your-options/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-and-how-to-replace-windows-7-with-linux-mint/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFHBBN0CqXk

Short term history is so fun and so weird.

Nah, it’s the dedicated Nvidia GPU. Gaming PCs with those come with 250-300W power supplies these days. I was using that one specifically for transcoding and to try to self host AI models for a voice assistant, so it did go all in under load. If anything I’m mildly disappointed. The power brick is 100W, I would have expected higher power limits. I guess they saved the rest for the display and the USB ports.

This may be a regional concern. Google has very outdated information where I am, too. You definitely don’t want to default to Google Maps to know if something is open here unless you want to show up to a closed business, and for learning where a place is so you can go look it up on their site they are all mostly interchangeable.

I mean… Organic sorta works, although apparently there’s a new fork and some drama around it? If you’re less hardcore DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead.

I’m not sure I understand the question.

Not my experience. I’ve used a bunch of stuff, and I can tell you a RasPi is what, 10W under load and 4 idling? A repurposed laptop (with a dedicated GPU but screen off) was 11W idling and 45W under load, and a repurposed desktop was about 40W idling and 120W under load.

You maaaay be able to find some laptop with an efficient CPU and iGPU that gets into the realm of a RasPi, and I guess the “identical storage” qualifier helps if you’re adding a bunch of heavy storage to the Pi to bring total consumption up and lower the percentage gap, but my real world, real time measurements don’t quite match that.

That said, if you already have one of those things and not the other the power consumption difference is fairly small in absolute numbers. You may save more money by buying a slighlty better lightbulb for your living room lamp. Definitely recycle whatever you have lying around that will still do the job.

The time I point people at is the early Ubuntu drops when Linux was getting easy to intall, computers were simple to build and magazines would sometimes just pop up in stores with a Linux install CD in the cover. That’s the time I remember more normies suddenly gaining awareness of Linux as an option.

But yeah, I don’t have a problem with any of the stuff you said.

It’s just all unrelated to Windows 10 end of support.

Steam OS and Bazzite are way more relevant than it. Because they fix problems for a subset of users who are mainly focused on gaming.

They don’t do it fully, and not for all users, but yeah, that stuff will move Linux from 1.5% of the Steam survey to 3-5% eventually. That WILL move the needle to some extent.

Now if you did that for Adobe users, video editors, graphic designers, people who HAVE to use Microsoft Office, people who only play Fortnite, people with zero capacity to troubleshoot, people who rely on commercial software with no Linux ports in general, people who have Nvidia cards and want to use Game Mode, people who use other specialized hardware that isn’t currently well supported…

…those things will move the needle.

“My ancient copy of Windows 10 I use as a Chromebook is no longer getting security patches” is, by itself, less of an event than any of those. That’s my entire point.

So just to help me wrap my head around it… where would that AI and smart software be hosted, then?

I don’t need to wonder. I get “so upset” because I hang out here a bunch and it’s boring and repetitive to see the same posts every single day. Especially when they’re kinda weird, wrong and self-defeating.

I’m also not super inclined to letting the Linux/OSS community play the “you’re mad at people being wrong on the Internet” card. Holy crap, is this place not the place to do that with any self-righteousness or moral high ground. In a conversation about lack of self-awareness that may be the biggest instance yet.

Heh, what can I say, nerding out about UI design is definitely part of my general dysfunction.

But yeah, if you’re already in a 19:10 display you generally won’t want the sidebar as much because you already have a naturally taller display, so your workspace is shaped the same as mine when you use horizontal and I use vertical. It’s probably more a problem of proportions that sizes.

Which, hey, is why being able to have a vertical and horizontal tabs option is good. We’re in a world where browsers need to fit not just horizontal and vertical displays on PCs and phones, but a whole bunch of screen aspect ratios.

It doesn’t have a big impact on anybody. Which is the point. The friction IS the impact.

The hype drives attention if you’re targeting the people that don’t already know. That’s not what’s happening, regardless of your impromptu Instagram IT advice anecdotal experience.

Hype driving attention also doesn’t work if the product you’re hyping doesn’t do the thing it needs to do the way the people you’re marketing it at need it to.

Acknowledging either of those things is not negativity or pessimism. If we’re talking about pushing for open source software as a community then denying or ignoring the practical issues is not helpful. OSS isn’t a religion where you proselitize, facts be damned. It’s meant to be a project for an alternative way of handling software development. That video I linked is not an attack, or a bummer, it’s a hopeful sign that contributors and developers often have more clarity on the situation and the work left to do than the user-level advocates and activist forum posters.

You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.

I don’t know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they’re in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just… hide it when I’m not tabbing, so it’s not an issue at all for me. Although I’ll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it’s a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).

I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is… quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.

It is fricking not, though, that’s my point.

I have heard exactly zero normies talk about this. Nobody cares. Just like nobody cared when Windows 7 ended support. People just… kept using it. Today Windows 7 is as high up the Steam hardware survey as Linux Mint.

Windows 10 doesn’t shut down in October, it just… stops receiving security patches for free. Anybody clueless enough to not have migrated or stuck there for hardware reasons either already mitigated the issue or does not care. This is Linux’s Y2K moment. Everybody is expecting this big shift to be a moment and it’s really not going to be.

So I’m getting exhausted for nothing, which just makes it more annoying. Not a single normie space is even thinking about this. This is 100% Linux users talking to other Linux users about this big game-changing moment that’s never gonna happen. The EoL day will come, a couple of tech outlets will run a piece saying “hey, MS ends Windows 10 official support” and maybe a listicle of things to do (“1. Move to Win11, 2. Pay Windows for patches 3. Move to another OS”)…

…and nothing will happen.

We’ll all be here and we’ll all quietly stop talking about it and all this friction generated by this delusional hype will just fizzle out.

At the start of the process I was mildly excited, not about the influx of Windows 10 users, which was obviously not going to be a thing, but about maybe the hype leading to Linux development spaces focusing on long overdue work to ease that transition in time for the deadline. That didn’t really happen, so now we’re all just advertising this weird narrative to each other multiple times a day.

The quiet acknowledgement that… well, yeah, it won’t happen, but don’t break kayfabe just in case there’s a Windows guy looking, just reinforces that point. I would much rather have spent all this energy addressing WHY it won’t happen, or how to address the work that is needed to make it happen. I’d argue THAT is what a “fan and user of FOSS” should be pushing the community to do. In that, you know, it may actually work.

Hah. I fear you and I are not the same, but you and the trumpeters may be equally disappointed.

Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.

Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I’m typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.

The idea is to hide it altogether when you’re not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.

I’ve said it before, but MAN am I excited to get to Windows 10 end of support so the old people and professionals stuck with highly specific hardware can just keep using their Windows 10 and the Linux community finally moves on from this stuff.

I am exhausted of these threads. Maybe we do a two week nostalgia revival when their paid commercial support ends again, but for now, can we make a deal right here to absolutely stop this crap by the end of the year when the needle moves exactly zero percent? Pretty please?