You know, I’m okay if an indie dev wants to use an LLM to generate lore text to save time, effort, and/or sanity. I sometimes feel bad skipping that stuff, because I know a small team of people worked really hard to write multiple pages of a “book” in some hard-to-reach corner of their game.

On the other hand, these giant corpos have the resources to pay for writers and artists, and I think they have an ethical duty to society to provide jobs.

I’m not sure how you’d solve the problem of big corpos becoming cheap content farms while avoiding harming the people who use these tools to make something rich and beautiful, but I have to believe there’s a way to thread that needle.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Plus, presidents regularly create carve-out exceptions to tariffs, anyway. This is likely overblown fearmongering.

Not in particular, but at least I could ostensibly set up a filter (or automod) that hid or removed low-quality comments like that. Removing downvotes is kinda the same effect.

I’m not saying voting should go away entirely. This instance still has upvotes, after all, but Lemmy will just turn into the cynical, pessimistic, self-fallating shithole that Reddit has become if we don’t do anything differently as a community.

(And yes, it was just an open invitation—a reminder, if you will, that The Fediverse is a cool place where you have choices regarding how you experience it.)

This instance actually drops downvotes before they hit the database, so unless another instance tracks users on different instances, they simply disappear for people on this instance.

Because downvotes are lazy commentary. I’d rather judge for myself what constitutes a bad take and use words to encourage or debate. I don’t need a bunch of angry keyboard warriors poisoning the discourse with voluntary polling.

Plus, seeing a bunch of negative numbers doesn’t make anyone feel good. I would rather Lemmy be a better place than Reddit.

Kind of ironic, that. I do not apologize. 😆

Join my instance, and you’ll never see another downvote again.

And that’s exactly my point. You aren’t going to get a basic feel by booting a live USB. Better for him to try out the update mechanisms, install a few programs, and maybe test some theming from within a VM.

Plus, some of the ones I listed don’t have live environments but would be great choices for gaming distros and better than some of the ones that do have live environments. You’d be limiting your options by having this unnecessary requirement.

Thanks. Stats are hard.

I agree, and also, the Arch distros I recommended have varying levels of preset configurations. Garuda is about as opinionated and complete as any green user could want, whereas Endeavor and Cachy are blank slates but not as bare as starting from scratch.

Arch also has the biggest community and the hands-down-best wiki out there, so when something happens, there’s a lot of people who can help.

I think a better option than live boot is VM. Live boot doesn’t always save settings, and you may not get a full-install experience, since certain things are set up after install.

For gaming try:

• Bazzite (Atomic Fedora)
• Nobara (Fedora)
• Garuda Dragonized Edition (Arch)
• Linux Mint (Ubuntu)
• EndeavorOS (Arch)
• CachyOS (Arch)

It involves a lot of self-setup and management. A lot of the benefits of Valve working on Arch will find their way to upstream and then to other distros, so that benefit is likely very small.

Yep. Those people aren’t my friends.

It’s Battle for Wesnoth for me!

Some people prefer GOG, some people do itch.io or FOSS games, some people only do emulation. It’s possible that I’m misinterpreting the data, too, but Steam having 50% of the gaming share with the other 50% spread amongst other platforms and activities doesn’t seem that outlandish to me.

No, I mean 4% of the overall Linux desktop share does some amount of gaming. This is based on a survey, and I can’t for the life of me remember who does it. It will show up again, with updated totals, on one of these communities eventually.

I can’t remember who does a more comprehensive survey, but the overall Linux gaming share is ≈4%. So, Steam users are about half of that, if I’m understanding correctly.

Sure, but that’s kind of a nonsequitur to the question of whether this would have ended up as e-waste.

A: Would this end up as e-waste?

B: It's the end-users' fault if it does.

A: Okay, so...would this end up as e-waste?

We don’t literally know, because we can’t predict the future, but we can be reasonably certain that old tech like this laptop would have become e-waste in the hands of your average user, regardless of whether they should have been expected to take the time to learn how to prevent that or not.

That’s the point. Most users don’t know how to do that, can’t be bothered to learn, so this laptop would have been e-waste under most other circumstances.

I’ve been going with Spiral Linux lately when I need a VM for something (works really well in a VM), but I might have to give LMDE a try!