As long as they’re both of an age to consent legally, then yes, absolutely. Not sure what jurisdiction you’re in but 16 is age of consent in most places, and they’re going to do it if they want to do it. It’s far better to treat them like adults, let them be somewhere safe, and teach them that they should not feel shameful or fearful about that part of them. If the age of consent where you are is 18, or Tiffany is not legally of age, then the situation would be quite different and difficult but would have to be no.

That your son is able to be so honest and comfortable with you, and Tiffany with her parents (hopefully!) is a credit to you all. This is an opportunity to encourage him to practice safe sex and also that sex as part of a healthy relationship like this is healthy and valuable in itself (as opposed to sneaking around, and him not able or even bothered to provide a safe space for his girlfriend). It’s worth encouraging this attitude that to do this they should be somewhere safe, and comfortable, such as his room in your home. It will also ensure a much better experience for both of them should it be a first time (whether overall or just together).

I would just consider confirming that Tiffany’s parents are aware of this and comfortable with this; especially as at 17 are in a grey area socially between being legally adults in many areas but not others. EDIT: As someone else suggests, ask Tiffany to get her parents to call you - so that the ball is in her court.

I would also even consider being out until late so they can have some privacy. I would also set some ground rules such as no drinking or drugs in exchange for this, and no one else in the house while you’re out. I totally accept that may not instinctively sit well with you to be out but they’re both at the cusp of adulthood and total autonomy (literally months away if your son is 17) and already have autonomy in this decision (unless you’re in one of the few places where the age of consent is 18).

This sort of treatment, respect and trust is something your son will remember for the rest of his life.

Its something of a myth but not completely.

For women, if the hymen is still intact it can tear during the first time having penetrative sex and that can be painful plus accompanied by blood. However it is a myth that the hymen is intact in all virgins and that the first time is painful for all women.

For men, the first time penetrating someone can rarely be painful too if they have not retracted their foreskin much before or it is tight. Some men don’t realise they can retract their foreskin fully when masturbating for example, and may not be told by anyone (particularly is homes that may by uptight or even puritanical about sex education). So it does genuinely happen that people find out when they first have sex. For most men the foreskin will stretch a bit over time and tightness or pain will resolve but occasionally they need a circumcision.

Men with circumcisions may also experience pain the first time if theyve has a bad circumcision and the scar is restricting them or being pulled on during penetration. Again that usually settles but very rarely may need surgery.

Meanwhile for anal penetration, the first time is often painful largely due to inexperience. People are not used to relaxing the anus, or are nervous and tighten it. Also if they have a bad partner they may be too aggressive which can be very painful, or they may not use enough lube.

So yes the first time can be painful, but is a myth that it must be painful or is always painful. Pain can be avoided . Persistent pain every time sex is had may be due to poor technique but may also warrant a medical check up - for either gender/sex.

If youre new to linux, then I’d say Linux Mint is the place to start. Use it with XFCE if light weight is what you want.

Not having cutting edge packages is a red herring - you really dont want bleeding edge as thats where the errors and breakages happen. Mint is reliable and secure which is what you need when starting out. You dont want to be a beta tester. Dont confuse latest packages for most secure on linux - plenty of packages have stable older versions which get security patches.

Mint is also very popular, with a huge range of easy to find resources to help set it up the way you want it.

Wayland is also a red herring - its the future but its just not really ready yet. Yes its more secure due to how its built but the scenario you’re using linux in the particular security benefits you’re hearing about are not really going to impact you day to day. And the trade off is that Wayland is still buggy, with many apps still not working seamlessly. Most apps are designed for X11 and x-wayland is an imperfect bridge between the two. I’m not saying Wayland is bad - it’s actually good and is the future. But you dont want to be problem solving Wayland issues as a linux newbie. Dont see Wayland as essentialnfor an good stable and secure linux install.

