Certainly, at the presidential level, however I recall Congress having a bunch of “tea party” nut jobs elected that shut down the government over the passage of Obamacare.

I started paying attention in 2000, even though I didn’t really understand it and couldn’t vote, however my first voting election was 2004 and I remember being disappointed when John Kerry lost to Bush, who had already gotten us involved in two wars that would cost trillions of dollars.

My experience has been that Republican administrations tend to be rife with corruption, cut taxes for rich people and run up the deficit.

Eventually, people get sick of the moral decay and tanking economic prospects and put a democrat back in, who tries to undo all the damage, but is blocked most of the time by Republicans in Congress acting in bad faith.

Then, the right wing media environment drums up a load of fear about immigrants and actual lies about the economy to get everyone voting for a Republican again.

That’s the cycle, except the Republican media ecosystem gets more extreme over time, and so do the candidates.

Some states still require you to file even if you don’t live there, but have ties, and may tax your income.

Not if you live in a state with state and local income tax. They capped SALT deductions, so you’re basically paying tax on taxed income.

Idk why people say “pay a premium”. MacBook Air is like $1000 bucks. Other laptops are also in this range.

Also, you’re never going to spend a second worrying about making the thing work or fixing an error. Even Windows requires fixing problems and installing drivers sometimes. I guess it depends on how you value your time. I’ve spent hours on linux and windows troubleshooting. I’ve never spent a second on macOS.

Does Apple own any of its own manufacturing?

Isn’t it windows 11 that is making a ton of hardware irrelevant due to extremely high system requirements? This meme is missing the mark.

TIL your account is still active after 150 years.

But people have been born and died, no? I’m sure total used is closer to something like 500-600 million?

Yeah, not using Quest. Trying to run an HTC Vive, which is pretty ancient at this point. In any case, I think the issue is I installed Steam via flatpak, but I guess it’s better to install it natively for VR. I’m sure I could technically get it running, but after putting a few hours into trying, I just gave up. Mostly just want to play Half-Life Alyx and after that I’m probably finished with the VR till some other killer game comes out.

I used Linux Mint originally. No issues at all with drivers there, worked perfectly. My main complaint was its kinda ugly and had limited UI configurability. It also was a pain to install certain apps, which weren’t available by default in the software manager. I tried a few other distros including Fedora and Elementary OS. Fedora was pretty nice. Elementary OS felt a bit dated looking and I was going to have to fix some UI issues to make it work.

Finally, I gave Zorin OS a go and couldn’t be happier. It’s based on Ubuntu so pretty stable and just works, plus the UI is polished and it has a lot of built in ways to customize it, whether you’re from Mac or Windows background. It’s also really easy to install apps - flatpak and snap. I guess some on here would say it isn’t optimized for gaming, but shrug it works fine for me (aside from VR). The free version works completely fine, but if you want to support the devs and get some extra UI customization, you can donate for the pro version.

I’m sure there are lots of other ways to do it, but my priority was to have something polished and easy to use without a lot of time spent tinkering. I’d rather spend my limited free time gaming.

I bought a steam deck and it inspired me to build a Linux gaming pc. Haven’t been in the pc world since windows 7. Dabbled a bit with Linux long ago. Well, it was a pretty smooth set up this go around. Everything just worked. I didn’t even need to find a driver for my GPU.

The exception was a VR headset I tried to set up. I decided to install Windows on a separate HD just for VR games. When I did, I was shocked at how bad it is. I mean the UI and UX are dated and bloated, sure, but Windows couldn’t even detect my motherboards wifi. I had to boot in to Linux, download my WiFi drivers and then transfer them via USB drive to windows. Same issue with Bluetooth. I can’t believe in 2024, Windows doesn’t just work out of the box while Linux does.

Not sure if the trade offs are worth it. It means making up a database of all people. Maybe it could work if your friends and family agree to be in your local database, but not worth it if everyone needs to be in a massive database.

Another alternative is don’t connect your TV to the internet.

Memory safety for one. C is very memory unsafe and that has been the source of a great, great number of software vulnerabilities over the years. Basically, in many C programs it has been possible to force them to execute arbitrary code, and if a program is running with root privileges, an attacker can gain full control over a system by injecting the right input.

I have very limited knowledge of rust, but from what I remember writing memory unsafe programs is nigh impossible as the code won’t really even compile. Someone else with more knowledge can probably give more detail.

I just built my first gaming PC, which is the first gaming rig I’ve owned in 20 years. I did so because I could install all the games I wanted to play on Linux. I haven’t installed Windows and do not plan to.

For sure, just suggesting that “compromised” doesn’t necessarily mean you got hacked by someone because they tricked you into giving a password, or they scraped it from another website, or you installed something sketchy. It could be as simple as Microsoft scans all your files with AI, or Meta snoops other social media (which it has been caught doing).

If the keys are accessible to any process, your system doesn’t need to be compromised. All it takes is an App that you”trust” to break that trust and snatch everything up. Meta has already been caught fucking around with other social media apps on device. They even intercepted Snapchat traffic on some users devices in order to collect that data. It could be as simple as you installed WhatsApp and they went and pillaged your Signal files.

What’s wrong with Tim Cook?

Edit: Downvoted for asking a question, y’all are miserable people.

The issue is some updates don’t contain just security fixes, but rather privacy invading features and advertising that make the OS shittier.