I think you’re suffering a bit from this: https://xkcd.com/2501/

You know the feeling you have about Gentoo? That’s the feeling for someone going to Linux, even to Ubuntu, the more complications you add the worse the feeling is.

Arch is not hard, it’s not complicated, but there’s a lot of unknowns unknowns that can bite a newcomer in the ass. If you’re already familiar with Linux Arch is easy peasy, just like Gentoo, it’s just some small things you have to learn.

Think about it this way, you’re already familiar with 99% of what Gentoo will ask of you and still it’s not something you’re up for doing, imagine the frustration of not knowing what’s anything and having to go through that.

Re-read my post, and tell me where did I said Arch is complicated? My view is summarized in the last paragraph, and I can summarize it even more here “good, but not beginner friendly”. Arch expects you to know how to deal with it, it expects you to read the news, it expects you know how to downgrade a package and it expects you’re comfortable in a terminal. A newcomer is unlikely to even know about any of that, they already have to learn a lot of other things like package manager, learning what’s the name of each program and how they behave slightly different from what they’re used to, etc, they don’t need to learn about pacnew/pacsave files on top of all of that. If you’re already comfortable in Linux, yeah, Arch is amazing, but if you’re presented with a terminal not even knowing what KDE/Gnome are you’re going to have a bad time.

And that’s the thing, it’s not that it’s complicated, but it’s the unknowns unknowns that will get a new user, they don’t know they need a session manager, they don’t know they need a printer daemon, etc. And if you bypass that by using Manjaro/Cachy, you’re now in a position of using a distro that expects you to know about that but didn’t taught you about them.

You know the weirdest part? Arch used to have a TUI installer when I first migrated to it, it lost it at some point between 2009 and 2012 (since I discovered it didn’t existed anymore on a laptop I bought in 2012. Weird that they redid an installer after all these years (and yeah, I know that technically pacstrap is an installer, but it doesn’t do much)

most recommended was debian and debian based. But I for myself(Even though the post says otherwise) now chose to use an arch based distro

Why are you asking our opinion on the matter since you clearly have made up your mind already?

because of the better supported and newer nvidia drivers

Newer doesn’t necessarily mean better, there’s a reason other d’Ístria delay packages and it has to do with compatibility and finding early bugs.

as well as automatic hardware detection.

What? Debian based distros have automatic hardware detection, Arch expects you to know your hardware and install things accordingly. Hell, almost nothing in Arch is automatic.

So I wanted to hear some experiences of you, that you may have had in the past considering EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro and Arch itself.

I used Arch as my main distro for over 15 years, it’s a great distro it has a lot of advantages in my book and it’s still the distro I feel most at home with. But it’s definitely NOT beginner friendly, you’ll get the latest packages with the latest bugs and incompatibilities, sure you might get the latest performance gains, but that’s when you’re not facing the latest regressions in performance or in compatibility.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Arch and have it on some of my systems, but it’s something that you have to know how to deal with.

I personally have gone for Manjaro now

If you must use Arch go with plain Arch. Manjaro and others essentially give you a pretty GUI installer, nothing more, and they cost you the customization of building your system from the ground up and knowing how to rebuild and fix if things go wrong for whatever reason (plus every Arch community will first ask what distro you’re running, and if it’s not pure Arch they won’t even look at your post). Also worth mentioning, AUR packages are built for Arch, they might work on Manjaro or Cachy, but they might also not due to the slight version variations.

In short, I think Arch is a great system, but it has some difficulties attached to it that could potentially make it a problem for someone that wants something that “just works”, which is what most new users want, whether they admit it or not.

Uhh, that’s hard… I guess I would say, in no particular order:

• Dead Cells
• Factorio
• Outer wilds
• Dwarf Fortress
• SOMA

I spent a while getting Ansible to be able to setup and maintain my server(s). And ended up not using it as much as I should, mostly because the computer I used to run Ansible from became a “Steam Machine” so I’m rarely sitting on it with a keyboard now and I don’t want to have personal info and keys on my work computer.

But it was a good learning, and useful while I used it. Now I just use ssh and compose files directly.

Except good artists and coders enjoy the creation process, so they won’t use it like that.

