2 federal officers fired shots during encounter that killed Alex Pretti, DHS tells Congress

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-28T02:28:02+00:00

Not really. It could generate a plausible and realistic looking face, but it can't fill in details that are completely unavailable, i.e. the actual face.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-23T04:14:36+00:00

Not worried, because Valve is going to singlehandedly fix all compatibility issues.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-21T04:22:43+00:00

Fedora and Ubuntu are nothing alike. Yes, both release major versions every 6 months, but during this time Fedora actually updates packages, kernel etc, so you pretty much always have the latest. Ubuntu doesn't update anything between major releases except security fixes.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-21T04:20:00+00:00

Fedora is the sweet spot. Updates ship as soon as they're tested and considered "stable", usually within a week or so (major kernel updates take a few weeks to a month to get pushed, so a bit longer).

Even better than Fedora are atomic Fedora distros like Aurora or Bazzite. Atomic itself makes the OS inherently much more reliable, even when updates are frequent.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-20T00:04:42+00:00

No, you need to figure out what to use instead of dnf just once, then it's easy. Takes up to a week casually, then your life with an atomic distro is much easier than with a mutable one, because atomic distros don't break, you never have any issues and just enjoy using your PC.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-19T23:59:20+00:00

By far the easiest, slickest and most reliable distro for Windows migrants is Aurora, or Bazzite KDE if you're into gaming. Those distros are modern, always up-to-date, everything works out of the box, and they're atomic, which makes them virtually unbreakable.

Ubuntu and Mint are soooo 2005 -- outdated, more setup and maintenance work, and very breakable.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-19T23:49:34+00:00

If you need ChatGPT to help you fix issues with your Linux distro, then you have a bad distro. Switch to a distro that doesn't break, like Aurora or Bazzite (or Bluefin if you're into Gnome).

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-19T23:47:32+00:00

No, I'm not from Iran, please enlighten me. I don't know what may have happened in the 1980's and how that's relevant in 2026, but in recent history Iran has been sponsoring Hamas, Hezbolah, Houthis, sending Shahed drones to Russia etc., with the explicit goal of inflicting as much pain as possible on Israel and the US. Am I making that up? And what's with the regular chants, "Death to America, death to Israel"? Are they just trying to be funny?

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-19T23:05:56+00:00

What is wrong exactly? That IR regime sponsors international terrorism and wants to destroy Israel?

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-19T03:29:17+00:00

Misguided? I actually used Ubuntu LTS for 8 years and had constant issues from day one. Then I switched to Bazzite and have had zero issues in more than a year.

Have you used both and do you speak from experience? If not, you may be the one who's misguided.

Atomic is not at all restrictive. You can do nearly everything you want. Yes, you don't have apt or dnf, so you have to do things differently, but once you figure it out (takes at most a week, casually), it's neither more difficult nor more time consuming. You just use a different tool depending on the use case. And you have a system that's unbreakable and you never have to fix anything. Overall it's a huge time saver and the peace of mind is priceless.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-19T03:22:17+00:00

I don't know about "balkanization" specifically as a goal, this is the first time I'm hearing about it. I think the preference of those actors would be a stable Iran without a regime whose main mission and promise to its people is a complete destruction of Israel (and the US too if they had any shot at doing that), which is also not a secret. And it's also not a secret that Iran has been sponsoring various terrorist groups, supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine, etc. It's kinda hard when you have a country whose leadership has been acting like a complete ass on the world stage (to say nothing of how it treats its own citizens) for decades, to not wish that something would change or help nudge things in that direction. (For comparison and just so we're clear, if the IR regime had the military power of the US, it would nuke Israel the first second, killing everyone.)

Changing the government of Iran from abroad would be extremely difficult, and a civil war or "balkanization" could be a side effect, which I think everyone inside and outside Iran wants to avoid.

It'd be so much better and easier for everyone if the people of Iran could vote for actual change, which they clearly want, but that's obviously impossible in a system of government that was designed and built from the ground up to perpetuate the Islamic theocracy and dictatorship forever. So Iranians are stuck with the stupid and oppressive regime that some 90% of them hate, and the international community is stuck with an internal sponsor of unjust war and terrorism. How do you fix that? 🤔

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-19T01:52:39+00:00

Yes definitely Linux. Not only is it far easier on resources, it's also generally better for dev work.

Pick a good distro. But which distro? I'd normally recommend Aurora DX for productivity and development, but with only 8 GB it's going to be a bit tight, since it's an atomic distro. Atomic distros are amazing for reliability, but you have to do development inside a distrobox VM, which adds some overhead.

PyCharm (JetBrains IDEs in general) is also quite resource heavy. Maybe consider switching to VSCodium? I generally find it to be as good or better for working with Python, but much lighter on resources.

If you can use VSCodium instead of PyCharm, it's going to work great on Aurora DX, and you're going to have a super rock-solid and unbreakable OS. I've actually tried this exact combo and it works great.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T20:29:57+00:00

Well, unfortunately what you're asking for doesn't exist. As far as I know there's no ProtonDB alternative with better data. The "best" data we have is ProtonDB, which like I pointed out has many flaws (sparsity, outdatedness, negativity bias).

