I’ve never tried anything beyond DOS or the SNES/Genesis era, honestly.

I’m typing this reply on an M1 Macbook Air running Asahi. My experience is very positive, but with some caveats. Some positives, some background to contextualize the positives, and some negatives.

Positives: Great screen, nice battery life when in use, fast, runs the programs that I use on a daily basis for work. Good support for the specific hardware that I have. I enjoy using it as my go-to laptop. Fedora isn’t something that I use on any of my other linux boxes, but I didn’t have much trouble setting it up and it works well with my other devices. Libreoffice, Firefox, Chromium, every DE and window manager that I’ve bothered to test - they work fine. I’m currently running Sway with no issues, KDE worked fine too. Sound, bluetooth, camera all work. Again, my 9-to-5 day job is fully doable from this computer and I enjoy using it.

Background: I’ve been tinkering with Raspberry Pi devices for years and I made do with a PI 4 as a daily driver for a few months once. That experience helped me to focus on native linux solutions that didn’t depend on WINE or x86-specific programs. I can’t remember every decision that I made during that time, but I definitely changed my workflow a bit, started doing more in the terminal, and started using programs that were less resource-heavy. That carried over to how I use other devices. I also don’t game much.

Negatives: Gaming is limited on this hardware. I can play minetest, tuxkart, and some light emulation. That’s about it, but I don’t mind. If you’re trying to run windows programs, you’ll be out of luck. My linux experience on this laptop prior to the Asahi shift to Fedora was a bit buggy because it was a beta version and sound wasn’t supported(other than bluetooth). Everything works fine now, but my understanding is that this is very model-specific. I would probably be having a bad time on newer mac hardware. Power management is so-so and it depends heavily on your choice of desktop environment. If you close your lid and don’t plug in the laptop, you might find out that the battery is dead when you try to use it a day later. No multimonitor support - the USB-C ports are more limited in function than they are when running MacOS.

Also, my only experience is with a niche distribution, so bear that in mind. For me, Asahi has been excellent but don’t expect to be able to run your favorite distro on the hardware. Time will tell if the progress made by Asahi will lead to greater support for Apple Silicon by other distributions, and time will tell how long Asahi will exist as an active project. I preferred the Arch version, but I had no real choice but to jump to Fedora when the developers did. Not a big deal for me.

Hahaha! It was a good bet on my part.

You clearly haven’t met all of my friends.

Fair point, but I still need a quick way to tell people about upcoming funerals. On the plus side, I’m between the wave of friends’ baby photos and the wave of grandbaby photos. Which is nice.

I don’t integrate it with anything else, but facebook remains my best option for getting current contact info for anybody from my past. Even after the enshittification, it remains an effective Rolodex. Rolodex…I am old.

I’ve been having fun with VoxeLibre lately on single-player mode. Nothing too fancy, gameplay is eerily similar to vanilla Minecraft. I’m looking forward to trying other games built on the engine that offer a bit more variation.

One nice thing is that the android version of Minetest is compatible with the PC version, so it is possible to sync save files and play on the go. It also seems to load faster than Minecraft does.

There’s nothing non-intentional or implicit about denying the franchise to noncitizens. For the vast majority of countries, that is the way citizenship is expressly designed to work as an in-group. Citizenship is generally meant to discriminate against outsiders.

Arch offers a combination of rolling software updates, a simple but easily customized base, pacman for the package manager, the AUR, a barebones installation process by default, good documentation, and active development. That may or may not be a good combination based on your goals.

Other distros offer a different combination of characteristics. Those characteristics are a starting point and you can get to the same destination no matter what you use. The trick is figuring out what starting point is closest to your destination or which starting point makes the journey fun for you. For some people, Arch is that. For plenty of people, Arch isn’t that.

I carry a 2 TB Silicon Power drive on a keychain sometimes.

In addition to an encrypted partition for secure data transport, I keep a fat32 partition that can supplement phone media when I travel.

A few file formatting choices (mp3 or mp4 suffixes) mean that media playback usually works with tvs that I trust, too.

If I need more space, I can temporarily delete a few albums. No big deal.

My most significant run-in with a genie was in Mario Land 3. After what I did to him, I’d hate clouds too.

Beautiful! I almost got one of these, but I went with the 1CJF variant for the blue outline. Great watch.

Easy if you go step by step and don’t accidentally skip anything. Archinstall will get you to the same result with lower risk of failure, in a tenth of the amount of time spent. And unless you install operating systems for a living, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Source: Installed Arch on about a dozen different devices, twice without Archinstall.

If you’re looking to learn something, do Linux from Scratch instead. The process is way more granular, way more documented, and way more educational than parroting the steps of installing Arch from the wiki.

That multicolor combo is amazing! Makes me wish I had more separate parts to paint when I coated mine.

My take: Ride as is if you can stand it, but there’s no wrong answer.

I powder-coated a Motobecane of similar age and I don’t regret it. The original paint job with hand-painted details must have been great, but decades of sun, rain, and neglect obliterated it. Restoration would have been starting over from scratch so I sandblasted and turned it into an electric blue beast of burden.

Somebody else can restore the original paint job 50 years from now. I’m just keeping the frame safe for them until they’re done being born and growing up somewhere. It’ll be waiting for them when they’re ready.

I think that phrases like ‘anti-consumer’ can stick to any target, so long as they’re thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.

Nick Cage: Is that supposed to be me? It’s…grotesque.

I’ll give you $20,000 for it.

I played around with Mandrake and Debian around the turn of the century. A bit of a break, but then I started dual-booting Ubuntu in the Windows Vista/X86 OSX era. I jumped to Xubuntu and started running Linux by itself on several machines around 2012.

I largely shifted to Arch around the time that snaps came out because they weren’t playing nice with some of my low-end machines. Nowadays, mainly Arch. Exceptions: Fedora on my M1, Debian Bookworm on an old x86 tablet and any time I set up WSL on a Windows machine.

Agreed. My old pebble lasts for over a week, not that I use it for much more than an alarm clock/metronome nowadays.

It does those jobs extremely well, though.

Steven Erikson makes a lot of bold choices throughout the series that go beyond plot structure and character deaths. If you don’t like something about any particular book, it will probably be absent in the next book.

There are several times where (after 1000+ pages of build-up) he shifts to an entirely different set of characters on a different continent. You get thrown into the deep end and have to start over with no immediate clues about where you are, when you are, who the people are, and what it has to do with what you read before. A book or two later threads start to intersect.

A later book has Kruppe as the narrator, which is fantastic if you love Kruppe as much as Kruppe loves Kruppe.