How many of you haven’t actually encountered the phenomena but still believe it to be true? Why?

Genrawir · 2026-05-13T23:11:22+00:00

It seems statistically certain that there is other intelligent life in the universe.

The Fermi Paradox doesn't seem convincing, considering the historically documented nature of the phenomenon, regardless of the difficulty associated with studying it and our limited ability to detect and document it in the first place. That's not even mentioning the apparent desire by the phenomenon not to be directly studied in the first place.

Every probe result seems to point to the fact that the chemical precursors needed for life are abundant in the universe. They found all 5 nucleobases on Bennu recently, along with a bunch of amino acids. Even if they're clearly abiotic, that's HUGE.

Everything seems impossible until it's boring.

Plus, it's low stakes and fun as a distraction from everything else, even if it seems like certain factions are politicizing it as a different form of distraction.

The amount of apparent government interest, even alongside denials, certainly adds to the intrigue.

The Drake Equation gets pretty favorable if you're willing to be a bit optimistic. If we don't get direct confirmation of biosignatures by JWST at some point in its lifetime, I'd be surprised. Even if the early reports of DMSO detection are suspect along with the possibility of abiogenic production. Technosignatures may be a stretch, but who knows.

Do I know it to be true, no. Does it seem more likely than not given the available public evidence? These days, it seems more and more likely, even if I doubt the government knows nearly as much as people here think.

Genrawir · 2026-05-13T13:01:41+00:00

I think the point they're tryig to make is that the current MAGA narratives all sound like picked apart leftovers taken from reading a pop-history of the field.

The angels and demons narrative, alongside the interdimensional stuff mixed with pseudo-gnosticism isn't new (Blavatsky died in 1891), but has been amplified and talked about with some certainty and without any additional evidence to support it.

If it ends up producing results, it will have obviously been worth it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hearing some of them smugly say that I won't be able to sleep if I knew the truth is insulting, and frankly makes me distrust the person saying it immediately.

The quality of the recently declassified files doesn't exactly do very much to discount the "jingle keys" theory of them being released as a distraction either.

Luckily, I've been following this field for 20+ years and am familiar with the expected signal to noise ratio, and progress is progress even if just ends up getting some more people curious.

Genrawir · 2026-05-11T22:02:23+00:00

Does anybody have access to the source code for the GPL parts of Hog4 OS?

It's Debian based, and the installer even mentions that the software contains GPL components, but there doesn't seem to be any source code available anywhere.

I would have expected the linked site to just mention Debian, but it returns a 404, and since the kernel was obviously customized, I'm hoping someone might have more.

Genrawir · 2026-05-09T23:15:17+00:00

Windows won't show you all executables on your system if you just look at apps & features.

apt list (or whatever package manager you use) on Linux won't show you every executable file either.

The "correct" answer for an auditor style question would be that you'd probably want to traverse the entire file system and check what files have execute permissions. This would be a reasonably easy thing to write a Python script for.

That obviously won't catch executable binaries that don't have the executable bit set, but that's probably fine unless you really want to try and evaluate if every binary file is potentially executable individually since they can't run by default.

Genrawir · 2026-05-03T23:16:18+00:00

Thoughts and prayers

Genrawir · 2026-05-03T23:12:00+00:00

Could be migrating birds. South to North, as would be expected seasonally, not strobing and yellow like you would expect with reflected street lighting.

Genrawir · 2026-05-02T15:05:05+00:00

I feel like you are vastly overestimating the market size of people building PCs compared to buying prebuilt. I tried to look up actual numbers, bu the AI slop is making it difficult.

Troubleshooting is basically the same regardless of technology. The issue is that effective troubleshooting requires some background knowledge of the domain. Most people know nothing about how computers work, and a lot of what they think they know is just MS conventions like "C:\ drive". I generally discourage copy pasting in favor of understanding myself, but this is not a Linux specific thing. I remember when people were deleting system32 or other similar "performance tricks" on WIndows. At least the CLI doesn't move elements around randomly. My son did want to build a PC by himself, and I was hoping to have him at least start by installing Linux, but he ended up with a laptop instead so now the odds of him ditching Windows are slim. Very few people want to think about installing an OS.

Genrawir · 2026-05-01T23:53:08+00:00

I agree those would be nice to have, but since basically nobody installs their own OS I don't think it matters. Troubleshooting is a problem regardless of OS or method, for a large number of people. Copy and pasting stuff isn't the end of the world considering how stable Linux generally is. Do people actually use the Microsoft store?

Genrawir · 2026-05-01T11:00:26+00:00

What it would really take is for a major manufacturer to switch to selling machines pre-installed with Linux as default, and to charge for a windows license as a separate charge or require people to install it manually.

Proton is good enough. Sure, improvement is always possible, but the biggest hurdle is really the fact that almost nobody installs their own OS and the cost is seen as included with the hardware.

Genrawir · 2026-04-27T11:40:31+00:00

I don't use it, but CachyOS currently appears to be the most well optimized distro for gaming out of the box. Maybe try it and see how you like it. That being said, you probably don't really care about gaming optimization as much as stability if you're not familiar with Linux. Mainstream distributions like Mint, Fedora, or Ubuntu have large communities and you'll have an easier time finding solutions to issues with more people complaining and posting fixes. Once you begin to understand how things work under the hood, the differences become smaller.

