ulterno

1. It's fine to disagree with scientific consensus. Even more so when there is not a real consensus.
   1. Going by a recent example where in some cases, it was being mandated for everyone to be vaccinated when possible; later, it was noted that vaccinations weren't significantly useful for people who had recently had COVID (sorry, too lazy too link. It was just a news anyway and not a res paper). But this pertains to a condition that is currently undergoing change, with new strains coming out every now and then.
   2. An older example. Old enough to get into our school textbooks. "different tastes on different parts of the tongue". The text used a kind of language that made readers think that given specific tastes can only be detected at those places, whereas the results from actual science were much more nuanced. Furthermore, the textbooks encouraged the students to "verify" this by trying different tasting objects on their corresponding taste locations, while not hinting them to try any of those in places other than those, which would have easily disproven the statement in the way it was written in the text.
   • The point here is that you are free to believe what you may, but when your actions significantly and maybe adversely affect others, you have to be careful about what others believe and whether your belief has any concrete proof. e.g. It's fine if you don't want to live in the same room with a vaxxer (just live in some other room, or don't rent a multi-tenant room in the first place), but that doesn't give you the license to harass that person or their family.
2. meh
3. It's stealing both ways. Whether it's legal or moral or not, is another discussion. WB stole from the customer. It was legal (they probably had it somewhere in their EULA) and probably immoral (because they knew most customers would not really read it well and those who did, would still probably give them money because they have no other option if they wanted to watch the exclusive). Pirates then stole from WB (in this case it was illegal), but the moral implications change upon perspective. Neither side of the argument is even close to ideal, but sometimes you can't really condemn yourself for saying "It is what it is" and picking a side.

Lookie here! This thread has 8 parallel lines.

Scientists do not question the concept of science

Questioning the validity of science is precisely how science is done These are 2 different statements, pertaining to 2 different actions.

Both the statements are true.. err... alright, maybe not the first one as much. You can question the concept of science (which, in a way, boils down to "Question everything") and still be a scientist.

Questioning the validity of (other's and your own previous) science is a part of the concept of science.

Questioning the concept of science is more of a philosophical matter and would be valid in a quest for better concepts.

The above two statements are not actually denying each other.

I'm not sure how funny this will be, but here's how I broke my system twice in a single case. Step by step:

1. Migrated from Manjaro KDE to EndeavourOS KDE. Kept the previous home directory.
2. After a few updates, there was a problem with Plasma. Applications were not starting from the panels or the .desktop files (they worked from the terminal. The terminal emulator was in startup and worked that way)
3. After a few google searches, found out that downgrading glibc would do something, so downgraded... Worked for a while
4. While using pacman -Syu, I always checked for warnings (foolishly thinking that the downgraded and ignored glibc would cause a pacman warning if it broke dependencies) and there were none. So, the updated OS stopped working due to unmatched glibc. BREAK 1
5. To fix it, I opened one of my multiple boots (another EndeavourOS) and made a script using pacman -Ql and cp to copy new glibc related files into the broken system (because I was too lazy to learn how to do it the correct way with pacman and chroot didn't work because glibc is needed by bash).
6. Turned out the script I made was wrong and I hadn't checked the intermediate output from pacman -Ql, which was telling cp to copy the whole /etc /usr and other directories. (just if I hadn't given the -r to cp) BREAK 2

In the end, I just made a new installation, this time with a new home and hand-picked whatever settings I wanted from the previous home, Viva la multi-HDD

It seems already too late for that movement - at least in places like the more "developed" states in the US.

I use a bicycle for commute btw.

I agree with that. And my point being "Start the movement (of buying older cars instead of new ones) now and change the status quo (of high demand for new cars) while also being able to get older cars that cannot be subscriptionified, because later, even the older cars will be such, that they will have a subsciption, making even 2nd handers to pay the OEM".

Yeah, the point is, do it now and change the status quo, because later, it will be too late.

This seems to be one way of them trying to prevent piracy.

The situation here is that the game soundtracks I bought on are not prevented from download and I am able to use it on any device I want. Despite that, it never came to my mind to pirate it. Same for the GoG games. But there still exist enough pirated steam games out there.

It can be simply concluded that the people who don't want to pirate, will buy the stuff and not pirate it no matter how easy you make it, whereas those who want to pirate it will actually be more zealous in pirating stuff that makes it harder to do so.

Interesting. Perhaps I'll try doing the single computer thingy.

Hmm. I remember steam saying it can't run a game because the same account was using a game on another PC. Maybe something changed since then. I'll check it out again. Thanks for the info.

Until you think it might be fun to play 2 games on 2 different monitors on 2 computers at the same time. Then you realise, Steam games are not treated as just software. 1 of the many reasons I prefer to pay the price for GoG despite Steam being significantly cheaper due to regional pricing.

You need to first understand what kind of interaction you expect with your OS. For this, you can start by considering what you use your OS for and currently what you do for your OS. e.g. Before I jumped to Linux, I was just starting to learn PowerShell on Win, because I saw a lot of places in my system where I wanted to use it. I felt consistently dissatisfied with the lack of things I could just tell the system to do, making me go to scripting. This way, I knew I won't have a problem with putting time into something that takes a lot of configuring. But since I was still new and wanted an easy start, I went with Manjaro KDE. It was based on Arch, but had a system of differed updates, giving me a feel of it being easier. Plus, it had a lot of customisations out of the box, some of which, I learnt from, when making my own configurations for EndeavourOS. EndeavourOS considers itself to be more terminal oriented, and it is possible to easily get a full-fledged tty system, just by selecting it in the installer. I chose KDE because I like changing the Appearance a lot, but you might want to look at other DEs depending upon your expectations.

Ubuntu has been shifting a lot to snaps, so if you want your computer to be snappy (the literal meaning), you might want to avoid it (ironically). But at the same time, if you want less configuration requirements and want to keep most of your exp outside the terminal, on top of finding it easier to install software from vendors' websites, you can consider it. If you are fine with putting in the minimal amount of brain usage it takes to understand the installation instructions of the website - and by that I mean, read the heading telling you which distro the copy-paste text is meant for (I know ppl too lazy to do that and trying paste an apt command into Red Hat) - I suggest Fedora/Linux Mint and a slew of others.

DE = Desktop Environment apt = Package Manager (kinda like an app store on terminal) used for Ubuntu

P.S.: If you choose an Arch-based distro, make sure you keep a backup OS that is in the Debian/Fedora tree. I keep a Debian KDE, mainly for older linux games, which ask for packages that have been long removed from Arch, but it is useful in case you break something. That way you won't have to wait for the time it takes to make a Live USB and can just restart.

"follow an installation wizard" <-- I know people just out of uni (having completed BTech), who can't even do that. Keeping that in mind, I can have way more patience towards OP.