I jumped into Linux, via Mint, about a year ago when I refreshed my hardware. The transition was pretty easy, and I haven’t looked back. Steam runs fine and I haven’t had a modern game that didn’t work under default proton settings except for things I’ve run outside Steam and mods. Most of my personal PC’s workload is gaming and handful of web-based apps that are effectively OS-agnostic; Everything else has an easy equivalent in the apt repos.

I would say that my decision to embrace Linux as my OS was primarily influenced by my Steam Deck. Gaming on it has been simple and the desktop UI was easy to adapt to. I replaced my laptop with the Steam Deck, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a USB-C dock with HDMI out (all things I already had for the laptop). I now just hook into whatever TV is handy as a monitor when I need a computer on the go.

I was a tech enthusiast when I was younger, and am thus familiar with fucking around on the command line, but now I’m an old man who just wants his stuff to work and it just has… The barrier of entry for the Linux Desktop is effectively gone. We just need PR now.

Also, I think I’d replace Mint on my primary PC with SteamOS, given a simple way to do so. About a year ago, the desktop/beta SteamOS was not fully baked.

Don’t lump us all together. Windows users are just linux users who aren’t there yet.

I moved early this year and haven’t had significiant problems, though I’m IT savvy and can code my way around my issues. Linux is great, and I’d been halfway there for a long time, but Windows had the edge on gaming and simplicity. They fucked up, though when they started pushing for AI and Win11, at least for me. Where the Rubicon lies will be different for everyone, but it does exist for many.

We win by couching linux as the place to go to escape corporate focus and greed, not by being elitist.

I’ve combined these headphones with earplugs for a plane trip. Engine roar overpowers the sound for bone conducting headphones the same way it does for earbuds or headphones that don’t isolate. You might still need to crank the volume up, though. Planes are loud. No issue of other people overhearing it at that point though.

As a parent, and as a kid who grew up in the infancy of the internet/Social Media, I think there is a very fuzzy line here. Specifically, I’m fighting the concept that ‘parents are 100% responsible’. I’m responding to Cookie, but not really disagreeing with them.

Kids have attempted to subvert their parents rules since the beginning of time. “I’m not touching you…” says the older brother in the car as his sister screams in annoyance. “You didn’t say I couldn’t have Ice Cream – With sprinkles on it!”

I am an IT professional, focused in Cyber Security. I can lock down anything that touches the internet – if it’s in my house.

My kiddo, though, has access to a school chromebook. Guess how much control I have over that.

Chromebooks are fun. I have one, I have a family account for him, where I can control what and when he can access the internet. If he logs into MY chromebook with his SCHOOL account, he bypasses all of those controls. Hell, even his school chromebooks have a ‘guest’ option that bypasses almost all controls at the OS level. That was a relatively simple fix (for MY chromebook, not his school one) once I caught it, but it’s a symptom of a bigger problem. All these internet connected devices tend to have their own flavor of browser with their own flavor of parental controls, if any. For any non-tech-savvy person to understand all the ramifications is unreasonable - and you’d better believe that the kids are more tech savvy than their parents and will find the gaps.

I don’t claim to know the solution. And I fully agree with the article linked: ‘Age verification’ and ‘Parental approval’ are BAD (from a tracking standpoint, but also because kids and parents might not align on some issues) if not merely insufficient, but I do think there needs to be some culpability on the service provider to ensure that children are not subject to obvious( and here’s the rub – what is “bad”) bad stuff.

If my kiddo turns out to be racist, that’s partially on me, but I need help from other parties to ensure it wasn’t because he tripped over a pokemon lets-play where the streamer was spewing hate-speech and he internalized that because he is 8 and takes everything for face-value. I literally cannot keep him off youtube completely, and even if I could, I would also deny him any bit of the cultural knowledge that would help him to make relationships in the real world. I have forbidden fortnight and roblox and you can’t imagine the angst I get from just those. (And he plays them at friend’s houses anyway)

The majority of the onus falls on parents, that is true, but kids are not rational and don’t see the world the same way adults do. I need help ensuring that my kid is not subject to the trash pit that the internet is. There are too many ways and places for my kid to fall in to terrible things. The linked bill is terrible, but we probably do need something to help the average parent keep their kids away from large parts of the internet. ___