Certainly, it is perfectly valid to just want ideal outcomes for all individuals regardless of the system. You are also not required in any way to discuss your viewpoints with anyone. I will thank you for your time up to this point, and wish you a wonderful day.

I do hope the judge looked him dead in the eyes at the sentencing and said “Bad dog” before rubbing his nose in the evidence bags.

On the positive side, he should be out after 2.13 human years. Sooner with good behavior and completion of an obedience class from a licensed training academy.

That makes the conservative talking point of anchor babies a real thing. Make your way onto US soil to give birth by any means necessary, and suddenly you are granted a pathway to citizenship and a guaranteed legal status from day one?

That kind of massive shortcut of the immigration system would break the system. Birth tourism would skyrocket along with all other forms of illegal immigration. There is a reason no country on earth allows that.

Do you not think that doing so would be a huge incentive driving illegal border crossings or visa overstays to take such a shortcut? Do you think that creating a parallel alternative immigration pathway such as that is a good thing?

I certainly disagree with how the trump administration is operating, and fuck anyone who says non-citizens don’t have a right to a day in court, but how can carving out loopholes and shortcuts be good for the long term health of the system? Unless crippling the system to the point of implosion to cause a reform is the goal, but I find that to be too close to the conservatives crippling other public sector programs to cause private sector reform to profit off it.

This is a bit of a catch 22, the child wasn’t deported her parents were. I don’t even doubt that ICE was lazy and didn’t make sure the mother knew what was happening and every option available to their child. This is a shit show how Trump is handling mass deportation instead of expanding the immigration courts to process the backlogs and get everyone their constitutionally protected day in court. ICE has been done a disservice by Trump and deserves a lot of the shit the department is getting.

The child is a US citizen, 100%, but that doesn’t offer protection from prosecution to their parents. A 2 year old who’s US citizen parent or parents commit a crime will have their parent/parents taken away when put in jail, and then be given into the custody of a relative or taken into foster care. This is not unique to immigration.

Would you rather the child have been unilaterally taken from their mother and placed into US foster care when no family was identified that could take them in the US? Then we are separating children from their families, which is fucked up.

There historically have been limited stays of deportation available for illegal immigrant parents of US citizen children, but this administration is obviously being extremely tough on those. If you want to give automatic deportation immunity to anyone who has a child on US soil until those children are legally adults, you turn “anchor babies” from being basically a myth into an actual reality.

There is no perfect solution for any of this.

I hate shopping at Lowe’s now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one “cashier” can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it’s just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I’m watch the death spiral in full swing.

Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe’s. It’s like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.

I was very concerned scrolling the comments that it looked like no one was going to mentioned Margaret Weis. She is an amazing author stand alone, and Dragon Lance was one of the first big Fantasy series I really cut my teeth on.

This is why I have stopped buying anything Blizzard. They removed the Warcraft 3 I payed for and replaced it with a completely unplayable something I didn’t want. Ubisoft has been on my shit list for a while for unrelated reasons too, but now they are on my never again list. And I never even played The Crew. Bad business is bad business even if it doesn’t directly impact me.

The Juke is the perfect amount of hideous that it flips the bit back to being great. Even the Cube is the right kind of quirky.

At the very least back up your Audible library in a DRM free format with something like Libation.

I am still using Audible because their web player works in my restricted office, and the authors get a couple of pennies from dragon, but have my library safely exported to ensure continued access and prevent fuckery like this.

I’m sure Mint is in a great place now, I enjoyed it when I tried it 8-10 years ago during my last foray into Linux. I looked at the reviews complaining about Mint as outliers, but did the same for Manjaro and PopOS and all the others. PopOS was what I was initially planning on for Nvidia support, but my 2080S started acting like it might be dying and I picked up a 7900XTX to open up my Linux options more.

BTRFS snapshots sounded like a good “training wheel” for easy restoration after I inevitably break something, which was a selling point for Manjaro. Rolling release is also both a plus and a minus. It is easy to get choice paralysis with trying to jump into Linux, especially if you don’t want to do a bunch of initial distro hopping to feel out the different options.

That is super exciting, I’ll give it a try. Thanks for pointing that out, I thought it was still in the rumours and supported speculation phase. If this trend continues then Linux will be more and more viable going forward. SteamDeck pushing the gaming scene has been huge, I hope the momentum just keeps increasing.

Thank you for the insight, that is actually useful information for me. I currently have a 4tb nvme with a small (250gb) C drive and the rest as an E drive (Program installs and Games) for Windows, the same general setup with a second 4tb nvme for Linux, and a 3rd separate SATA SSD that acts as my “home” drive with Documents/Pictures/Downloads /etc. I planned and sharing that third drive between Windows and Linux so I don’t require duplicating data.

A home server/NAS is also in the works, and I’ll be looking into Samba. It’s just been a bit enlightening finding out all the unicorns and rainbows on the Linux side of the fence are equines of indeterminate parentage with paper cones glued to their foreheads and RGB light strips soldered together with a “trust me” sticker on them.

Microsoft is still a ghetto, and Apple is a WASP country club where the HOA president lives next door and is “retired”. Computers are both at an all-time high for choice and in some of the worst states it’s been in.

There’s the rub. Every distro has vocal supporters and detractors, and appears simultaneously good or “dog shit”. Determining who is accurate is a crapshoot, and there apparently is no right answer. Manjaro was attractive because of built-in automatic snapshots for recovery when I inevitably break my installation. There was also previously a well reviewed gaming focused Manjaro fork, though I stuck with the main fork.

