I would suggest you read “Anatomy of the State” by Murray Rothbard. I don’t want to sound rude but your comment is what people say when they haven’t read anything about it.
I used to make similar arguments like was at the top of your comment until I actually read some literature around it.
When I was using my 1080Ti on Debian with the official driver, I would frequently have problems on screen 2 where there seemed to be no video acceleration. I could fix this temporarily through some setting in the Nvidia drivers but it would stop working after a reboot.
I had several bad updates (this was when using Fedora) and was left with graphics 30 minutes before I had to start work, I ended up plugging in a really old AMD GPU to be able to work for the day and then spent several hours faffing to get graphics back up.
I will only buy AMD/Intel cards now because it is plug and play on Linux. I've had no problems with the AMD card on Debian 12. On Debian 11 I had to enable a non-free repo to install the relevant firmware. The 1080Ti as awesome at the time as it was, only worked properly and reliably under Windows.
The other issue with Nvidia is when they stop supporting your card, their drivers will sooner or later not work with the kernel. I have an older machine that works quite well and I had to buy another GPU as the legacy Nvidia drivers do not work with new kernels. The hardware itself works fine.
Since it was a debian, i have to ask - was a driver 10 years old already when you used it? I also had 1080 Ti (and a regular 1080), worked flawlessly in: Windows 10, FreeBSD, NixOS. I don't recall versions I ran tho.
As I said there was issue where one screen wouldn’t be accelerated. This was on both Debian and Fedora this was around 2020. I started using Debian around 10 I think.
That isn’t my experience at all. e.g Helldivers 2 I have to lower to medium setting, Black Myth Wukong I have to run at lower settings than Windows. This is with Debian Testing.
It isn’t just I that have observed this. I have a friend using Arch and he noticed there is a higher input latency and worse performance.
I’ve also noticed some weird mouse behaviour in Doom Eternal.
It is enough of a difference that I just reboot into Windows now to play games.
Most cars are "proprietary". The only cars that come close to being open is older vehicles that are no-longer manufacturer with a good after market parts market.
e.g. I bought a Land Rover Defender because it is the closest thing to an "open source" vehicle. However you are giving up many modern conveniences and you will be doing a lot of work yourself.
> I feel you. Regulatory bodies have definitely fallen short in many cases, and we've seen concerning proposals from governments that threaten digital privacy and freedom. "Who watches the watchmen" seems incredibly apt nowadays.
Many regulatory bodies seem to constantly fall short of what they are supposed to do and then demand more money and powers to continue to fail at what they are supposed to do.
At what point would you accept that they maybe not fit for purpose and other solutions should be considered?
It maybe better to put resources into educating people on how to protect themselves from privacy breaches or minimise the impact.
The only thing I've ever seen from the ICO is a letter saying that if I have customer data I have to pay them a fee or pay a fine. Then I have to go through the inconvenience of telling them I don't have any, so I don't have to pay this fee.
I never see regulatory bodies demand money or powers. That's private companies and law enforcement, respectively. Regulators seem to be staffed by skeleton crews allowing them to take on one case a year, and the Google-tier customer support that entails.
> I never see regulatory bodies demand money or powers.
It happens quite often after a big failure. I've worked in government myself as a contractor and seen huge amounts of waste while completely failing what they were supposed to be doing. I left after a few months (I was asked to stay) because I was utterly disgusted by it.
> That's private companies and law enforcement, respectively.
Law Enforcement most certainly, but private companies that just isn't true.
Maybe if you are at some large corporation, however generally waste at large corporations I've seen is due to having to cancel projects because of situations changes e.g. I was working on a large project to that was to integrate the platform with Russia, that got cancelled for geopolitical reasons.
Most private companies aren't large corporations though and most work is done by a few super stars in the company.
People use it because it is essentially Chrome with uBlock-Origin built in (I think the developer of uBlock Origin is employed by Brave) and it removes the stupid cookie modals that are on every website. Between running a pi-hole and Brave, I rarely see an advert on a website.
Turning off the "crypto-crap" can be done quite easily (you literally right click on the BAT icon and it is gone) and the new tab ads are removed again with a couple of clicks. I've found it also runs much better than Firefox on older hardware.
The first and last time I tried Brave, it was injecting links (with a pretty golden picture) in each post of reddit (and I'm not talking about changing the referrals). To turn that off I had to look deep into the settings.
Somewhat related there are other confusing things around how environment variables are set (especially on Linux). There are environment variables I set for QHD and UHD monitors e.g. QT_SCALE_FACTOR
* If you are using Xorg, you put environment variables in ~/.xprofile
* If you are using Xorg on Debian, you put the environment variables in ~/.xsessionrc
* If you are using Wayland, you make a file in ~/.config/environment.d/ and set you configuration variables there.
