What exactly do you mean by “news is censored”? Are you saying that certain stories aren’t getting the kinds of traction you think they should be getting? Or, are you saying that major events are not being covered at all because the government is threatening news organizations that cover them?

It needs a lot more people and lines connecting to the centralize services, like 6+. You have 14 dudes in the fediverse, you should have a similar number of dudes in the traditional centralized social media things. You need to make it clear that every connection between two people goes through that central server. With only 3 or 4 it looks like it’s some kind of small community there, like you’re just saying “communities exist on Facebook” rather than “on Facebook everybody connects to one central Facebook service”. It would also be good to draw a black line around the edge of the bubble to indicate it’s a walled garden rather than an open system.

For the Fediverse example, it would be good to have a slightly darker shaded bubble with people around their local fediverse instance. That would indicate that there are local communities, but that they can still communicate with all the other communities. And, maybe show that people can be part of different communities, show one person connected both to a mastodon instance and a Lemmy instance.

Edit: I just thought of something else to make it clearer. On the centralized networks you could also make a darker group of people who are a community on say Facebook, but show that that community has to connect to each-other through the central server.

Maybe we’re now at a point where it’s a good choice for more techy people to use, and that adoption will mean more work gets done on it.

I installed it because I wanted to see how well it would run games. But, I haven’t actually played many games on it, not because they don’t work (they work great), but because I’ve found it’s so good at everything else too. It made it easy to get around to some projects I’d been putting off.

My machine plays all kinds of fairly recent games extremely well, but Microsoft is ditching Windows 10 support in less than a year, and has decided this machine doesn’t qualify for Windows 11. I bet there are lots of other people in the same boat. Bazzite doesn’t have to be perfect, but if it can be better than throwing away your old machine, there could be a lot of people switching soon.

Yeah, +1 for Bazzite.

It looks like it’s really designed for Linux beginners. They’ve done a solid amount of work sanding off the rough edges.

As someone who has been using Linux for decades, I’m also impressed with it for a development system. I chose Bazzite because I wanted to be able to play games easily, but since I installed it a month or so ago, I’ve barely played any. I’ve installed a few to make sure they work, but I got interested in another project once I installed it, so for me it’s been a machine used to set up and administer a Kubernetes cluster, as well as doing some Go / Javascript development.

In the early 2000s, I was one of those guys who ran Gentoo and liked building all my own software on my own machine so that it was perfectly tweaked for what I wanted to do. But, these days, I really like having an OS that’s stable and gets out of my way, so I can focus on more interesting things.

Bazzite, a gaming-focused Linux distribution, is designed to work really well with Steam. One drawback is that if you have a game installed in Windows on a Windows drive, you can’t use it from Linux steam. But, there is a way to have games accessible to both operating systems. I haven’t done this, yet, but I’m probably going to try it this week.

It involves installing a Windows driver that supports BTRFS partitions.

Here’s the video guide I found.

If OP is a gamer and not too comfortable with Linux, Bazzite is a good choice of distribution.

It’s a so-called “Atomic” distro. Basically what that means is that it works more like Android / iOS than Windows or a traditional Linux distribution.

The base system including drivers and key applications is built as an image by Fedora. Every 2 weeks or so, they release a new one, and Bazzite users get the new one the next time they reboot. Everything in that base image is tested to work together, so you don’t get weird incompatibilities. You can still install all the other software you want, but you tend to do it using Flatpaks rather than rpms/debs. (For someone who doesn’t know what that means, Bazzite is a nice OS because that’s something you don’t need to learn right away.)

Bazzite is meant to be something that you can install on a SteamDeck, or another handheld gaming PC, but it also works great for desktop machines. But, because it’s meant for handheld machines, they’ve worked extra hard to sand away some of the rough edges.

