The upside of content creators and influencers like Mr. Beast is that they have built massive audiences based on manipulative brainrot. The downside is that brainrot audiences are already brainrotted in a way that makes them almost immune to further marketing, which is itself manipulative brainrot, the proto-brainrot if you will. All the brainrot value has been squeezed out of them already. There’s nothing left to squeeze, and they cannot be manipulated any further. Imagine trying to market beer or something, to a vegetable of a person who’s already just sitting in their chair drooling at the screen. Like sure, of course they want the beer, but how are you going to convince them to get up out of their chair to get it?

Was this article written by AI? It’s full of what seem to be overly specific references and is just really fucking weirdly paced and disorganized.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is what they’ve done and are continuing to do to phones. We talk about the Apple and Google’s “walled gardens” but it’s even more than that. It’s about only allowing “trusted” applications to run, on “trusted” operating systems, with “trusted” drivers and “trusted” hardware, for “your security”, to “protect you” (from yourself). But it’s really about control, complete control, not just of our devices but of us as people.

That is what they intend to do to all computing devices. Over time, gradually. They know they can’t do it overnight and force it down people’s throats, because it’s fundamentally anti-freedom, people will resist, rebel, start to switch to devices and systems that allow them to take back their personal and computing autonomy, using technology to enable their own goals instead of what the manufacturers and services “allow”. So they have to slowly creep it in. People still resist and rebel, but they keep pushing ever so subtly towards more control for them and less control for you. One step back is followed by two steps forward, then another step back when people resist, then another two steps forward. Progress keeps being made, despite the resistance. They will keep normalizing it until people say “well of course they have to protect <x>” and we forget that the freedom to decide what we ourselves are willing to trust so we can do what we want with the hardware and software we own is a fundamental and necessary human right.

It means you can basically run even more Windows programs on Linux than you already can, and that’s wonderful. At the rate it’s going, soon Wine and Linux will be more compatible with Windows software than Windows itself is. Especially older stuff.

AA batteries is an interesting choice. Wish we had a ubiquitous lithium-rechargable-based battery standard for products like this that would be smaller than an 18650 but bigger than a coin cell. Design it with some safe chemistry like LiFePo if you have to, but the old 1.2-1.5V AA standard is starting to feel very anachronistic these days.

The OG cyberpunk Johnny of course is included in that. while he is technically found among “any of the Johns”, I actually meant for it to be both implied and explicitly included, but my words kind of got ahead of my muddled brain.

I’d absolutely buy and play more cyberpunk games with Johnny Silverhand/Keanu in them. I’d also play games where I can be Johnny Silverhand/Keanu. Could certainly see another attempt to make some cyberpunk-style matrix-like story or open world that would go over well with me. I’m pretty open to any sort of Johnny Silverhand/Keanu related themes. I’d also readily accept a John Wick or John Constantine or Johnny Utah game too, basically any of the Johns. Honestly, I’d even play a game where I have to drive a bus that can’t slow down or it explodes (which really isn’t any different from most arcade racers when you think about it). Basically, shut up, take my money, do whatever you want with it as long as there’s eventually more Keanu- or Keanu-adjacent-content in the video gaming space once you’re done, this is a good thing. Or just inject some Keanu right into my veins, whatever, I don’t know.

It solves almost everything?

I guess you don’t understand the benefit of putting all the shady Microsoft shit in its own dirty polluted sandbox (or individual sandboxes) where it can’t spy on anything besides the other stuff in its sandbox that is already tainted and at most it may find a way to spy on the stuff you give it implicit permission to while you do whatever work you need to do with it. Meanwhile your main OS which hopefully does at least 90% of what you actually need to do on a daily basis, and does all the stuff that is actually important to you and happens to be none of Microsoft’s business, is safely running the actual show and remains completely under your control and authority, private and spyware-free. If you can’t completely get rid of Windows from your life (and some people still feel like they can’t for whatever reason), you can at least limit your exposure massively and turn it into practically a non-issue. Compartmentalization is a very effective way of dealing with nasty untrusted software.

When you get that shit locked down tight enough you can run straight-up viruses and rootkits with no concerns at all. You can see what they do, or try to do, and when they’re finished doing it, just casually delete them. Some people do. For research. In fact it’s so common that a lot of viruses or rootkits go out of their way to try to detect that they’re on a VM and refuse to activate if they think they are, there’s a whole arms race of researchers trying to make the VM look more realistic so the virus will still trigger. Even the viruses know your VM is probably just fucking with them. Windows, thankfully, isn’t quite that bad, and programs written for it will run quite happily in a VM or other virtual environment and let you do whatever you want to do with them, quite safely and subject to your complete authority over them that a VM or other simulated environment can provide.

Last I checked, it does not work well at all and I don’t think much progress has been made on that issue yet

You might be able to figure out how to get something to sort of work on your own, but you’re certainly not going to be able to follow a Minecraft guide block-for-block. It does not work the same way. There are some details in those threads that may help you, but again I don’t know if anything has changed in the meantime.

I still think the original actually looks great, in a way. It’s so low-poly it transcends into a sort of retro-futurism. Who needs spheres when a dodecahedron already looks totally techno? Gunther’s face looks so angular you could cut glass with it? Well of course, he’s basically a robot!

Steam machines was a better name to be honest. I’m sad that effort withered and died.

Lemming nerdy loser, reporting for duty. Personally I’m struggling with a Bluetooth controller on my Asrock B850 Riptide that used to work perfectly in Linux at first, then one day decided it was no longer detected and has never worked since. Fortunately it’s not critical, and if it doesn’t fix itself eventually I’ll probably just buy a cheap USB one and use that.