I need to change every instance of this function to another? Sure, let an LLM do it, that’s tedious to do and easy to verify. Implement a new system? Hell no, that’s interesting to do and hard to verify. I imagine artists have similar feelings on the matter, but I don’t know what’s a tedious task that’s easy to verify for an artist.

PiGallery is what you’re asking for, but you should consider Immich, it’s very simple to setup and you’ll get tons of features more that are extremely useful. I get you want something simple, but I don’t feel Immich is hard to setup or maintain, and it’s the difference between a simple photo gallery and google photos.

Bitcoin is a protocol, kinda like HTTP or Morse code, whoever created it can’t change what things mean unless those using it accept it.

To answer your question with some more technical details, Blockchain use a public/private key pair, explaining what they are and how they work is quite difficult without going deep into mathematics, but in short a private key is a secret number so big it would take billions of years to brute force even with the entirety of the computational power of earth. In short, it’s impossible to guess a private key. On the other hand a public key is a number that’s derived from that first number without a way to going back to it, a very dumb down example would be think on 2 numbers (123 and 5) multiply them and you have your private key (615) add them and you have your public key (128), knowing just the public key you can’t know what the private key is.

Ok, so you have a number no one can guess and another number derived from it, so what? Well, because of the way the public key is derived from the private one you can encrypt things with the public key that only the person with the private key can decrypt, which is cool and all, but the important part here is the other way around: you can sign a message with a private key that anyone with the public key can verify. This is extremely important, because it means that if we use the public key to identify someone, only the person who knows the private key can sign as them, and no one (not even the creator of Bitcoin) can falsify that signature, because to do that they would have to know the private key.

With that knowledge understanding what Bitcoin is is much easier. Imagine your public address is 12345 and you want to send 1 coin to me, my public address being 54321, you essentially send a message saying “12345 gives 1 coin to 54321” and sign it, now a miner will see that transaction, and if you have 1 coin to give they’ll try to build a block of transactions which includes yours. Eventually your transaction will make it into a block, and all blocks that are built on top of it will make it more difficult to revert.

Final details, how do they know you have 1 coin? They tally all of the coins 12345 has received and sent over time. They store the total for each account in memory so they don’t have to calculate it every time, but that’s how they know if you have enough. And finally, every time someone creates a block they can claim a special transaction that creates a specific amount of new coins to any public key they want, that’s how new coins are created.

As you can notice, you sign transactions and no one can falsify that, miners group transactions and it’s in their best interest to be honest (otherwise other miners won’t accept their block and they will have spend computer power for nothing). It’s a system where everyone is kept honest because attacking the system is more expensive than playing by the rules. And the rules are set and forget, although miners can change the rules collectively it requires lots of people to be in agreement and it won’t happen to revert your purchase.

In short, it’s not exactly 0 trust, but it uses game theory to make sure that you can trust the system as it’s in everyone’s best interest that the system remains honest.

If you have any other question let me know.

Let’s talk about Proof of Work which is what Bitcoin uses (Ethereum uses Proof of Stake, and that’s slightly different).

The way Blockchain works is that every block depends on the previous one, I won’t bother with the mathematics of it, just accept that a block needs to have a parent block. The protocol is that the longest chain is the valid one, once your transaction gets on a block miners are incentivized to build on top of that. In short, suppose the chain currently has 100 blocks, your transaction on block 101, a miner that purposefully ignores that block to try to build a different 101 block is racing against every other miner who’s trying to build block 102, because I’d any other miner builds 102 before then he now needs to build 2 blocks before the miners build 1, so on and so forth until he has to accept defeat.

In short, a single miner depends on luck to be able to “rollback” (it’s not really a rollback, it’s a pretend it never happened and move the tokens elsewhere so the original transaction is not valid, in an attack called double-spending). This is why the more blocks (or verifications) are on top of a transaction the harder it is to “revert”. To “undo” a transaction that just happened you have to get lucky twice and build two blocks in quick succession, to undo a transaction from an hour ago you have to build 7 blocks in average before others can build one. To give you an idea of just how unfeasible this is, the reward for finding a Bitcoin block is around $80.000 currently, this means that to “undo” a transaction that happened 1 hour you’re losing the opportunity to earn over half a million dollars (which is what you would earn if you were to find 7 blocks without having to race against anyone else)

Because no one has your private keys, the only way to move the tokens from your ownership is to rollback the chain until that transaction happened, remove it, and rebuild the chain from that point onwards. So, it’s doable, in the sense that it’s physically possible, but unless you can convince the majority of miners that the transaction should be reverted, and even then until the new chain reaches or surpasses the old one the old one is the valid one, so if you only convince 51% of miners and the transaction happened a few hours ago they’ll probably spend a few days catching up, and if in the meantime some miners flip side they might never catch it and miners might abandon your cause as it’s coating them 80 thousand dollars every time someone else finds a block.