At what point do you consider it an "environment variable" vs "application setting" (even when called an env var by the app)? Windows has it's explicit env vars and GUI or CLI methods to set them, but if I was changing something about Explorer or some other graphical portion of the OS, I'd be going to the registry, for example. Setting the display resolution or scaling factor would be another registry entry, though I'd be using a purpose-built GUI for that.
Well with QT_SCALE_FACTOR is goes and tells all the QT to behave in a particular way. It isn't a per application setting.
There is a similar environment variable for Steam on Linux and I would argue that it should be an application setting but for whatever reason it isn't.
Both of these are hacks around how Xorg (doesn't) handle fractional scaling.
> Well with QT_SCALE_FACTOR is goes and tells all the QT to behave in a particular way. It isn't a per application setting.
I understand that, but your window server is just another application. On Windows I wouldn't consider scale factor being an env var, and indeed it isn't set as such -- rather that value is set in the registry.
Maybe that's the answer -- Windows has a defacto method of setting system-wide env vars that every application inherits within a given personality but Linux/BSD does not.
> If you are using Wayland, you make a file in ~/.config/environment.d/ and set you configuration variables there.
This is not in any way Wayland specific, and arguably should be the default choice for setting env vars, as it should apply to all user sessions regardless of what type they are or what shell is used.
> Honestly I don't even understand why enough people still use their cars through my city instead of biking.
I am an ex-avid cyclist. Bikes are easily stolen, You can get soaked if the weather is poor, If it is bitterly cold it can literally take you hours to warm up (especially if you are older). If you have to ride in traffic it can be very frightening especially if you haven't done it before. Other people find cycling simply uncomfortable, I've been told it more uncomfortable for women.
Well we're in different places so I guess it's different. I used to bike in France and I got about three or four bikes stolen there, one every other year or so. At around 30-50€ per bike it's not that expensive even though it's certainly inconvenient.
Now my bikes don't get stolen anymore in Flanders (even though I use a much cheaper and more convenient frame lock).
About the weather, I just wear warm clothes. I'm about ten minutes away from my children's school, not 2 hours. It rarely gets lower than -5°C though (23°F).
It also works because we have decent cycling infrastructure so cars don't kill too many cyclists.
I'm not an avid cyclist or an avid automobilist but I sometimes have to drive the same route by car and I have never wished I was in a car rather than in a bike including under rain, while the other way around is almost every time.
> At around 30-50€ per bike it's not that expensive even though it's certainly inconvenient.
The bikes I had stolen would be about €2000 today. I ride a second hand mountain bike that is old and isn't a target for thieves.
> About the weather, I just wear warm clothes. I'm about ten minutes away from my children's school, not 2 hours. It rarely gets lower than -5°C though (23°F).
I am in North of England. The temperature itself frequently isn't the problem. It is the wind chill factor. You can literally feel it chill your bones. I have fenders on all my bikes and tbh that reduces how wet you get by about 30-50% but affects the bikes handling a lot IME.
I use a decent U lock. Always lock the frame to something metal and solid. Additionally I have a ~100USD insurance to cover my several thousand dollars bikes. Never got stolen any.
Yeah you need to adapt to weather.
But a good pair of biking pants, rain cover for the shoes, thick leather gloves and different pairs of coats (which you anyway need) usually do the job.
If your bike is super uncomfortable there is tons of different sattles and options. Even bike fitting to fit your bike perfectly to your body.
Not to be rude. You think I am not aware of all of this? I was an avid cyclist. I have repaired and built my own bikes for the last 25 years, I still look after my bikes even though I don't ride them as often as I used to.
> I use a decent U lock. Always lock the frame to something metal and solid. Additionally I have a ~100USD insurance to cover my several thousand dollars bikes. Never got stolen any.
You are lucky. I've had two bikes stolen. I ride a very old and battered looking mountain bike (Marin Hawk Hill 97). My anti-theft measure is that it isn't worth stealing.
> If your bike is super uncomfortable there is tons of different sattles and options. Even bike fitting to fit your bike perfectly to your body.
If you haven't cycled in years it is just painful on backside and your nether regions. I hadn't cycled in over a year and I was saddle sore for about two days afterwards. I was expecting it btw. The bikes I have fit me perfectly, I use a good saddle (roll).
Generally people buy the cheapest POS bike from a store, the fitting probably isn't right or they just get their friends bike that they no longer want and put up with it until they can afford a car. They aren't going to a proper bike shop to get fitted up.
I used to make similar arguments like was at the top of your comment until I actually read some literature around it.