If you’re a more advanced user, Bazzite is still good because you can still do almost everything you’d do on a normal distribution, you’re just discouraged from doing things that affect the base image because it makes updates slower and means they’re not guaranteed to work. I actually really like some of the things you’re encouraged to do in Atomic distros that you wouldn’t do normally. For example, using distrobox as a way to install certain kinds of dev tools. I currently have one project I’m running in an Ubuntu distrobox and another I’m running in a Fedora distrobox. It keeps some of the tools isolated to the “box” where they’re needed. I haven’t used Fedora much lately, so it’s fun to have the more familiar Ubuntu environment in one, and then the other one where I can experiment and learn.

For someone who doesn’t play games, Bazzite probably isn’t ideal, but I’d still recommend an Atomic build. There are downsides, but unless you’re the kind of person who really likes building their own kernel and making sure it’s optimal for their system, it’s so nice to have a stable base image so you can focus on the other stuff.

I believe this is what they call “preaching to the choir”.

No, I don’t know how to script to test it, sorry. But, if you do test it let me know what you find.

Part of the problem is that people who hit some massive share ratio are doing it at the expense of people who are simply trying to hit 1.0.

My guess is that most of the people with really high ratios aren’t even aware of how much they’re sharing. They just set the things to seed and then forget them. Some people do treat it like a competition, but for many it isn’t. Most are probably just trying to be nice and make sure that something stays available.

What’s really needed is some seeding priority thing so that someone who is trying to prove they’re not a leech is given top priority to seed things, and someone who has already established their credentials is put at the back of the queue.

I may be wrong, but I think you can even game the system a bit. I think the way the torrent protocol works, it prefers to trade packets between people who don’t have a complete download before it requests missing bits from seeders. So, if you restrict your download bandwidth so you avoid becoming a seeder for as long as possible, you’ll upload more stuff. If I’m right, then the ultimate way to do things would be to grab as much of the content as quickly as possible, but slow way down when you’re at 99% complete. That way you have the chunks that everyone else wants but you don’t get counted as a seeder.

I haven’t bothered looking into the protocol to verify this, but it always seems that I upload less when something’s complete vs. when it’s in progress. But, that could just be an illusion.

You’re basically never going to hit a positive ratio if you do things that way. Other people are using RSS feeds to know when something becomes available, then grabbing it on a seedbox. They get the entire thing instantly, then they start seeding to everyone else.

It is possible (but slow) to get a positive ratio if you don’t have a seedbox, as long as you grab new things instantly. But, while it will take maybe 20 minutes to download, it will often take days of continuously seeding to hit 1.0.

If your goal is to hit a positive ratio, either get a seedbox or grab things immediately via a feed. If you’re grabbing using a feed, you could theoretically grab popular shows even if you’re not interested in them. But, it’s a bit of a waste of bandwidth to grab something and seed it if you never intend to look at it. Your best bet, if you’re trying not to be wasteful, is figure out a show you actually want to watch that’s still releasing new episodes. Grab new episodes immediately and seed them.

Even if it’s a show where you’re still on season 1 and currently season 4 is airing, as long as you’ll eventually get to season 4, you’re not wasting bandwidth that way.

And you were born in 2309?

If you don’t have a seedbox you’re basically “competing” against people who do. So, even if you’re willing to seed to a ratio of 2.0 and keep things around for months or years, the requests that go to seedboxes get fulfilled at an insane bandwidth and nobody needs the content you’re serving up using your 2400 baud modem.

There’s a private sports tracker I’ve heard of that rewards long-term seeding. What’s cool about that is that most sports events are only relevant for a few days and then people move on, this is especially true for big fans of certain teams who want the latest event. But, if you reward people for seeding, they’ll just keep some random game or event around for months. That means that if something suddenly becomes relevant months later, you can probably still find it.

To be fair, and ugh, I hate to have to stand up for these assholes, but…

To be fair, their claim is that the video was a lie and that the results were manufactured. They believe that Teslas are actually safe and that Rober was doing some kind of Elon Musk takedown trying to profit off the shares getting tanked and promote a rival company.

They actually do have a little bit of evidence for those claims:

1. The wall changes between different camera angles. In some angles the wall is simply something painted on canvas. In other angles it’s a solid styrofoam wall.
2. The inside the car view in the YouTube video doesn’t make it clear that autopilot mode is engaged.
3. Mark Rober chose to use Autopilot mode rather than so-called Full Self Driving.