Personally I wouldn’t recommend Fedora - it has a short update cycle and tends to favour newer bleeding edge tech and paclages. Thats not a bad thing but if what you want is a stable, reliable low footprint system and to learn the basics, in wouldn’t stray into Fedora just yet. It has a 13 month cycle of complete distro upgrades and distro upgrades are the times when there are big package changes and the biggest chances of something breaking. The previous version loses support after a month so you do need to upgrade to stay secure. Most people won’t have issues between upgrades but with any distro when you do a big upgrade things can easily break of you’ve customised things and set up things differently to the base. It can be annoying having to fix thongs and get them back how you want them, and worse can lead to reinstalls. Thats nor a uniquely Fedora problem, but the risk is higher woth faster updating and bleeding edge distros. And in fairness there are lots of fedora spins that might mitigate that - but then you risk being on more niche setups so support can be harder to find when you need it.

For comparison the latest version of Mint supported through til 2029, and major releases also get security patches and support for years even after newer versions are released. There is much less pressure to upgrade.

I work in a hospital and the worst days to work are weekends. The hospital is still full of patients but most staff are off so its busy. And its much harder dealing with sick patients and emergencies on a weekend as a result. Also all your friends and family are off on the weekend so you can’t see them.

Meanwhile if you have days off in the week, it’s great because everything is open (unlike a sunday) and all the kids are in school. So you can go out an enjoy the parks, or venuesnlike gyms or shop freely etc. But most of your friends and family are also at work so that limits things.

I would definitely take 2 days off together, not split them. If I were to have 2 days off and work every weekend I’d either take Mon/Tue off or Thu/Fri. I think its just preference and howbbusy your job is. It could suck being in work on a Friday while everyone else is gearing up for weekend off and discussing their plans, plus also people head off early where they can - I’d probably take Thu/Fri off so I didn’t have to put up with all that.

I personally work 80% of full time and do 3 long days plus oncall. It works out 3x 10 hour days and 2 hours pay per week is for my weekend oncall work every 16 weeks. I end up with 4 days off every week and its glorious. So aiming for a 5 day week may be a mistake. When I was 100% full time I did 4 long days for a bit - it was OK but I had Tue off, worked the other days and had the rhythm of weekend off then on/off/on - it didn’t feel like i was really off for 3 days a week. I’d definitely recommend always stick off days together.

But it may be longer daysnis the real best option if available. Even working 100% hours you have 1 less day commuting on 4 days, and if you work 10 hours so you start early and finish late you can even miss rush hour. I used to stay late or come in early to miss traffic when i was doing normal 9-5 work so switching to 10 hour 8-6 was easy. Depends what your role is and your own stamina for long days is though.

If the EU were concerned about the US jurisdiction of Linux projects it could pick:

• OpenSuSE (org based in Germany)
• Mint (org based in Ireland)
• Manjaro (org based in France/Germany, and based of Arch)
• Ubuntu (org based in UK)

However if they didn’t care, then they could just use Fedora or other US based distros.

I think it would be a good idea for the EU to adopt linux officially, and maybe even have it’s own distro, but I’m not sure this Fedora base makes sense. Ironically this may also be breaching EU trademarks as it’s masquerading as an official project by calling itself EU OS.

How is it misleading? Plex Pass is a subscription? It would be confusing to many people if it said “Plex pass” instead of “Subscription” as not everyone would necessarily even know what that is. Subscription is very clear.

I use Jellyfin as a home media server - in my set up I have it running on my desktop PC, and I use it to stream a media library to my tv.

A home media server basically just means its meant to be deployed at a small scale rather than as a platform for 1000s of people to use.

Your scenario is exactly what Jellyfin and Plex can do. If you have 5 users then you just need a host device running the server that is powerful enough to run 5 video streams at the same time. The server can transcode (where the server takes on the heavy lifting needing a more powerful CPU) or direct play (where all the server does is send the bits of the file and the end user’s device such as a phone or smart tv does the hard work of making a quality play, so a lower power server device can work).

If this is contained within your home, your home wifi or network should be fine to do this, even up to 4k if your network is good enough quality. If the 5 people are outside your home then your internet bandwidth - particularly your upload bandwidth - and your and their internet quality will be important determinant of quality of experience. It will also need more configuring but it is doable.

This doesn’t need to be expensive. A raspberry pi with storage attached would be able to run Jellyfin or Plex, and would offer a decent experience over a home network if you direct play (I.e. just serve up the files for the end users device to play). You might need something more powerful for 5 simultaneous direct play streams but it would still be in the realms of low powered cheap ARM devices.

