not trying to start a distro war, but I would advise against using ubuntu for the time being as their custodian has been somewhat incompetent in recent years, and they have been forcing users to use their "snap" system. It may give you a bad first experience.
I haven't tried it, but I've heard Pop_OS! is a pretty popular distro these days. If you want something really lean and unobtrusive (though you may need more up front setup), you may want to look at an XFCE based distro (my personal favorite).
Just remember, most distros have live usb stick distros so you can always try out a bunch before you decide on the right one for yourself.
Thanks. Pop_OS! is a candidate for testing here already if Ubuntu doesn't work out. I picked Ubuntu as a first point because I grabbed a Lenovo Neo 50s desktop and that supports it out of the box. That will set expectation for hardware compatibility and issues for other distributions or variants.
I like Fedora and Pop_OS! I'd recommend Pop_OS! first for newcomers but Fedora is great for a work desktop if you're reasonably technical and don't mind upgrading at least once a year. Pop_OS! offers an LTS edition so you can stay with a release for several years.
I'd second mint for anyone who wants a "it just werks (TM)" experience with minimal configuration to throw on anything except a server.
For servers, these days I'd recommend Alpine on ARM architecture for a very good mix of high performance and having sane defaults set up so you can easily set up a reverse proxy, web server, etc.
OpenSUSE is nice. It has btrfs/snapper configured by default, which makes upgrades low-stress (if anything ever goes wrong, just reboot into the snapshot automatically created before every upgrade.) It also has a decent GUI (YaST) for system administration tasks.
I love OpenSUSE (esp. Tumbleweed), but every time I see a tutorial about ML stuff, they are using Ubuntu. I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu that other distros don't have (e.g., having some libraries preinstalled, sane default configs, etc.)
> I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu
No advantage, but Ubuntu is the most popular distro for regular users / tutorial customers. Ubuntu also has the widest availability of support resources, even though the information is often not Ubuntu-specific.
If you use a non-Ubuntu (or non-Debian-derived) distro, you'll need to do a little bit of package-name mapping to get the prerequisites installed. This is annoying but only has to be done once (take notes!).
The bigger problem I've had with ML libs is that they're very picky about version compatibilities. Once you settle on a set of working/compatible versions (libs, python, python pkgs), make some effort to preserve your sources. Package versions can get deleted from the official repos, be prepared to build from source, etc.
Why does the gov. have its nuts in a twist over a privately-owned timewasting service?
The gov. should use public forms of communication, like their own websites and mailing lists. Why endorse this privitzation of their communcation channels in the first place?
100% agree. Even when Twitter was publicly owned, it seemed wrong to have public servants endorsing it and using it as a channel for conducting official business and communications.
Why not just go all the way and post government announcements through Instagram or TikTok. Oh, yeah, that would be "inappropriate" and a "security threat". But Twitter, that one is fine, a totally different thing!
I obviously don't have numbers at hand, but I'd bet most people have a internet connection with a latency of at least 100ms to closest game service servers, unless you already work in IT or adjacent sectors where latency matters more. Not even 50% of people online in the US are connected via fiber optic connections, so extrapolate that over the rest of the world, although many countries have better connections than available in the US.
There are a lot of sources of total latency in most games and systems that affect how long it takes between when you click a button and get a response. This means that there's often opportunities for optimizations that can remove entire frames of latency to make up for the additional network lag. It's not going to be enough for e-sports games but it can keep the experience from changing for many titles.
Just as an example of what I'm talking about, if you turn on the nVidia Reflex latency reduction feature along with the DLSS 3 AI Frame Generation, you get the same latency as with Reflex off but with much better smoothness. Of course if you're playing Overwatch you are chasing every millisecond of latency, but for most games it just needs to be low enough not to be noticeable.
Only 2% of the US population owns a Xbox Series S/X, 2.3% own a PS5.
The average internet speed in the US in 2022 is 120mbps.
Asking people to have a >250mbps connection to using cloud gaming vs being one of the most popular gaming consoles in the country isn't much to ask... in order to be a moderately successful game platform.
>I've played a 50hrs of Xbox cloud games in the last 2yrs and never had latency issues
Gonna be honest , I'm not taking gaming advice off someone who has played only 2 hours per month.
Especially with regards to something like input lag.
I don't play competitive online high framerate FPS games where that level of input matters. If I did I would invest in a windows PC.
But for all of the single player games I played it was never a noticeable problem. If you're going to complain about anything with cloud gaming it should be switching or starting a new game. The loading screen preamble before the game start screen is the only annoying part. But that doesn't affect gameplay.
If input lag was such a real problem I highly doubt Xbox would have redesigned their new 2023 Xbox UI to be 100% centered around Gamepass (The current one already pushes it hard but the new one leaked on Youtube makes it the near default).
What does it matter? Just use Tor for everything read-only.
If some service requires you to create an account, just give them false information. If they ban you, just create another account. At the end of day, the legalese is irrelevant. If it was relevant, then people would read it.
It is not like the user has any bargaining power with the platform owner to spy on them less for example, or even verify that they are upholding the privacy policy. These companies do not follow their own rules in banning you or otherwise.
I agree with your first statement about hoarding by early buyers.
However, the smug "write-only database meme" is getting a bit old. Cryptocurrencies, and even other crypto-payment systems (e.g. chaumian cash) obviously have different characteristics than centralized money. Come to think of it, you could just mockingly describe any computer program that has structured data as a database.
Cryptocurrency has almost nothing to do with databases or storing data. At its core, cryptocurrency is a system of distributing signed transactions that uses hashcash as a sybil-resistance and (order) synchronisation mechanism.
Google spreadsheets need not apply. The whole point is that you don't require a single party to sign transactions. The problem that cryptocurrency deals with concerns co-operation between adversarial parties. Centralization leaves you hopping from platform to platform forever.
A blockchain is a kind of transaction log, but if you evaluate all the transactions you get a database at the end.
A Google Docs spreadsheet also has a transaction log (a CRDT) while you have it open to do the updates. (Well, I assume it does, anyway.) Of course the security models are different, but you could say the log is a dual of the database.
But this resistance is against a problem it creates: yes if all your stakeholders are anonymous and distributed you cannot trust them, but why not make a network of licensed operators you can trust ? Like I dunno, a savings account with international bank transfers...
