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Joined 4 days ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2024

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  • Honestly, there isn’t much to it when setting up Linux for elderly people - in fact, I find it less troublesome than setting it up for a teenager.

    Most often the issues regular users face with Linux are related to installing packages from external sources or broken updates. Elderly people tend to not do that.

    Set up a stable distro like Debian, Linux Mint or Ubuntu LTS with KDE Plasma or Cinnamon, install LibreOffice, Okular and a browser with strong ad blocking, and any other applications you think they might need. Enable a simple firewall, hide the root / folder from the file browser’s sidebar, and you’re done. Perhaps set up scaling to make everything bigger on their monitors, disable mouse acceleration and set the speed slightly slower than usual.

    I wouldn’t bother with immutable distros, Flatpaks are nice and all until permissions turn using a simple app a confusing chore with broken interactions.





  • you value Steam’s honesty

    Both are multi-millionaire if not billionaire companies. There’s no way to attribute virtues like “honesty” to corporate entities.

    But GOG is a much worse store than Steam, lacking features Steam had a decade ago and, most importantly, being loudly indifferent to how the games work on platforms other than Windows. Any gaming thread gets flooded by GOG fans talking about how we should support them anyway, because they’re great and anti-DRM… Except I’m telling you they aren’t, if their own games are at risk of being pirated they add DRM, if somebody wants to publish games protected by DRM on their platform they allow it. That’s not anti-DRM.

    Steam’s DRM is disabled by default, and Valve is aware it’s trivially easy to bypass and said multiple times they don’t care. That’s just as “anti-DRM” as GOG if we go by their actions, rather than their marketing claims.

    Don’t fall for marketing claims when they themselves are using DRM, it’s ridiculous.




  • strong DRM stance

    They have allowed content protected by DRM into their store four times already, which is not surprising, given GOG is owned by CD Projekt Red who included DRM into their own DLC for Cyberpunk, including on GOG. That’s not “strong” in any sense of the word.

    So in other words, they sell you the “feel good” anti-DRM narrative but quickly look the other way when it’s good for business. At that point, might as well purchase on Steam, where DRM is common but optional and Valve actually cares about making the games platform-agnostic, easy to backup, easy to share, etc.

    EDIT: cool downvotes, doesn’t change the fact that GOG provides software protected by DRM on their “strongly anti-DRM platform”. There is no amount of downvotes in this world that can change this reality.







  • There’s a difference between tech geeks and tech bros.

    The tech bro is selling you NFT web 3.0 AR experiences, the tech geek might be learning Docker to self host a Lemmy instance, not because he needs to, but because it’s fun.

    Both have always existed: one was selling you some horrendous domain during the .com bubble, a plot of land on Second Life or even a perfect marriage based on a secret algorithm running on his Commodore 64, the other was busy playing muds and learning how to make free calls by ringing weird tones into a public telephone.





  • VRR works really well already - some Nvidia users might lose extra functionality like Reflex Ultra that, when paired with VRR, can smartly adjust the frame rate cap. But VRR itself works.

    HDR is a difficult beast though… It’s hard even on Windows, and very problematic on Linux (though with Gamescope, KDE Plasma and Wayland you can kinda use it already).