It’s a crap shoot, but as long as you can verify the supplier (or at least ensure return/refunds) it’s been okay.

I’ve gotten 2 GPUs and 4 CPUs through eBay, and only one of the GPUs was a scam—still got my money back within the day when it didn’t arrive on schedule (the lister had already deactivated their account)—the RX 6600 is working great so far, and the CPUs have held up in some office workstations and server for a few years now.

I’ve also gotten tons of used ram and used ssds and hdds. I’ve had a few times in my workplace where a few sticks of OEM ram and HDD failed, but haven’t had that issue with any of the used stuff (work or home).

I may be really lucky, or I may be the right amount of cautious (or both), so YMMV—definitely check with others for their experience before you decide to take the risk. Just keep in mind that if you go looking for scams and horror stories, it’s gonna seem like that’s all that happens, and the reverse holds if all you look for is success stories.

I’ll be damned, I did not realize. I’d heard of it and filed it away as an odd bit of trivia, but checking just now it is indeed its own kernel.

Thanks for the fact check!

Everyone in this thread is a coward wearing the facade of a revolutionary

>$1500 on an all new parts DIY PC complete with a Windows license. Nowadays everything’s outdated and these same parts would be like $800 max. Even back then I could have saved at least a couple hundred just by swallowing my pride and buying used.

I haven’t bought brand new tech since, and I have not regretted it yet.

You mean ReactOS?

GUIs are an awesome tool. Humans as a species have 5 senses, and instead of limiting computers to the narrow portion of sight needed for typing, they make full use of both our visual and aural senses.

That being said, they add another layer of abstraction away from the hardware on top of the already very abstract userspace utilities that abstract away the kernel that abstracts away the machine code that abstracts away the hardware.

All of which is to say that “Just Works” is shorthand for “I don’t want to actually learn how this complex tool that I’m using works, I just want it to do everything I think it should be able to based on my lack of understanding, and do so in the way that makes sense to my ignorance. And I want it to do all that without learning why we do some steps (and then I’m going to complain about how little sense it all makes).”

That mentality is what allows predatory software companies to not only take advantage of their customers—by hiding shady practices outside of the GUI, and drawing attention to and manufacturing outrage about inconsequential “features” (like ads on the start menu)—but also exist in the first place. Pushing back against that “I shouldn’t have to learn the tool to use it” mentality is one of the ways we keep scam artists and spyware dealers out of Linux spaces.

“I pay lip service to minorities, but don’t want to allocate resources to their needs”

They mean redact it from the screenshot you posted. It’s in the beta tester blurb at the bottom

What really is going on in the US right now?

Fascism

Is this worse than the first term?

Yes

Why’re legal people being kicked out?

Fascism

When is it time to really consider leave?

November 6th, 2024

So people don’t think I’m just fearmongering, here’s an in-depth explanation: the Republican party learned from their mistakes during Trump’s first term, and not only figured out how to use him, they had a plan for dismantling the government from day one. Unfortunately, their plan was to keep people focused on survival while they took away any public services, leaving only the parts that could be abused to enrich the billionaires.

As usual, they utilized divide and conquer techniques to keep the working class fighting amongst themselves about irrelevant issues like gender and immigration and the price of everyday goods. Now they have to make good on those promises to keep their supporters from turning on each other, but since they cannot control the price of goods through sheer will alone, they have to focus on purging the scapegoated groups.

They achieve this by attacking anyone and everyone who is an immigrant or visitor, documented or not. They are not trying to enforce the law, they are abusing the paramilitaristic forces they have control over (ICE) to see how much they can get their will done through sheer force.

The reason this works is because everyone in ICE “just follows orders” assuming if anything they did was out of line, someone else would stop them/clean up their mess. Our society operates on one big ethic of “that’s Someone Else’s Problem™.” But here’s the thing: you need enforcers willing to enforce the law, the system of checks and balances, at every level. Right now, there is no one arresting Trump for violating court orders, and everyone’s unsure if they even can because the Supreme Court ruled Presidential Immunity (the president can break most laws if he believes it’s “for the good of the country”).

