I hope we can agree that “different” and “not surviving” is not the same thing!

Hah, it’s now a discussion of literal existentialism. No, I would say one could reasonably believe that “different” and “not surviving” are symonomous. The form that something existed in did not survive, and now only the new, different form exists. Ship of Theseus. If you replace every part of the old country one-by-one, once every part is replaced is it the same country or a different one? In this case, I think it’s not useful to try to claim it’s the same country.

No it’s not, according to the rules of the federation, no state is allowed to secede according to the constitution!!

Again, that’s not what justified the civil war. Again, I agree that a peaceful democratic secession should be allowed, but again that’s neither here nor there. Because here is a federal government ignoring the states’ checks/balances, and there is a crime against humanity that was justified in being stopped by the other states, not a federal government acting outside of the states’ checks/balances.

You seem to be arguing from a personal opinion of what USA should be

I am arguing based on the founding doctrine of the US and the concept of Federalism.

it always was a risk by the way the federation clearly always can trump the states

The assumption you’re making is that the federal govt was designed to have autonomy of its own separate from the states. But the federal govt was intended to only be a democratic-republically determined representation of the states’ intentions. Trump has the same misunderstanding, which is why he’s using the “activist judges” rhetoric. But by design of the US constitution, the states are intended to have checks on the power of the federal govt. Regardless of how any 2A nut interprets the 2nd Amendment, that is the actual intended purpose: to prevent a federally organized military from staging a coup. The federation was always intended to be a way for the states to hold the power to regulate themselves.

The EU is fine for now, but I could easily see them going down a road to toward the same mistakes the US made. Especially if, in response to the failure of the US, they end up organizing a centralized EU-controlled military, and then all it takes is a bit of FUD to put a demagogue into power and wield that military to oppress.

way more similar to Germany which also became authoritarian and abandoned German democratic values under Hitler.

…what’s relevant is if the federation will survive if it does USA is technically intact, even if it breaks every traditional value of USA.

This feels like we’re having a semantic argument. I would say, if Hitler still held power to this day, the country that Germany is would be different from the one it was. And if someone had stated in the 1930s that we were watching the death of our country, even in retrospect, i would agree with that statement. After all, he took total control and threw out the existing form of government. If you’re saying that it’s still the same country just became the new regime continued to use the same name for the same plot of land, I would not be convinced. Completely new form of government -> completely new country.

this is the foundation of USA, and was the cause for the civil war. The power of the federal government precede the states.

This is known as the “war of northern aggression” argument in the US south. The argument that the civil war had “nothing to do with slavery” and was “about states rights”. But I hope we all agree that that’s a BS argument. They wanted to continue enslaving humans in what was objectively a crime against humanity, and the other states who chose to wield the federal government’s resources to demand a stop to it were justified in doing so, both ethically and in service of the founding delcaration of the US: a nation where “all men are created equal”. But the federal government would not have been able to do that without support from the northern states. Conversely, today we find ourselves fast approaching a situation where the federal government will have total control over the states, regardless of what they or their “activist judges” want.

Now I agree that a peaceful, democratic secession of a state should not necessarily be precluded by the US federal government, but 1) I understand why that’s not how it currently works, and 2) that’s not the situation we find ourselves in.

And IMO if one of those students can get Roblox working on Linux, they have solved a harder problem than any homework they would be given 😆.

I’m curious how ootb mint works out for this usecase. Any chance we could get a 6mo update later? I’m particularly curious how well it holds up against non-admin users who may constantly be trying to get root-level access. There’s almost certainly going to be one student who figures out a local privilege escalation.

The entire concept of the US is heavily tied to its founding ideals of federalism, separation of powers, and rejection of a totalitarian monarchy. It’s why we have the name United States, and not a singular State of America. Versus something like Hungary which, from what I can find, is named for the native peoples of the area, didn’t have a written constitution for most of that time, and has gone through a handful of constitutions in recent history. It’s not an apt comparison.

Will the land of mass still exist there? Will there still be people there with some form of government? Yeah, obviously, we don’t disagree.

But would every single US citizen agree that, if we are no longer a democratic republic as determined by the founding constitution, then we are no longer the same country? Yes. There’s just not a world where US citizens say “yeah this is the opposite of what the founders were going for, but it’s still the same country”. The name United States wouldn’t even make sense anymore, because the states would no longer have autonomy.