If you want to use transcoding and hardware acceleration you’d need better hardware for 5 people to stream simultaneously. For example an intel or amd cpu, and ideally even something with a discrete graphics card. That doesn’t mean a full desktop PC - it could be an old PC or a minipc.

However most end user devices such as TVs, PCs, Phones and tablets are perfectly capable of direct playing 1080p video themselves without the server transcoding. Transcoding has lots of uses - you can change the audio or video format on the fly, or enable streaming of 4k video from a powerful device to a less powerful device - but its not essential.

Direct play is fine for most uses. The only limitation is the files on the server need to be in a format that can be played on the users device. So you may need to stick to mainstream codecs and containers; things like mp4 files and h.264/avc. You could get issues with users not being able to playback files if you have say mkv files and h. 265/hevc or vp9. Then you’d either need to install the codecs in the users device (which may not be possible in a smart tv for example) or use transcoding (so the server converts the format on the fly to something the users device can use but then needing a more powerful server)

I prefer Jellyfin as its free and open source. It has free apps for the end user for many devices including smart tvs, streaming sticks, phones, tablets and PCs. Its slightly less user friendly than plex to set up but not much. And the big benefit is your users are only exposed to what you have in your library.

Plex is slightly more user friendly but commerical. You have to pay for a licence to get the best features and even then it pushes advertising and tries to get your users to buy commercial content. Jellyfin does not do that at all.

Finally if your plan is to self host in the cloud, again this is doable but then you stray into needing to pay for a powerful enough remote computer/server, the bandwidth for all content to be served up (in addition to your existing home internet) and the potential risk of issues with privacy and even copyright infringement issues around the content you are serving. A self hosted device in your home is much more secure and private. A cloud hosted solution can be secure but youre always at risk of the host company snooping your data or having to enforce copyright laws.

Edit: the other thing to consider ia an FTP server. If you just want to share the files, its very simple to set up. What Jellyfin and Plex offer is convenience by having a nice library to organise things, and serving up the media. But direct play from a media server is not far off just downloading the file from an ftp server to your home device and playing it. But you can also download files from a Jellyfin server so I’d say its worth going the extra step and to use a dedicated media server over ftp.

Wow, I’m a huge fan of Terry Pratchett. What a lovely story - I didn’t realise he was a such a big fan of oblivion. Also the makers of that mod are very kind to have adapted the mod in ways that would help him enjoy the game despite his Alzheimer’s.

How old are these people? These sound like kids?

Graffiti free is an aesthetic choice.

Whats misinformation about it? To say “this is misinformation” and not explain why can be a form of misinformation in itself.

The article does say it previously called this a “backdoor” and has been changed. Otherwise it seems to be fairly factual although the person it quotes continues to use the term “backdoor”.

To say its a backdoor does infer this is deliberate or some motivation to concealing the prescence of these commands - there is no evidence for this whatsoever and there is no evidence there is malign intent. Most chips likely have undocumented commands used by the chipmakers.

However it is fair to say this is a potential security risk if these commands are not locked down in production and could be used as an attack vector. Even if they could be used to scrape information that would be concerning. But we’d need to know more detail.

If its been covered better elsewhere please share it as that is a netter counter to misinformation than just saying misinformation.

Its interesting - the article has taken one view of this as the the target being Palestinian children.

However reading this, the target actually seems to he the “prank” victims. Young people are goading older israelis into showing how angry, biased and racist they are when asked to help Palestinian children, and then sharing that and laughing at them?

It feels like Israeli children are mocking Israeli adults. Its a bit crass but the targets aren’t really Palestinian children. If anything its showing just how racist Israeli adults are.

Of course there is also the disturbing element of Israeli children seeing this all as just a joke, and not seeming to care about what this means about their parents and the country they live in. To see people get so viscerally angry when asked to help starving children is shocking yet I don’t think the Israeli youth seem atnall disrtubed by how hateful the people they’re talking to really are.

This started in the UK in the 90s with a research paper by Andrew Wakefield linking MMR (measle mumps rubella) vaccines to autism. It was trash research but it for published in the Lancet (a major international journal) before being retracted once other doctors pointed out the massive flaws in the research.