But, he was interviewed about this, and he provided additional footage to clear up what happened.

1. They did the experiment twice, once with a canvas wall, then a few weeks later with a styrofoam wall. The car smashed right into the wall the first time, but it wasn’t very dramatic because the canvas just blew out of the way. They wanted a more dramatic video for YouTube, so they did it again with a styrofoam wall so you could see the wall getting smashed. This included pre-weakening the wall so that when the car hit it, it smashed a dramatic Looney-Tunes looking hole in the wall. When they made the final video, they included various cuts from both the first and second attempts. The car hit the wall both times, but it wasn’t just one single hit like it was shown in the video.

2. There’s apparently a “rainbow” path shown when the car is in Autopilot mode. [RAinbows1?!? DEI!?!?!?!] In the cut they posted to YouTube, you couldn’t see this rainbow path. But, Rober posted a longer cut of the car hitting the wall where it was visible. So, it wasn’t that autopilot was off, but in the original YouTube video you couldn’t tell.

3. He used Autopilot mode because from his understanding (as a Tesla owner (this was his personal vehicle being tested)), Full Self Driving requires you to enter a destination address. He just wanted to drive down a closed highway at high speed, so he used Autopilot instead. In his understanding as a Tesla owner and engineer, there would be no difference in how the car dealt with obstacles in autopilot mode vs. full self driving, but he admitted that he hadn’t tested it, so it’s possible that so-called Full Self-Driving would have handled things differently.

Anyhow, these rabid MAGA Elon Fanboys did pick up on some minor inconsistencies in his original video. Rober apprently didn’t realize what a firestorm he was wading into. His intention was to make a video about how cool LIDAR is, but with a cool scene of a car smashing through a wall as the hook. He’d apparently been planning and filming the video for half a year, and he claims it just happened to get released right at the height of the time when Teslas are getting firebombed.

A better trick would be to paint the road going straight when there’s a cliff. Much easier to hide the evidence that way.

Nope, it’s maybe a month old.

I’d agree that in the current state it’s pretty useless. But, I don’t think it would take too much to make it usable. If the GRUB menu had some basic information on it like: what version is it, when was it installed, has it booted successfully, etc. then I think that would be enough for most people to figure out. Although, I do think that the current Bazzite timeout is way too short.

BTW, on my system /boot is ext4, /boot/efi is FAT32 and the rest mounted at /sysroot is BTRFS.

Anything’s possible. But, they try to make that hard. The system always keeps 2 versions around, the newest one and the previous one, so if you screw up the newest one you can always boot into the previous one. And Bazzite, at least, uses BTRFS which uses copy-on-write, so it’s much harder to corrupt the filesystem. I think the /boot partition is still ext4 though, so it’s possible that if you time it just right you could theoretically mess up your boot partition. Then you’d need to use a rescue USB drive to fix it.

Sort of. In my experience with Windows it gets really annoying. They tell you there’s an update and that you have to restart. If you put it off for long enough and just hibernate your computer, Windows will eventually boot your computer even if it’s “off” to install the update.

With Bazzite and other atomic distros it’s more like it lets you know that there’s an update available for you, and that the next time you reboot you’ll get that update. I personally haven’t ever had it bug me to reboot, but maybe it does that eventually. I don’t know of any Linux distros that would have the nerve to boot your system when it’s off to install an update.

Also, if you don’t want that update, you can “pin” your current deployment and you don’t have to update. Next time you boot you can choose the “pinned” deployment rather than the new one. Normally you wouldn’t want to do that because you’d be missing out on security updates, but if you’ve heard that the newest drivers are unstable, you can definitely choose not to update – or at least not to boot into the updated version.

Also worth mentioning that there are always 2 boot entries, the newest one and the previous one. So, if the newest one does get installed and there’s some issue, you can reboot and choose the previous one. Theoretically you can also roll back to an earlier one from months ago, but I haven’t ever done that.