Removed by mod

They do conserve one thing: the status of the wealthy.

Removed by mod

Printers should probably be connected by USB for security reasons anyway.

We kinda do need him, though. Very few people are as intensely principled as he is on the subject of computing freedom, and without him anchoring the Overton window, there’s nothing stopping the Bill Gateses of this world from moving it.

I think the problem there is that, for many years, nobody bothered to explain to him exactly why child porn is bad.

Most people observe that everyone else thinks it’s bad and don’t question it any further. That’s not good enough for Stallman, though, and for good reason: expecting him to unquestioningly bow to peer pressure is an insult to his intelligence.

Someone did eventually explain the problem to Stallman. I don’t know what exactly was explained, but my guess is that Stallman was told that child porn is non-consensual and therefore violates the child’s privacy, similar to how revenge porn violates the subject’s privacy. At any rate, after that discussion took place, Stallman did an about-face on the subject, and is now opposed to child porn like anyone else.

Moral of the story: taboos and peer pressure bad; logic and education good.

Printers these days tend to be driverless, so that’s pretty much a solved problem.

And back at that time if you installed any flavor of Linux you were lucky if the OS install didn’t fuck itself over

I was using Linux religiously back then, and this is false. As long as there’s a driver for all of your hardware, it generally worked fine.

But that “as long as” is doing some heavy lifting. The usual suspects were pretty much the same as now: Broadcom, NeoMagic, and NVIDIA. Some cheap printers and modems were problematic as well, but if you paid for good hardware, it would probably work.

The wireless kind, presumably. Those always need their own firmware and therefore their own driver.

Since when did Bethesda have QA?

If you can’t afford Starfield, how can you afford a computer capable of running it?

What the heck is database cracking?

Gotta move that fruit up!

[meme where the hero pulls the mask off the tied-up Firefox’s head, revealing Safari]

Note that for vector graphics editing, Inkscape is really good. That doesn’t help you if you need to edit photos, though.

KDE has neat stuff, but Compiz was the king of bling.

Linux. I signed up with my first proper ISP as a kid in the '90s. The service included a shell account on their Linux server accessible by telnet. I thought it was really cool and decided to see if I could run it on my own computer, and to my delight, I could.

I take it you don’t already have a desktop you can use?

“If you open this device, the contained alien immediately escapes, rendering it inert.” There. Problem solved. Case dismissed.

Why not use a full-size computer for all that stuff?