FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Anyway: Right now, today, if you leave a non-five-alarm-turbonerd alone with a Linux .ISO, you are telling them to burn their house down and then move to a new town with nothing, and saying how much better and great and empowering that's going to be. All our installers are irrevocably destructive and have been for thirty years, they will pave your drive flat and rebuild a strange house on top of that, and your job is to never do that to anyone.

Help people. Start with backups and listening.

Listen, nerds - if you're going to pick This Year to help people switch to Linux, I am begging you to do one thing: _Make sure your friend or parent or grandparent or whoever has backups_. Before you do _anything else_.

Make sure they have all their passwords and accounts somewhere. If you have the means to do so, take a drive image.

Be as sure as you can that they don't lose anything. Even if that's "where the icons are" and "my desktop background pic".

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/linux/im-brave-enough-to-say-it-linux-is-good-now-and-if-you-want-to-feel-like-you-actually-own-your-pc-make-2026-the-year-of-linux-on-your-desktop/

touchHLE v0.2.3 is out https://github.com/touchHLE/touchHLE/releases/tag/v0.2.3

win32 is the stable linux abi etc

I'm actually okay with reasonable amounts of government fraud. Because government programs that serve all the people must operate from a default accept, not a default deny if they're to cover all people with benefits. Sure, do audits and penalties if fraud is found, but even still. I would FAR rather a daycare that's not following the rules get government funding than the 99% of daycares who are legitimately serving families be stuck without support. I would FAR rather some folks get social disability payments support who weren't supposed to than disabled people stuck for months or years with no help because they had "insufficient documentation".

Governments aren't supposed to be a business. They're meant to ensure everyone is covered equally, even the ones who are difficult and "unprofitable". Because that's what governments are designed to do.

the railfans are FOIAing again,

It's so fascinating to see the changes in one company's logo over the years.

I rarely agree as strongly with anything as I do with this:

“The early #internet was mostly text. Now it's focused on video livestreams that you skim in seconds. Subtlety doesn't play well at that speed. For #autistic people whose faces don't always match our feelings, or whose tone is naturally flat, this shift was devastating. We went from being judged on words to being judged on performance.” – Daniel Grahn, chair of #OrganiseradeAutister, Sweden

https://asy.fi/nordic-network-meeting-2025/

#ActuallyAutistic

I made a venn diagram to help you understand Moiré patterns.

iMac Grape - Shurey
https://macthemes.garden/themes/65d354bc5c49-iMac-Grape

one definite goal for the year #besilly #bekind #survive #year2026

I was asked by a family member why it was taking so long to paste something large into a new Microsoft Word document on their computer, I sarcastically replied it was because it takes a while to upload it all to the copilot AI nonense first. And then I realized accidentally I might be right...I disabled copilot in Word and it went back to being instant again

So that's cool that Microsoft seems uploading everything you paste into a new Word doc to their servers now.

girls will really spend several hours deicing a freezer that hasn't been deiced in more than 6 years instead of going to therapy

Makin' graphic design nonsense again

Really, and I cannot emphasise this enough, entirely fed up with living in interesting times.

so the ReactOS codebase includes a clone of Task Manager

and the WINE codebase also includes a clone of Task Manager… in fact, it's the ReactOS one

however, WINE prohibits copying code from ReactOS because they are suspicious it's not legally clean

so the clones have diverged

#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 4: Share a tool of your trade.

It's a little keypad with en-dash, em-dash, degree, superscript 2, pi and multiplication symbols.

not entirely sure this disc drive is meant to be used vertically