Steve Wozniak’s net worth is not definitively known,

They literally TOLD YOU THEY DON’T KNOW and you’re still listening to their estimates as if they’re fact.

but it is estimated to be around $100 million.

estimated BY WHO? AND HOW?

PikaOS is Debian with the latest drivers and hardware and selective updates where needed. It’s basically perfect for me and I’ve been daily driving it on 3 different PCs (2 Nvidia 1 AMD) for more than a year now with zero regrets or significant issues. I did pop into the discord with a few speed bumps and questions that were quickly answered.

4790k was among the fastest per-core performance for many, many generations, even long after CPUs with 4x as many cores that could do 2x as much work total, 4790k could still beat them on single-core performance.

Even today it’s still a great CPU and I’m still running one of my gaming machines with it. I use it for my Windows machine, since it doesn’t support TPM it will never get upgraded to Windows 11 accidentally and I consider that a feature lol.

It’s definitely getting long in the tooth these days, and its memory bandwidth is starting to really let it down, but as a CPU doing CPU things, it was a really nice piece of hardware, and still is.

I do all the things you described and I am daily driving PikaOS (shares some development/developers with Nobara I believe, it’s just Debian-based instead of Fedora-based) and it’s been perfect for me. I haven’t used Nobara personally but assuming it’s similar to PikaOS I would happily recommend it for developer use.

Bazzite (immuatable) or Nobara (mutable) if you want something Fedora based. Both are great.

You absolutely can use VMs, but you don’t need a VM to run windows software and you won’t have a good experience if you try. Steam/Proton or Heroic/Proton handle basically all non-native games (sometimes better than the native version, sometimes better than Windows itself honestly). Wine/Bottles handles Windows applications. They just work. A VM is an additional layer of complexity and slowdown and missing features that will mess everything up.

Honestly the biggest headache is with the “linux native” stuff. It remains and exhausting and unclear figuring out whether I should use a system repository package (when available), flatpak, AppImage, snap, manually download a system package designed for the upstream distro, run it as a docker, or just unzip a raw tar.gz and build it myself. Because they’re all subtly different, provide access to different versions, behave in different ways, update in different ways (or not at all) and each method has certain applications where it makes the most sense. It ends up being a huge cognitive burden of inconsistency. Some work is done to streamline it but it’s far from transparent to the user. Maybe I’ve overthinking it but in my opinion it’s a quick way to turn your system into a mess where you don’t know what is installed where and how and why, having things installed in multiple ways and different places.

… that’s not their username though?

The desktop environment is always available, and from what I understand Bazzite KDE boots directly into desktop mode (KDE is the desktop mode)

I could be wrong though as I’m not super familiar with Bazzite personally. As a relatively comfortable Linux user for many many years, I’m using Pika OS. It seems pretty friendly on the surface although I am comfortable getting dirty in the console so maybe I’m not the best judge. Being Debian-based would make it similar to Mint and Ubuntu though if that’s up your alley.

but I feel like it’s not working with the integrated graphics card

That’s possible… but it’s also not exactly clear what “feeling” you have about this, and I don’t know what other graphics card it could be using? I don’t really understand this, are you just saying the performance is bad? That I would believe as a possibility due to the distros you’re using, it’s probably fixable with the right twiddling of knobs but whether you want to do all that tinkering is a question I’ll address later. First, let’s address the elephant in the room:

You typically don’t need drivers from a website for Linux, especially not graphics drivers and if you do the OS should be able to get them itself. Which drivers to use are notoriously finicky because they tie in so tightly to the OS itself, and there are competing proprietary drivers that might interface with the hardware better and suck at interfacing with the OS and kernel, and open-source drivers that interface with the OS and kernel perfectly but sometimes suck at interfacing with the actual hardware, and the tradeoff of which is better for a particular OS or particular kernel or particular hardware is really not always obvious or intuitive and changes over time.

In short, I personally find this is a good area to trust the distribution you’re using is picking a good option for you and will provide reasonable alternatives within its own packaging system. Assuming you’ve picked a good distribution, you don’t need to mess around with installing proprietary drivers from the websites manually which tends to just make a mess of your whole OS, which brings us to the next topic we need to address:

Mint and Kubuntu are nice comfortable stable “desktop” variants but they’re not really optimized for gaming, and gaming on Linux is a space that is in very very active development right now and one where it really pays to be on the cutting edge, because projects are improving things rapidly and you’ll only get the benefits of those improvements on the bleeding edge gaming distributions that are quickly integrating those changes. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck on a “stable” distribution that might be years behind graphically, and years is a huge amount of time in Linux gaming at the moment.

While you might think “stability” is an obviously good and important thing to have, the reality is it also means you’re not getting improvements, and sometimes those improvements are really good or even completely necessary for modern and esoteric hardware support, like the kind of modern and slightly esoteric hardware you have. It’s also a bit of a misnomer, all distros try to be pretty stable as far as not crashing or corrupting. It’s not something that commonly happens even on “unstable” distros. Unless you’re using something that has very hard coded environment requirements and dependencies, you’re not likely benefiting from the kind of “stable” that stable distros provide anyway.

A lot of people recommend starting out with Bazzite as a relative newbie to Linux who’s interested in gaming. It’s a pretty safe distro and gets around the stability of crashing vs the stability of the software environment by essentially giving you “snapshots” of each new version that you can choose between or go back to the old version if it’s causing trouble, similar to Windows system restore, but better. It should have good performance and get you quickly and easily set up for all the gaming and media you can handle.