On top of all that, the bureaucrats who would usually stand in the way of such gross misconduct are being purged. The red tape is being burned to the ground. The peons are keeping their heads down, “just following orders” as aforementioned, and the high ranking officials with weight to throw around are either following their duty of office—resigning if they refuse to follow orders—or being replaced with sycophants. The sum total effect is that there’s no one within the hierarchy who will stand up to abuse of authority.

As such, the presidency is free to do whatever he wants.

And he has. The other lesson The Party learned was to just unleash a constant barrage of policy. No matter what doesn’t pass, there’s a flood to hold back, so some is guaranteed to get through—and every bit that does is that much more power centralized in his office… And the dam will break eventually.

Meanwhile the liberal “opposition” will continue to waffle for three reasons: one, they’re still trying to play by the rules which have long since been discarded by the GOP; that only serves to benefit their opponents who use that against them. Two, they are easily manipulated by rhetoric, thinking they can bring GOP over to their side by engaging in the same rhetoric as the fascists (e.g. “so much for the party of ‘Law and Order’”); what they fail to comprehend is that the rhetoric fascists engage in is meaningless to the fascists, it is just a smokescreen: to a fascist, everything is about power, and words are just empty containers that you use to manipulate people into doing what you want (a form of power). Three, ultimately the Democratic Party is also in the pocket of billionaires, their interests are the same as the fascists: concentrate power into the hands of the wealthy, privatize the government.

If you can, leave. It doesn’t get better until after the fascists are violently deposed. They will stop at nothing less. Unfortunately, they have all the people who bekieve in doing that kind of thing on their side, so it’s only going to get worse.

And by worse, I mean that they’re already making plans for camps. They will market them as firstly “work retreats to heal lost souls,” or some similar rhetorical mixture of corpo-jargon and christianity (the 2 major ideologies) to justify rounding up anyome they deem a useless eater. Or maybe it will juat be called “Prison Labor” (which is really just constitutionally allowed slavery) and they will find whatever excuses to criminalize people they don’t like.

First it will be “illegals,” then it will be the homeless, addicts, the mentally ill, terrorists, or anyone else that is labelled a threat to society. And collateral damage will be acceptable (and encouraged) this whole time; so sometimes legal immigrants will get scooped in, or trans people who are clearly mentally ill by virtue of being trans, or anti fascists because antifa is a terrorist organization (because big brother tells me it is), or people who express leftist ideals publicly, or gun owners who haven’t pledged allegiance to The Party, or PoC with non-european names, or autistic people, or disabled people (because their secretary of Health and Human Services has “proven” that that disability is fake) or anyone else they believe they can “fix” by forcing them into labor.

And when those people don’t magically get “fixed” by labor, well… they’re just taking up too much space, aren’t they?

And the public will largely have one of three reactions: 1. “He can’t do that, that’s illegal! Someone (other than me) should really do something about that! I hope they do sooner than later… Anyhoo, better get back to struggling to survive in the worst recession since the Great Depression”; 2. “Well, business as usual, as long as it doesn’t affect me”; 3. “Hahaha FUCK YEAH, FUCK THOSE [bunch of slurs] AND ESPECIALLY THOSE [more slurs].”

If you can, leave. If you can’t… Well, read up on your rights and practice as many as you can.

- sent from the concentration camp I’m now fated to because writing all this will probably labelled an act of treason by The Party.

Not any moreso than learning any other OS. I’d just argue that it’s the case if you’re averse to research, reading, listening, watching, or just generally learning from others… or if you’re delving into unknown territory

Personally, i’m a learn-by-doing type of lady, so I’ve fucked up my share of devices (I’m allergic to reading unless it’s fiction), but I have yet to mess around in the kernel (it’s on my todo list, for my LFS build which is TBD)

Fascism. Once a p single private interest controls the government, they can effectively do whatever they want in the private sector, making them a sure bet for investors

You can use both, you don’t have to limit yourself to only one document/image manipulation program

Because GIMP already can make bitmap shapes

GIMP has shape tools like MS Paint does.