If Trump established a dictatorship that wields the US military to oppress the will of the states, then for that duration it is no longer the United States, it’s whatever Trump calls it (he would probably call it the US, but it would be as accurate as North Korea calling itself a Democratic People’s Republic). If the states later overthrow that dictatorship and reinstate a form of rule that is based in the founding ideals, then the US would be refounded, and I could be convinced THAT is the same country re-established. But if the democracy is never re-established, and we stay under a form of totalitarian rule, then the US ceases to exist.

I don’t see it explained what he means by “US won’t survive Trump’s next 100 days”?

The Trump administration has made a series of Executive Orders. State judges have deemed several of them unconstitutional and issued an injunction, legally pausing them until SCOTUS can rule them. In response, Trump has complained to SCOTUS that no single “activist judge” should be able to impede him like this. They will hear that case soon, and one of two things will happen:

1. SCOTUS rules in favor of the Executive branch, and judges can no longer block federal behavior, meaning the only way for unconstitutional actions taken by the federal govt to be heard by a court is for the affected individual to file a lawsuit in federal court.

2. SCOTUS rules in favor of the states, BUT trump legitimately believes he is allowed to commit crimes as president, so he’ll just continue ignoring everyone.

I think what he really means is that democracy in USA won’t survive.

That’s the same thing. No democratic republic, no constitution, no USA. Trump might continue using the name, he might even come up with a new constitution and say that it’s the same one with a few improvements, but the US as we knew it would be dead and gone.

You can always live boot from a USB drive and try everything out that way.

IMO bazzite is too focused on gaming for people to be daily driving it for everything, but hey whatever works. Just hope they’re not upset when something breaks and the response from bazzite is “well yeah, that’s not something we bother testing for”.

(I have bazzite on a HTPC in my living room, and I think it’s perfectly suited for that usecase)

IMO Mint, Fedora, or OpenSUSE is going to offer the more stable, user-friendly experience long term. Install Lutris through the distro’s package manager, launch it, install bnet through lutris, launch it, install wow through bnet, launch it, Thrall’s your uncle 😉.

Edit: to answer your other question, yes Lutris runs as an app similar to how battle.net or steam works on windows. It’s just that instead of having a storefront and downloading data directly from a central “lutris” server, it’s basically a bunch of community-written scripts to automate the installation and configuration of games from all sorts of places. So when you tell lutris to install bnet, it’s running a script that goes and downloads it from blizzard, then locally creates a wine environment, launches the installer in that environment, you install it like on windows, and then it creates a lutris launcher entry for the bnet executable so that when you click play on it in lutris, it will automatically launch it in a wine environment each time.

And it should all work in KDE plasma, gnome, cinnamon, or whatever window manager you’re using (the window manager on msft windows is called dwm and it’s responsible for the same job).

I played WoW through Lutris (and later Bottles) with minimal issues for all of classic TBC and WotLK. Basically use either platform to install and run the Battle.net client, and then use bnet to install any blizz apps like normal. I used WowUp to manage addons. WoW should not be a blocker for you.

That said, I’m thoroughly done with blizzard’s shit and won’t be playing wow anymore.

Just so you know, this is called Moral Nihilism, and it seems to me about as useful as a physicist saying, “none of our models are 100% accurate, therefore they are all completely useless”.

Like, yeah we agree that ethics is a construct we’ve invented, and no ethical system is perfect, and none of them ever will be. But that doesn’t translate to them all being useless. I know we’re living in a stressful time, and I understand the feeling of wanting to just flip the table and give up, but please recognize that as a purely emotional response, not a rational one.

Package managers tend to assume they are the only ones touching files in /usr/share. You will find if you try to change any files there, the next update may delete or download a new version of the file, stomping your changes. Instead your local changes should go in /usr/local (if you want something system-wide) or ~/.local (if it only applies to a specific user).

Ex. If you made a custom .desktop file to show up in your app launcher, or a custom .xsession file to show up in a login manager.

A CSV file should work.

Hey, putting their money where their mouth is, I don’t have a problem with that.