There was and is no evidence of causation - autism happens to be diagnosed usually after childhood vaccines are conpleted but thats because vaccines are mostly in young ages and it takes a while for autism to be diagnosable as its only obvious once children reach a certain age when the socialization aspects of the diseases become more obviously.

However despite it being trash research and eventually being withdrawn, the damage was done. Enough parents of children with autism wanted to believe that this disease was inflicted upon them and have someone to blame rather than accept it is largely genetic and bad luck. A perhaps understandable feeling but that gave an opening for conspiracy theorists to blame the government for a “cover up” even though all the counter evidence and push pack is evidence based and freely unavailable.

Andrew Wakefield eventually got struck off the UK medical register - he was found to have had undisclosed financial interests that would make him millions in selling bogus test kits. The real conspiracy was his but Hes managed to move to the US and make a career as a “victim” and “outsider” to the pharmacy industry.

This whole vaccine conspiracy has been taken up with the US right wing and religious groups. Its a perfect conspiracy for them as it plays into the ideas of the US federal “forcing” then to do things against their will. In this case vaccinating children (which depends on a majority of children getting vaccinated to protect the whole population - herd immunity) and is used as an example of “socialism” vs their preferred extreme individualism. They already rail against being told they cannot indoctrinate children by lying about science in schools (trying to suppress evolution teaching etc) or use the states infrastructure to discriminate against groups they disagree with such as gay or trans people, or be downright racist asis often seen throughout the bible belt.

So the vaccine conspiracy theory is basically one of many tools used by the right wing and religious allies to rail against supposed state interference in their lives. Instead most people who believe in this nonsense are either extremely ignorant and easily manipulated or deliberately using the nonsense to further their own goals. So some of these people are highly intelligent and don’t care whether this is true or false - only that it aligns with their world view and goals so they dont challenge it. Some will even know its all bullshit and go along with it to further their own goals.

The covid vaccines has supercharged this debate. The roll out of vaccines with massively reduced testing and safety steps to try and control the pandemic, and then the side effects seen has all helped fuel this conspiracy and grow it within the right wing echo chamber.

There is no evidence whatsoever that vaccination causes autism. However parents are refusing to have their children vaccinated with MMR and now you have outbreaks of diseases like Measles in the US. People will die, people will become infetile - all from a disease that is easily prevented by a vaccine.

Tl:dr: The vaccine conspiracy is a right wing aligned nonsense started in the 90s andnuper charged by covid, and is a sign of the extremely polarised and disinformation heavy nature of right wing US politics (and is seen in other western countries if you dig into it even if fringe stuff)

This looks like a good build.

A couple pf considerations; which really come down to your budget and future plans.

The Ryzen 7700 X is a good value per £ spent, and a good chip. But if your budget allows then £140 more gets the Ryzen 9 7950X, which has twice the threads at 16, better specs generally and nearly double the bench marking scores. Obviously prices vary in different regions but I’m seeing the 7700 X at £330 and the 7950X at £470. For 40% more you’d get about 100% more power. Those sorts of things are worth considering when you build - a higher budget now may save you money longer term as you may not need to upgrade for longer and youre already sinking the £330 in which you wouldn’t get back when you upgrade.

However you would also need to think about CPU cooling and may end up spending more on a fan too. But fans are generally cheaper and if youre already getting a good fan it’d be moot. Do get a fan; I dont think the 7700 X cones with one and generally stock fansnwith CPUs are OK but not the best for high performance use like gaming.

For graphica the RX 7900 GRE is a slightly better AMD graphics card. Its about 11% more powerful. I’m seeing t at £560 versus £520 for the 7800 XT. About 7% more expensive. 11% is a more marginal boost but again might be worth it. I’d definitely go with AMD at that price range - Nvidia 4070 is similar performance to the 7900 GRE but I’m seeing the 4070 as more expensive and Nvidia drivers are not as good on linux.

Thats not to say the drivers dont work - I do have a 3070 on Linux and I have a good experience gaming. The problems are ive had bad driver updates ive had to roll back, and I have problems with Wayland so use X11.

However if money were not a limit, the top end cards are Nvidia and you’d still get your gaming power from them on linux. Its just frustrating and annoying when drivers lag Windows, or have buggy updates. In terms of value for money and Linux, the AMD RX 7900 GRE is the better buy.