Also, why not use those programs you listed instead, if GIMP isn’t getting the job done.

>2025
>Not using Plan 9 for distributed computing

ISHYGDDT

Wrong tool for the job anyway.

GIMP and photoshop have always been photo editing tools first and foremost, which means they are meant for working with bitmap graphics, not vector.

Want to work with vector graphics? Use Inkscape.

Would you look at that: Inkscape already has very robust shape tools

Edit: before I rip my hair out: As explained elsewhere in this post, GIMP already has shape creation methods for bitmap. I assumed people were refering to PS’s vector shape capabilities because… GIMP already has shape creation methods for bitmap.

Yes, it’s part of the default tool set of a lot of programs that are not GIMP; don’t like it? Use those programs you listed instead. Or implement it because it’s FOSS. Or throw some money at the devs—who are creating something for you for free while you whinge about the things they haven’t done for you—so you at least have some right to whinge.

Can someone please guide me into installing it the safest way possible?

1. Get the installation image you want to use. Fedora has a lot of different flavors, I think they call them “spins,” so it’s important to know the difference and choose the right one for you.

2. Install it on a VM in VirtualBox. Play around with it, figure out what all the installation steps do, don’t be afraid to break the VM.

3. Play around with the VM in fullscreen just to get a feel for it. Don’t blame the OS for performance issues, that’s probably just the resource limitations of a VM.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary to find an OS that is comfortable enough to be your daily driver.

5. Use a program like Rufus to make a bootable USB out of the installation image.

6. Run the installer like you practiced. MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE CORRECT HARDDRIVE, DON’T OVERWRITE YOUR WINDOWS DRIVE. Otherwise, besides MAKING EXTRA SURE ABOUT WHICH HARDDRIVE YOU INSTALL IT TO, use defaults for settings you aren’t sure about.

I want to install Fedora on a separate drive and keep my windows drive completely intact (Need it for work).

I cannot stress the above warning enough: formatting the drive is the one step in installation that cannot be undone. If you format your windows drive, you cannot ever recover that data anymore.

Since it’s work related hardware, I have 2 pieces of advice; you should follow one or the other:

1. Don’t. Don’t fuck around with work hardware. It should be a separate PC that you literally only ever use to get work done. Whether it’s owned by a company or you’re self-employeed, mixing your hobby/leisure/gaming/tinker/daily driver with your work computer is a baaaaaad idea. You will get something all fuzzed up, you will try to fix it by reinstalling the OS or otherwise doing disk formatting/partitioning, and you will end up corrupting windows.

2. Okay, so you decided not to heed my warning because you like gaming (or whatever) too much and can’t afford a separate desktop/tower rn. i get it, I did the same once and lived to tell the tale (i do have separate machines now, fwiw). In that case, before you install fedora, simply disconnect the Windows drive. Yank it right out and don’t reinstall it until you’ve got linux up and running just how you like it. Not just after the installation, but after the configuration. Then there’s no chance you accidentally format/corrupt your drive.

Preferably I would like GRUB to ask which boot option I want to use if my linux drive is set to be my boot drive and to boot straight to windows if its my windows drive set to boot.

If the installer gives you the option, simply install Grub on the same drive as Linux. When you select the linux drive in your BIOS’ boot options, it will run grub, which will give you options, including booting into windows if you want. When you select the windows drive in your BIOS’ boot options, it will use the windows bootloader (which boots straight into windows, unless you have multiple windows installations).

Openwrt is just as easy to use as any commercial solution, the one difference is that it doesn’t come pre-installed on most hardware. Find the right hardware, and installation can literally be as easy as running a single command from the command line.

If you’re trying to avoid reading documentation and messing around in settings, good luck finding a privacy-respecting commercial solution with secure defaults that’s still simpler than openwrt’s LuCI. And I mean that, good luck. Plwase share if you find something that works for you.

Yes, I switched back in 2023 and noticed it was already better than google.

All major search engines feel like they’re either filled with AI slop results, or just only returning major corporations’ sites anymore, though. DDG just falls into the latter, while Google is mostly the former.

You should act your age