Mint had just as vocal of detractors saying it was unstable. Same with Ubuntu and I dislike the company focus anyway. Arch is Arch, and Manjaro is an Arch fork anyway. It’s the same problem someone looking at starting One Piece or Bleach or Naruto have: there is too much and even the fans appear to hate it more than anyone else, lol.

I don’t want to distro hop, that doesn’t interest me at my current stage. I want long term (at least a year) in between reinstallations. More self hosting is lined up for the future, so desktop is dipping my toes in the water as my server is piecemealed together.

I am mid switch, but it’s not been smooth or easy. I chose Manjaro and maybe I chose poorly. I am a lifelong techie, and have used Ubuntu and Mint in short stints in the past, but the transition is rough.

I didn’t attempt the switch before because I primarily played Destiny 2 and Bungie hates Linux. The enshittification of Destiny drove me away, and in theory the games I am playing now should work. I have had mixed results however.

I play Darktide and Vermintide 2 and heavily use their modding scenes to make them fully playable. Vortex mod manager is a huge bonus for this, and I still haven’t been able to set this up.

My Elgato equipment has community support, but has a bunch of steps to get working that I haven’t spent the time to fully research or attempt.

I still haven’t set up an automatic mount point for my shared NTFS drive to load on boot, both because I don’t have a good grasp on the fstab and because Windows does a chkdisk every time I mount it in Linux. Dual access storage still seems iffy as of 2025.

I am going to keep trying, because I hate Microsoft right now more than I dislike the learning curve and limitations. Not sure if that is enough to make this the year of the Linux desktop though.

You’re absolutely right, I feel almost as bad attempting to use Mac as I do Linux but it is a less powerful OS and I just accept there are things I can’t do. Plus it IS designed to be idiot proof.

For Linux, I run into the problem that there is a floor of knowledge assumed in every tutorial. Auto mount my secondary NTFS drive at boot? Just do XYZ in fstab. Don’t know where fstab is and where to make that entry? You’re SOL. I am comfortable in command line to an extent, but it’s been a long time since I dailied DOS, honestly don’t spend a lot of time in PowerShell, and networking equipment is a completely different beast.

Microsoft may suck, but I can usually find my way through a script or formula or something with their knowledgebase. My skill set doesn’t translate well, and I am finding it harder to learn than I probably should. I probably need to take an introductory Linux course.

This right here drove me to dual boot Manjaro. I can’t be the only person who has stacked monitors instead of side-by-side monitors. The UI is an abomination and the telemetry even moreso.

Linux is not turn key, and as a significantly PC gaming user it has limitations. I still have not set up modding yet, and whether Vortex mod manager will work or not is still unclear. I can’t get more than 60Hz out of my monitor on HDMI, which is required if I want 175Hz and 10bit color due to DisplayPort 1.4 limitations. Sleep causes my motherboard to permanently display a “CPU unknown” QLED Code. Instructions on simple tasks like creating a permanent drive mount at boot are confusing because there are steps that seem to be just assumed by everyone writing them. Etc.

I am working my way through these, but still find myself in Windows 11 most of the time because unfortunately it just works. Software is natively written for it, there is no searching for how to get peripherals or programs to work. I say this as a lifelong tech nerd who started on Windows 3.1 and DOS, and who’s job involves working with Linux based equipment. This shouldn’t be as hard as it has been to transition, but it is.

They must be talking about Eve Online (spreadsheets in space), it’s the only logical explanation.

The real question is if there was enough backlash to the spyware crap with Civ 6 that they learned their lesson or not.

All the talk the last few months about SteamOS and Bazzite (plus Windows 10’s imminent death) got me to finally let up a Linux dual boot. Choosing a distro is a fairly contrary process with half the review lists being useless “tech media”, half AI buzzword word salad, and half distro stans trying to sell you on their version by pointing out flaws in the others.

I jumped in and am now on Manjaro as I use my computer primarily for gaming and media consumption. I originally planned this because of Manjaro Gaming edition, but Manjaro Gaming edition hasn’t been updated in years so looks like abandonware. Regular Manjaro it is, and add what I need as I go. I hope.

I decided to try Manjaro over PopOS due to enough anecdotal reviews about PopOS stability issues to make me second guess it. I have used Mint on old hardware in the past, and it was ok but I was concerned about gaming support and Nvidia drivers (accidentally jumped from Nvidia to Amd anyway, but that’s another story). Ubuntu has the same issue as PopOS on top of being the corporate distro. I also still have a bad taste from trying Ubuntu years ago and gaming attempts on it sucked.

I do not want to distro hop to find the promised land or just to see what the other grass is like, it’s just not something I am interested in and never have been. As bad as Windows can be, I have usually been able to ride an installation for multiple years barring external incident. I want to primarily sit down and use my computer. Reinstalls should be reserved for hardware refreshes and new builds.

If SteamOS can eventually simplify the decision paralysis involved in making the jump to Linux, it is going to be an absolute win. As a hard core techie with decades of experience building PCs, if I had this much trouble making the switch then I expect an even worse experience for the regular Joe.

Well I am going to put it to the test and see if it’s available anywhere to binge watch. I remember it being perfectly fine and enjoyable, but never one I was intentionally waiting to watch. Time to find out if it holds up or even gets better with age.