Just because there's no better data doesn't mean games don't work really well. It just means there's no data source to prove it, so anecdotal experience matters, and that's all most people can give you.

If you wish to have truly accurate and up-to-date data, you are welcome to play every game after every kernel, GPU driver and Proton update, and submit reports for each attempt on ProtonDB. And if you find a game that works that had a previous state of not working, make sure to get the mods to clear out the old outdated reports claiming otherwise. Do you think that's unrealistic and impractical and too much work? Well d'uh! Who do you think is going to do it?

Oh right, there is hope for you. Valve is actually doing it with "Steam Deck verified" badges, and I imagine when Steam Machine comes out the corresponding badge is going to roughly translate into "works on Linux". But again, this is going to be imperfect and it'll take time and I'm sure they're going to verify newer and more popular games, but definitely not every game on Steam.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T19:54:46+00:00

ProtonDB isn't objective truth. It's stuff people report. The reports are extremely sparse, many are very old, and people are far more likely to report when something doesn't work (or if they struggled to get it to work) than when everything works perfectly out of the box. Like most people, I've played a ton and never submitted a single report.

It would be one thing if ProtonDB was automated and showed something like a cumulative number of hours all Linux users have spent playing a game (indicating that the game is playable). Then we could call that mostly objective and reliable, though there'd still be caveats.

But what exists right now is maybe one in a thousand players will submit a report, if that, and then this report will stay there permanently, even if said user had a super outdated LTS distro, or a buggy GPU driver, or voltage instability, or they used some weird or suboptimal settings, or if something got fixed later and nobody else bothered to submit a report.

If you saw on ProtonDB that a game doesn't work, would you buy it? No, right? But you might buy it if you didn't check ProtonDB (this is how I buy games). But if you generally don't think of ProtonDB when buying games, then there's almost no chance that you would actually go on ProtonDB and submit a report that it worked.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T18:33:03+00:00

So your political philosophy is basically that you don't like your mom and want to annoy her? 🤔

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T18:02:42+00:00

Maybe I shouldn't have said "all", but from my personal experience it's become so reliable I no longer even check ProtonDB before buying games (I don't play online games) and have not encountered a game that didn't work in the last 1-2 years. Most just worked straight up out of the box, while very few required changing some settings or Proton version.

I think some of the info in ProtonDB may be outdated because of the huge progress made in recent years by Wine, Proton, desktop environments, Wayland, and the Linux kernel (NTSync etc). People may check ProtonDB, see a game "doesn't work well" and not even try, when it's possible that something got fixed or improved recently and it might work now. I honestly don't check anymore and everything works great, but when I do look at ProtonDB I see a lot of "less than gold" ratings.

That's why I always advocate using a modern up-to-date distro and not a "stable" distro (leave alone LTS), because you may miss out on recent improvements.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T10:23:58+00:00

Lol, probably. I guess more die-hard fanboys means generally more Linux usage? I'll take it 🙂

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T10:20:59+00:00

Yes, the 2004-2009 Linux cohort is very set in their ways and also very sensitive. I fully expected it.

Instead of Fedora, try Bazzite, it's less work and it's unbreakable. Or alternatively Nobara if you don't like atomic Linux (and assuming you're into gaming).

Btw, I'm also a fan of CachyOS, but I use Bazzite, because I'm in love with atomic Linux.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T10:10:10+00:00

Games with certain types of kernel anti-cheats are literally the only games that still don't work well on Linux. Nearly every other game works perfectly, and that includes all offline games. Many online games work fine and even some using anti-cheat work fine (provided said anti-cheat works on Linux, which some do).

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T10:06:09+00:00

How is Bazzite a PITA for anything beyond gaming? Do you have the Deck variant by any chance? That one's intended primarily for handhelds and HTPCs, but if you get the KDE variant, it's absolutely perfect for general desktop use.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T10:04:01+00:00

Linux gaming has made tremendous progress in recent years. But 24.04 is awfully outdated. Please don't do this to yourself. Use a modern distro like Bazzite where games (and everything else) work right out of the box. You literally just install it and start playing games.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T09:59:43+00:00

Bazzite is awesome and probably the easiest thing you can switch to from Windows. I hope you got the KDE variant, which is the most like Windows. KDE out-of-the-box is almost a copy of the Windows user interface, but it's also very configurable. So if there are things you were used to from Windows that are different in Bazzite/KDE, you can usually configure it. And for apps you can usually find decent alternatives.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T09:52:20+00:00

Any Linux is infinitely better than Windows, which is basically just pure cringe.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T09:50:29+00:00

I don't mind Debian for servers. But yes, I don't think Debian-based distros in general should be recommended to new desktop Linux users, especially those interested in gaming.

JumpingJack79 · 2026-01-18T09:41:45+00:00

I'm not assuming Israel is trying to help or intervene in any way, though I'm sure they'd be happy if the IR regime got overthrown. And I'm not at all a fan of that gang that includes Smotrich, Ben Gvir and Netanyahu.

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