The simplest and dumbest way of getting a Windows VM up and running on Linux is to install VirtualBox and then download one of Microsoft’s own Windows VM developer images. Dead simple. Disadvantages: They’re time-limited, it’s Windows 11, and I don’t know if the Guest Extensions that will allow video acceleration are pre-installed.

Looks like your options are wireplumber (separate package) or pw-cli (looks kind of arcane). Gentoo appears to create an /etc/pipewire directory for some configuration, but your distro may be different.

Sorry to break it to you, but it doesn’t “know” anything except what text is most likely to come after the text you just typed. It’s an autocomplete. A very sophisticated one, granted, but it has no notion of “fact” and no real understanding of the content of what it’s saying.

Saying that it knows what it’s spouting back to you is exactly what I warned against up above: anthropomorphization. People did this with ELIZA too, and it’s even more dangerous now than it was then.

One could equally claim that the toaster was ahead, because it does something useful in the physical world. Hmm. Is a robot dog more alive than a Tamagotchi?

Let’s be clear on where the responsibility belongs, here. LLMs are neither alive nor sapient. They themselves have no more “rights” than a toaster. The question is whether the humans training the AIs have the right to feed them such-and-such data.

The real problem is the way these systems are being anthropomorphized. Keep your attention firmly on the man behind the curtain.

Nothing, since I use it myself. But it’s likely to be a massive shock to someone who was expecting a binary distro.

Gentoo technically qualifies, but probably isn’t what you want for other reasons.

Myspace is very much still there.

Even if the article’s title were literally true, 70% of . . . what, hundreds of millions of users? A billion plus? Regardless, that isn’t rock bottom, that’s “balanced awkwardly on the edge of the roof of that ridiculously tall building in Dubai after parachuting out of an aircraft”. There’s still a lot of “down” to cover.

Finishing the projects I wasn’t able to make enough time for last month. 😅

Look into qt5ct, if you haven’t already. That should allow you to retheme QT5 applications so that they behave as you choose even if KDE isn’t running.

I can beat that: we’ve got a metal-bodied Viking vacuum from the late 1960s that I believe is still in functional condition (although not often used anymore, thanks to Roombas). It survived decades of pet hair.

Wayland’s major “technical merits”, as far as I can tell, are a lack of screen tearing, slightly faster rendering under some circumstances and better handling of touchscreens. That’s it. If you don’t have a touchscreen and aren’t a gamer (few non-gamers care all that much about tearing or about framerates above 60Hz), Wayland has no real advantages to the user that I’m aware of.

X is network-transparent, more widely compatible, and arguably more extensible. Most users don’t care about those things either.

Wayland has an advantage in attracting developers because it has less accumulated technical debt and general code cruft. That doesn’t make it better for users, though. Most Wayland evangelists I run into seem to be devs who are more interested in the design of the graphics stack than whether it makes a difference in the real world.

So, as with so many things, “merit” is in the eye of the beholder. People should use what works for them.

Which means that you trade some speed for making it easier to understand what’s going on at any point during init. (Also, OpenRC does have a parallel mode, although it isn’t commonly used.) “Serial” isn’t inherantly evil, it’s just another tradeoff.

Brace yourself for the punchline: I don’t even use Ubuntu, and what I said is not specific to any distro. Making sure that packages work, and work properly, is the single most important job a distro does.

Correct integration matters to me. Testing by someone trusted matters to me. I trust my distro’s dev team to do those things. I do not trust people uploading Flatpaks for distribution to cover those things (even, or perhaps especially, if it’s software they’ve developed—the number of blind spots developers can have about their own environments is terrifying). “Why does [preference X] not work inside this Flatpak?” is not an uncommon topic.

Anyway, I can confidently say that the number of users whose PCs have Windows on them and not Linux approaches 10/10 too. There’s a reason argumentum ad popularum is a fallacy.

Because “users who just want their apps to work” is only a subset of “everyone” (and for them, yes, Flatpak is a reasonable solution to this kind of issue).

I’m part of a different and non-overlapping subset: if something doesn’t work as advertised, that isn’t acceptable. If there’s a distro-native package and it won’t install and run, then that’s a bug and should be treated as such.

If you use “everyone” when you know that there are people out there who disagree with you, you should expect to get some flak.

The drivers should be built into the kernel already if you’re using onboard Intel graphics.

The system might be loading the wrong driver module for its chipset—unlikely, but possible. The correct driver for your chipset should be i915. You can check by running lspci -v and finding the Kernel driver in use line for your video card. (There may be other ways of checking as well.)

Personally, if this computer will normally be operating in headless mode, I’d just ignore this altogether, disconnect the monitor, and administer it via SSH from a machine not having these issues.

Short version: some people (I’m one of them) object to systemd on grounds that are 75% philosophical and 25% the kind of tech detail that’s more of a matter of taste than anything else. The older sysV init is a smaller program, which means that it has a smaller absolute number of bugs than systemd but also does less on its own. Some of us regard “does less” as a feature rather than a bug.

If systemd works for you and you don’t know or care about the philosophical side of the argument, there is probably no benefit for you in switching.

Taking a quick glance at the font packages I have installed, I find the Liberation family, Freefont, the old MS core fonts, a couple of Bitstream Vera Sans variations (including Deja Vu), and the ancient URW fonts, plus a couple of CJK-specific fonts, since I need those characters just often enough for their absence to be noticed.

Freefont has decent coverage of what was in Unicode as of ten years ago, and so in combination with the CJK specialty fonts covers most common writing systems worldwide. I’m not particularly concerned about things like Anatolian hieroglyphs, a couple of hundred less-common emoji, or the Bitcoin symbol being missing.

Now starch up a pair of trousers, and you’ll have an excellent faux ghost for Halloween. 😉