Finally, if such a thing were to actually happen, trust in that coin would drop significantly, and with that its price, and with that the money minera receive from finding blocks. So it’s not in their best interest to do that, as it can yield to them losing money from their source of income.

In short, yes, it’s possible, but unless your attacker can essentially burn millions of dollars to fuck with you it’s not very likely to happen.

Doesn’t have to though. All of this is based on smart contracts, to which means the logic is what you make of it. It could, for example, also send some kickback to a platform when activating the game there, so e.g. you buy the game from the game dev directly and you’re given an NFT for it, with it you can download the game from the game dev page, but also you can pay a small fee and get a steam key for it, that fee could be sent to both Valve to justify their involvement, then you might be able to generate similar Playstation key for it, or any other platform. This would be an interesting system where users can buy the game once and activate it for different platforms.

An NFT doesn’t dictate ownership, neither de jure nor de facto.

Sure, just like a property deed doesn’t dictate ownership. Just like money, deeds of any kind are only as valid as what we allow them to be, if our society were to use NFTs to track ownership of something then it would dictate ownership just as much as any other deed and would be enforceable by judges and police in the same manner.

In other words, NFT are a way to use Blockchain technology to obtain a non fungible token, whether that token means something depends on our societal agreements, just like any piece of paper.

I feel that most people who speak very badly or very well about NFTs and crypto in general don’t really understand it.

In simple terms what the Blockchain technology solves is a way to have an append only database with no centralized authority. This is a HUGE accomplishment, but you very likely don’t care about it.

In short, this means that Blockchain provides a way to exchange “tokens” without any user needing to trust each other or a third party. If you can trust the other person, or can trust a third party to be impartial then you don’t really need a Blockchain.

A Token is a representation of something, for currencies a token is a representation of value, and value is a fungible attribute, I.e. 1 of them is the same as any other, like coins, where you can replace a coin for another of the same denomination and they’re worth the same.

However tokens can be non-fungible, which means that one token is not the same as another, think for example house deeds, if someone takes your house deed they can’t just give you a different house deed and be the same.

We use non-fungible tokens a lot on our society, some examples are steam keys, vehicle registrations, or certifications of ownership for expensive pieces of art. We usually can trust valve, the government and whoever issued the art certificate to be impartial when someone tries to sell a game, car or art. But what if you couldn’t? How would you safely validate ownership without having to trust anyone?

That’s what crypto NFT bring to the table, someone had the idea to create a platform where artists could create tokens of authenticity for their art, and sell that to people giving them a way to own digital art in the same way that someone owns a painting. Then crypto bros started pumping that to sell their tokens for a higher price and a lots of people fell for it and started buying tokens representing ownership of things they didn’t wanted or understood to try to sell for s higher price later.

Obviously that scheme fell, but that doesn’t mean the technology is useless or untrustworthy. But for most cases crypto is not needed as most people can trust their government or some other centralized authority.

First of all, you’re the only one talking about copyright, none of the things we’re talking relate to copyright. Copyright has been a thing for a long time and we’ve never had these issues with anything from books to kitchen utensils.

Also you’re purposefully ignoring the points I keep making every answer, I keep giving you examples of rights you have on a book that you don’t on a digitally downloaded game and you keep ignoring that as if it was the same thing. It’s not, the issue at hand is with that difference, if you can’t spot it maybe you should read more on the subject.

But just to give you an answer since you seem hell bent in making this about copyright, what do you think would happen in the society we live in if tomorrow all copyright laws were to vanish? People already do derivative work as long as they’re not profiting from it, fanfics and fan drawings have never been an issue, but now they can charge for it. Big whoop, nothing much changes there. But on the other hand, a starving writer who wrote his first good novel and wants to publish it takes it to a book publisher and his name gets erased and it’s published by the company instead, because no copyright means the author has no claim over it. An artist creates a cool character that becomes viral, now Hollywood is making a movie, but does not have to give 1 cent to the artist. You’re only looking at the ugly side of copyright, you’re forgetting that companies will abuse anything , and you’re failing to see that the lack of rights will be more abused, and if you remove copyright laws that’s in THEIR best interest, you won’t be able to make a new God of War that can compete with theirs, but they can take any idea you might have and make a million dollars product out of it that you won’t see a cent.