I get that sharing confidential info is not allowed, but a blanket “any unauthorized communication with the media” restriction sounds to me like a first amendment issue.

But also, ethically, employees should always report confidential info if it is a crime or otherwise threatens someone’s livelihood. And I’m not sure what data the Dept of Labor would have that should not be reported publicly to tax payers (besides PII).

I’d like to report Doug Collins for hate-mongering rhetoric that seems pretty anti-Christian to me.

Re: modding

Nothing is consistent with modding. The idea of a game having “modding support” is a relatively recent concept. For most of gaming history, “modding” meant hacking the game (or sometimes hardware) to do what they want in spite of the creator’s intentions, rather than in accordance with them.

All that said, if you can get a vanilla windows binary running on Linux, getting mods working is usually the same process that it is on windows, especially if the mod is just swapping out files. The same files exist somewhere in your Linux filesystem and can be tampered with just like they can on windows.

If the mod involves running a 3rd party tool to edit a process’ memory in real time, that could be more involved since the windows version of the tool might be making some assumptions that are not necessarily valid when running in a Linux wine/proton environment. In order to get it working, you may need technical knowledge of how the mod is doing what it’s doing.

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

It depends on how often you play games with aggressive anti cheat, or games on non-steam platforms. Games like Valorant and Fortnite probably won’t work at all. But I do a ton of non-competative multiplayer (and single player) gaming that is not inhibited at all.

Heroic launcher is your best bet for non-steam platforms (GoG, Epic, Amazon), and lutris/bottles should probably be your 3rd option (I’ve used both for battle.net). But steam games running through proton should “just work”.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

The actual modding should be arguably more accessible. You technically have control over the entire kernel, so nothing is going to stop you from doing whatever you want. The only problem you may run into is if you’re dependent on modding tools that were only made for windows. Some of those tools are basically spyware anyway (ex. Curse), and often times the open source community has made its own alternative you should be using instead.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

YMMV. Valve has done a lot of heavy lifting to get proton to be a one-stop-shop for running windows games on Linux but you can add a program as a non-steam game, launch it through steam, and it often just works.

Wine is your other option. Sometimes the community has gotten windows apps running reliably in wine or proton, other times no one has ever tried it or it’s too much of a headache to get working. protondb.com has user reports for how various games run.

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

The short version is yes. The long version is the same as the previous answer.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

Most distros come with some form of package manager that works similarly to an app store on your phone (an app store is basically a package manager with purchases). Ideally, everything you want to run can be installed through the distro’s package manager, and then you use the package manager to update everything. But sometimes the software doesn’t exist in the package manager, and you have to download, run, update, and sometimes even build from source, your own programs. Those programs usually have a guide on the best way to run it on popular distros.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

It is actually more secure due to being open source. Source code can be audited by anyone rather than relying on “security by obscurity”. There are antivirus programs, but I don’t know much about them. Generally, don’t run programs from shady sources, don’t expose your machine to the open internet, and don’t run everything as root and you should be fine.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Yes, though historically AMD has better support for the newer features asked for by Linux compositors (namely Wayland). Nvidia’s drivers are still not fully open source, but otherwise work fine. Driver bugs are rare in my experience.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

To the same extent that windows can, yes. But if your concern is YOU misconfiguring something to cause Linux to do that, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. It is unlikely you will be interfacing directly with the kernel at all. Most distros configure the kernel in some specific way they want and you never worry about it. And still, a proper kernel-level driver should ensure that it will never send commands that could damage something, even if the config vars are incorrect.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

First off, install Ventoy to a USB drive. Then take advantage of Linux’s ability to “live boot” by downloading several .iso’s for several different distros onto the USB. Then boot off the USB, and you should be presented with a handy menu of ISOs to pick from. This will make trying out a bunch of different options really easy, without actually installing anything to your hard drive.

I’d say try grabbing mint, fedora, Pop!Os, and opensuse to start. Maybe also try Zorin. These are all geared toward new Linux users.

Unfortunately relevant Desaparecidos song

Vance: “I fucking knew it! You guys are assholes!”

So to be clear, you’re literally telling me you’re driving people toward the MAGA movement as a non-US citizen? Damn, I didn’t know Putin’s troll farms were allowed to go mask off now, that’s confidence.

It’s your party, do what you want.