(Edit: worth saying too for single player gaming the ones youre playing are the ones that make good use of ultra high end graphics - so for example Witcher 4 is going to making use of top end graphics in the years ahead. GTA VI too. Not sure that justifies the cost of high end cards though - they are rediculousl overpowered and overpriced fr current uses)

Last thing, again coming down to budget vs future proofing. 32gb of ram is good but maybe worth getting 64gb if you can afford it to future proof. However if sticking with 32gb get a brand and combination you’d hopefully he able to buy more of down the line. Its not a good idea to mix ram sticks so you could get 2 16gb sticks now, and then another two 16gb sticks in the future - so make sure its a decent brand like Corsair that will still sell in 3-5 years. However if you get 64gb you might be OK for 5 and maybe even 10 years.

RAM is also always one of the cheapest and first and easiest ways to boost performance in a systemif you had to pick just 1 item to boost. (Edit: but in your case 32gb is already top end so you probably wouldn’t notice the 64gb unless you have some very memory intensive scenarios. I do have 64gb - which I do use for Cities Skylines as I load so many mods. So 64gb can still be a good buy if you’d use it)

Edit 2: also get a 4k gaming monitor because with the specs youre considering you’d be playing at 4k. I play at 4k with high and ultra settings still on my 3070, and that’s less powerful than what youre buying.

You can convert using Evernote as an intermediary: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Onenote

You’d need to hunt down a copy but there are mirrors since Evernote ended legacy version, and it’d need to be set up in wine to run in linux but it should do the job.

Neither of these systems are powerful, and they’re also running Intel integrated GPUs which are frankly generally poor.

If you want to game with Proton, then the device still needs to be able run the game well if it had Windows installed.

As a general very rough rule, most games will work with proton if other games work with proton on your system. Its basically a compatibility layer between the game and your linux PC - if Proton can communicate well with your graphics card and CPU, and it has the right specs, it should just work - proton does the heavy lifting. But if no 3D games are running then most of them wont.

When it doesn’t work, the first place to look is your drivers and hardware. There are then certainly lots of caveats for specific games which may behave peculiarly with certain hardware and needs adjusting but I find that is the exception rather than the norm. Start with your drivers and hardware.

Yeah took them years to recognise the value in FiveM. At first they trued banning its makers, even sending private investigators after one, and accused it of being a tool to facilitate piracy. Then they changed the rules to allow non commercial mods online in 2022, and finally bought the makers in 2023.

I still find it a bit bizarre they’re not launching on PC at the same time as the consoles. Its the PC landscape where all the modding comes from, and PC is the single biggest gaming platform. But in fairness simultaneous launches are risky, and PC launches are more complex in terms of the breadth of hardware that needs supporting. But it’ll be PC that facilitates the most user generated content.

It doesn’t mean they are pushing flatpaks, but rather for whatever reason they decided to package their own flatpaks.

Flatpak can support different repos, so of course fedora can host its own. The strange bit is why bother repackaging and hosting software that is already packaged by the project itself on flathub?

One argument might me the security risk of poorly packaged flatpaks relying on eol of dependencies. Fedora may feel it is better to have a version that it packages in line with what it packages in its own repos?

I have some sympathy for that position. But it makes sense that it is annoying OBS when it is causing confusion if its a broken or poorly built repackags, and worse it sounds like things got very petty fast. I think OBS’s request that fedora flag this up as being different from the flathub version wasn’t unreasonable - but not sure what went down for it to get to thepoint of threatening legal action under misuse of the branding.

Fedora probably should make it clearer to its users what the Fedora Flatpak repo is for.

Yeah I have a Ser5 as a living room PC, wiped windows and have Nobara running on it. Linux is great - browse the web, play games, stream videos, and all with interfaces that actually work on a TV. I don’t miss Windows at all.

I’m not aware of an alternative TV App for android tv. On my android TV live tv is also wrapped within the android interface but other sources like HDMI inputs are not.

If you can switch to HDMI sources outside the android apps then maybe the best thing to do is get a separate basic satellite tuner device?

It seems shitty that google are effectively hiding your inbuilt tv tuner behind an app with all their advertising and other crap.