Vasectomy is like inflation… when it is zero the value we assume is described doesn’t go up or down.

whoosh!

In my view, the choice is about whether you are better off with her or alone, including the financial implications of divorce.

While there may be “other fish in the sea”, that is a poor basis for deciding whether a marriage is worth saving, and it will likely bite you in the divorce if it comes up.

Keep in mind that you will have to reconstruct your relationships with your family and friends along the way… which will likely be easier if at first you don’t have a new partner.

Good luck!

Sorta. If you put a FAT32 disk or sd card into a Linux system and mount it, it will ignore case because of the way the filenames are stored in that filesystem. However, there are a lot of important features you lose working on filesystems like that, so really it should be reserved for sneakernet with other operating systems.

Trying too hard to get a reaction by threatening to load Windows, the hardware hog? Way too low to even be believable.

First thing that comes to mind with a thrifted laptop is that you need to use an older distro compiled for 32bit cpu. But honestly, modern laptops are cheap and the overall experience regardless of OS is that very old hardware is going to look bad by comparison with anything on a store shelf so unless you are familiar with Linux already and committed to rehab old hardware (e.g. for standalone use) then it probably isn’t worth your time.

That is not an ideal experience. However, hardware gremlins are not a universal experience either.

Others have pointed out that getting a slightly older laptop to put Linux on can give the tinkerers time to get the key drivers working, and avoiding bleeding edge revisions of your distro can help.

It is quite possible that my comfortable experience with Mint and Ubuntu over the years have been influenced by my low expectations of getting all the bells and whistles working the way they would in Windows. I like the software environment that typically comes on Linux and I don’t stress when Windows software (esp games) doesn’t work (though Steam makes a lot of games work anyway).

I did have to spend more time getting the bios and fingerprint reader straightened out on my latest laptop (Dell Inspiron), but Google and blogs walked me through it and the only remaining problem is that sometimes when the fingerprint prompt times out I have to use the password until I reboot.

Banach-Tarski may be relevant here… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox

Cool analysis if you happen to have cylindrical onions and infinitely long knives laying around.

Isn’t it “any algorithm that would impress Dilbert’s Boss”? In the vein of “I don’t have to be faster than the bear… I just have to be faster than you”… /s

For the same reason I think software developers have the right to choose to release under copyleft, I think they have the right to release under SaaS or copyright. I don’t think it is fair to take those rights from them. (I may choose to avoid SaaS or other proprietary models where possible, but I am not pure about it… I just do so recognizing that proprietary tools are a band-aid and could become unusable when any upgrade or TOS changes.)

As one example, keep in mind that some governments may choose to punish a software developer for making “offensive” (by whatever their standards are) content, and rather than fighting a losing battle in one jurisdiction so you in some other jurisdiction can keep using that controversial software the developer may just choose to cut their losses and turn it off for everyone. If you force them to release it anyway then said punitive government may continue to hold the developer responsible for the existence of that software.

There are rights and responsibilities associated with a proprietary model… and IMO you (and your permissive government) should not be overriding those rights for your own short-sighted benefit.

A) this issue applies to all kinds of software.

B) procuring software is a two-way street … the producer assigns terms by which access is obtained, and you agree to those terms in exchange for that access. If the software is SaaS then if the producer chooses to shut down the service then you are SOL. If the software is provided with a long list of terms via Steam, then you are basically buying SaaS with local caching and execution. Maybe don’t reward producers by agreeing to one-sided deals like SaaS?

This kind of headache is what prompted Richard Stallman to come up with the idea for the GNU license. Maybe you think that is too radical… but maybe imposing your ideas of what licensing terms should look like on (only?) game developers is radical also.

IDK… that word checks out in this case.

Perhaps re-frame the question: is it expected that you should partake of marijuana on the first date?

Really, a date is about getting to know each other, and any assumptions about the suitability of these kinds of social lubricants may indicate a divergence or convergence of cultural norms.

In other words, arranging a to meet at a bar sends a signal well before the “date” actually begins about how you approach life… if such a proposal is accepted then the other party is at least open to you consuming.

There are quite likely a lot of people who will breeze right past this and proceed to get tipsy to provide a cover story for embarrassing mistakes… and every but of this is fodder for judging how well you will get along if there are further dates. Don’t get depressed if the other person decides against future dates… no matter your feelings if they don’t feel likewise then best to drop it early.

The important thing to do is communicate the kind of person you are… forgiving, uptight, loose, teetotaler… and learn what kind of person the other is… preferably without conflict, and with respect. If alcohol fits with your persona, don’t hide it.

if it is a magnum, shouldn’t it be bigger? /s

They are a record of the process of adding to the Linux kernel. Such background can be used to trace the history of contributions if those contributions turn out to have had malicious intent or were derived from code that came from sources that were not compatible with the GNU license that the kernel is released under.

Can’t really help much there… I haven’t bought a keyboard in years. But once you drop that first qualifier the availability of options just goes bananas!

I suggest that you should spend less effort looking for special hardware and more effort learning how keyboard mappings work in your OS (e.g. [1][2]). “Linux” is a very powerful chameleon because hardware vendors almost never cater directly to that market.

[1] https://linuxconfig.org/reprogram-keyboard-keys-with-xmodmap [2] https://github.com/xremap/xremap

Just a note: Windows software for controlling hardware is highly likely to assume a)direct access to the hardware (sometimes mediated thorough ancient APIs and assuming the existence of defunct expansion slots) and b) assume meatspace time can be counted using OS timing ticks (which get stretched out as modern VMs timeshare with other processes underneath the virtulized hardware). It is awfully tough to replace them sometimes.

Bro stair climbing wheelchair. Segway put a lot of design effort into this about 30 years ago before trying to go big with the normal Segway. https://www.scewo.com/en/

Stick with Windows. Microft will deliver paradigm shifts and you will have no say in the matter. They are already removing options for disabling Copilot, and for all the promised backward compatibility they are letting go of features that lots of old Windows software depended on, as they introduce features similar to ones in Linux. I cannot really fault them for all of these changes, but the difference is actually one of choice and privacy, and not really the one you seem to think it is.