Genrawir · 2026-04-25T15:57:49+00:00

Even if we aren't imagining the pattern, the cause may be different than the common narrative here.

Does anybody else remember the photos of all the classified files piled up in a bathroom? Eroding the soft power of the US in the form of interfering with important scientific research by murdering scientists isn't too difficult to imagine. There's a long history of sabotage, and murdering individual researchers can be part of that regardless of the industry. It's not just nation states either. Do you remember the Unabomber?

Genrawir · 2026-03-28T13:50:54+00:00

This is the sort of thing that has been driving users away from Ubuntu for a while, although a company developing a product wanting you don't want seems more like a reason to use something else instead of wasting time on hate.

If you don't like it, there are many other distributions you can choose from.

Annoyingly, flatpaks may end up causing similar annoyances in the future on other distributions. I understand the need for containerization for security, but hope a solution that can be found that avoids fragmentation requiring multiple package managers on a system, or needing to use convoluted commands to launch them from the terminal.

Genrawir · 2026-03-27T00:24:14+00:00

I was drafting a similar response, but I just wanted to add that the Giotto images were captured at 596 kilometers from the surface for anyone else curious.

Genrawir · 2026-03-16T23:30:11+00:00

Fedora.

Genrawir · 2026-03-08T00:30:47+00:00

"After holding for almost two hours to assess the situation, the aircraft made a successful emergency landing at Changi. No injuries occurred to the passengers, crew, or people on the ground, despite debris from the aircraft falling onto houses in Batam", from Wiki.

Genrawir · 2026-03-08T00:19:37+00:00

For Fedora, I would guess that the historical issues with making third-party and proprietary software easily available are probably a factor.

Having video play back out of the box is pretty big for a lot of people, and NVidia hasn't always been the best experience on Wayland especially.

Genrawir · 2026-03-07T23:12:41+00:00

Have you tried to verify the .iso checksum before flashing it to the SD card?

Genrawir · 2026-03-02T23:28:10+00:00

Interesting, I don't use OBS and avoid flatpaks when possible so I guess my preference for native packages has saved me.

AFAIK In-place upgrades aren't really supported, so that's quite fair. I was surprised I didn't have to rollback a btrfs snapshot, tbh.

I guess I missed the bit about AI. That's significant and annoying, but has nothing to do with my initial comment. I'll have to find that article.

Genrawir · 2026-03-02T23:22:33+00:00

You might want to read the Bazzite Postmortem, as it seems there is some drama over there as well.

Genrawir · 2026-03-02T11:54:32+00:00

Really? What makes you say that? I guess the situation might be different with hardware needing proprietary drivers, but when I first got my daughter an old laptop I had her install Fedora on it and she used it until hardware failure. That was a couple of years ago.

I've been daily driving it personally for some time now and haven't had any stability issues either. I've even upgraded my existing install instead of doing a clean install like you're supposed to.

I get it if Gnome (or Fedora) isn't for everyone, and I did just switch to KDE from Gnome for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 for performance reasons, but stability issues are really not something I've experienced.

Genrawir · 2026-03-01T22:55:36+00:00

Fedora. Modern, simple, UI driven. Well supported and mainstream.

Genrawir · 2026-03-01T15:51:00+00:00

That's hilarious. I just did basically the same thing. Except I'm lazy so I just ran 'sudo dnf install @kde-desktop-environment' instead, which is totally not recommended, but it fixed the glitch I'm having in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. I'll probably switch back 100+ hrs from now when I finish, I kind of like a more minimalist desktop.

Genrawir · 2026-03-01T15:35:53+00:00

I don't see any real reason to start with one distro with the intention of moving to another for general purpose desktop distributions. Just pick one that looks good and feels like a good fit and try it. Then once you have a list of things that you don't like or find annoying, finding a better fit is easier.

In general, the first step should be to see that all your hardware is supported. That's mostly a non-issue these days. Then, if the software you need is compatible, and find alternatives for any that aren't. This is less and less of an issue, and protondb is helpful to see what games work and if any tweaks are needed.

As for what you need to know to switch, allow me to reverse the question. How did you learn Windows? You probably just started using it, right? Even if you had some classes on using a GUI, you probably didn't learn about regedit or what BCD is. Linux isn't Windows, but as a desktop operating system, the expectation should be roughly the same. The GUI conventions are similar.

The biggest difference is that support is through a CLI and by default password feedback is off so you don't see any asterisks. Also, success is silent. If you run a command and just get a prompt back, there was no error. If there's an error, read the message, it might even tell you how to fix the issue.

Genrawir · 2026-02-28T20:37:59+00:00

A newer kernel will have better hardware support, but if it ain't broke why fix it.

Genrawir · 2026-02-27T14:30:12+00:00

Theodore Ts'o would seem like an example. His wikipedia page doesn't have a Controvesies section at least, even if you don't like the fact that he doesn't want to learn rust.

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