Finally, I never said I don’t believe in free and open platforms, or copyleft or creative Commons licenses, but that’s not the same as removing licenses. First of all, that is optional, you’re not forced to make your project free and open source, if there were no copyright laws you would still not be able to reproduce closed source programs, but they could simply copy open source ones. GNU license is very restrictive and contagious exactly for this reason, which has stopped corporations from doing nasty things, without those copyright protections GNU and Linux would not be where they are now because corporations would have stolen it. Copyleft and CC licenses follow similar patterns, you’re free to modify and redistribute but only if your product keeps that license, that discourages companies from stealing it as it would poison the well and their product would not be copyrightable, but if nothing is copyrightable then everything is fair game and the companies would not think for a second before stealing content. Think for one second on how companies operate and you’ll understand why copyright is needed to protect indie artists from them.

It won’t radicalize me against copyright because I believe people are entitled to profit from their creations, and until we live in a society beyond the need of money corporations would fuck everyone in the ass (even more so than what they do now) if there were no copyright laws. Or do you any of the mega corporations in Hollywood would give a cent in the direction of a good story of they weren’t legally required to?

In any case, that is different from what Sony is doing now. Like I said before:

• the author can’t go into your house and take the book back
• they can’t force a new version of the book onto you
• they can’t require you to proof you own the book before they allow you to read it
• they can’t stop you from reselling the book.

Those are not covered by copyright law, you have a right to do that with your books but not with your Sony games.

This steamed from the way digital downloads came about, and we agreed to trade some rights for ease of access, but companies like GoG show that it’s possible to have digital downloads while preserving some of those rights.

No, this has never been how copyright works, if you buy a book you own that copy of the book, the author can’t go into your house and take the book back, they can’t force a new version of the book onto you, they can’t require you to proof you own the book before they allow you to read it, and they can’t stop you from reselling the book. You OWN that copy, you don’t own the IP, but you own that copy of the book.

While I get where you’re coming from, most people don’t understand what’s normal to others because they think their experience is normal. And most of us won’t get to experience someone else’s experiences to figure out what’s normal for others and what isn’t. You might be fully satisfied with your situation because it is a good situation, but it also might be because you don’t know any better and think what you experience daily to be the norm for everyone, similarly to people living in a dictatorship regime who don’t even know about the possibility of living free so they’re content with their situation.

I’m not saying it’s your case, I’m not saying you should feel bad or that there’s something that doesn’t work the way it should. I’m saying you don’t really know how things should work because you only have your experiences to rely on, and your satisfaction might derive from not knowing what something should actually feel/be like in comparison to what it is.

Also not necessarily correct, foreskin protects from chafing and other similar micro fissures that happen daily for people without foreskin (as shown by the person above you having issues running). And while removing a part of you does lower the chances of getting cancer there, if it’s protecting another part of you from something it can increase the risk of cancer on that other part.

It’s very different. One is “I will give YOU money if you vote for me” and the other is “I will give EVERYONE money if I win”. The main difference is that one is not discriminating against who people voted for. The first is buying votes, the second is a campaign similar to “I will retroactively lower taxes for this year if I win”, which I don’t think anyone would see as problematic but it’s exactly the same outcome as the one you’re finding problem with, i.e. give people money.

It’s a stupid campaign because anyone with half a brain understand that he’s not going to do it and that that money would have to come from someplace else, but it’s still a campaign promise similar to any other promise politicians make to ask you to vote for them.

That is an amazing learning, not exactly the same but relatively recently I also realized “I’m a grown up, I don’t have to eat everything on the plate, sometimes portions are too large and it’s okay to not finish everything”. I still struggle when it’s very little leftovers, something in my brain goes “that’s just going to the garbage, there’s no reason to save such a small portion, better eat it now”. But I’m slowly learning to say “no, I’ve eaten enough”, and it’s been very educational to realize just how much more I was eating than what I actually wanted to eat.