Gimme mah Cube!

And the wobblies and explosions are cool too!

I remember when Walmart sold boxed releases of RedHat and Mandrake. My first installs were fueled by $20 boxed releases at Walmart. I was so bummed when they stopped. But I could send away for Ubuntu releases on a CD for free.

Thanks to Trump, there appears to be some initiatives in Europe for governments to switch to open source. It seems they want to try and get out of relying on US companies for their technology. That would make a large jump in the user base.

They have tried before, and not had the best luck in dropping US vendors. Things seem to run out of steam at some point and they switch back. It will be interesting to see if things stick more this time.

I’m pulling for them to succeed.

I briefly looked at LFS with the thought to try it a long time ago. No… Just no…

That’s not an OS, that is a psychotic break with reality. Fortunately, you can take shots for it…

I did Gentoo for a bit also. Ain’t enough hours in the day…

Despite not being a gamer myself, Gamers are or should be a hotly contested demographic for Linux to chase and capture. And thanks to Steam, there is a shift happening as gaming gets easier.

Real men and women run Slack. Tarballs Yum!

To head off the zealots-- ./././

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting “OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!” to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it’s a major, major victory for all the distros.

It looks to be a pain between the tools needed and the hassle. It supposedly takes between 30 minutes to a couple of hours depending on your skills and some luck.

Installing Graphene doesn’t lessen the danger of your Pixel bursting into flames because of the old and dangerous batteries.

Oh my, I hear Google is going to brick the batteries of the 6a just like they did with the 4a phones. Due to worry about them catching fire. So good luck!

Glances at my new Pixel, Welp, I guess I ain’t ever goin’ to Catalonia. Not that I was planning to go there anyway.

***Tinfoil conspiracy: Maybe this a scare tactic to keep the British out of Spain.

Do you think a 5 bed hospital will have the money to afford a robotic surgeon?

That more of a problem with the manufacturer, (Morton Thyiokol) telling NASA the o-rings were fine to fly coupled with NASA’s desire to prove the shuttle could fly in that low temp condition.

Turns out risky business has risks.

The interesting thing isn’t how many fatalities NASA has had but rather how few they have had. Exploration has always gotten people killed.

While I agree that real charcoal is superior in every way, a good grill and the person running it needs to be able to control the temperature while cooking. It might be just fine to burn those hot dogs or hamburger patties, but if I want to roast a potato or an onion, I need to be able to control the heat to something less than the surface of the sun.

I’ve got a bluetooth temp probe set too. I use it in my smoker. I’m not trusting that expensive piece of meat to the whims of the gods. I need to know what the temperature of the meat is and when it hit’s the target temps.

That ain’t science. It’s engineering doing what marketing asked for.

Ex-Girlfriend Sugar Momma is what I think you meant.

The truth is people choose to live wasted lives. They could choose to do something fulfilling but don’t. Even cavemen probably wasted their lives being scared something was going to eat them.

I started out choosing work that wasn’t all that fulfilling as a toolmaker/engineer. I didn’t find a lot of satisfaction in needing to hit impossible deadlines. So I ditched that career and became an EMT and finally a medic with a side helping of firefighter/rescue in several small and very rural communities that have shortages of trained responders. And just before I retired I taught some math in my tiny rural school because teachers are hard to get there. I never got rich with money or fame but that wasn’t what mattered.

I feel like my life was not wasted for the most part. That I made a difference for the people and the world around me. In the small handful of years left to me, I can go satisfied I did what I could. You could too if only you would choose.