Dae

Tl;Dr, yes*

I find this discussion to be an exercise in frustration. There’s a lot of philosophical jargon that gets glazed over and nuances that often get ignored. I also think it’s an incredibly complex and complicated topic that we simply do not have enough information available to us to determine in a scientific manner.

For instance: what kind of “free will” are we talking about? Often it’s “Libertarian Free Will,” that is, absolute agency uninfluenced by any external factors. This much is disproven scientifically, as our brains run countless “subconscious” calculations in response to our environment to hasten decision making and is absolutely influenced by a myriad of factors, regardless of if you’re conciously aware of it or not.

However, I think that the above only “disproves” all notions of free will if you divorce your “subconscious” from the rest of your being. Which is where the complication and nuance comes in. What is the “self?” What part of you can you point to as being the “real you?”

From a Christian perspective, you might say the “self” is your soul, which is not yet proven by science, and thus the above has no bearing on, as it cannot take the soul into account. But from the opposite side of the spectrum, from a Buddhist perspective, there is no eternal, unchanging, independently existing “self.” And as such, the mind in its entirety, concious awarness or not, is just another part of your aggregates, and from that perspective it can be argued that a decision is no less your own just because it was not made in your conscious awareness.

With my ramblings aside, I am a Buddhist and so my opinion is that we do have free will, we’re just not always consciously aware of every decision we make. And while we cannot always directly control every decision we make, we can influence and “train” our autopilot reactions to make better decisions.

Relatable tbh. I think a good part of it was depression in my younger years, but, I used to be an incredibly angry person.

It took a long time for me to accept that the truth is, you don’t get angry about shit you don’t care about. Hard to accept that half the things I’d get angry at weren’t worth it. The other half anger just wasn’t a helpful response. Been a long process of learning to have a better reaction for me.

Zen Buddhist. I grew up Christian, realized I was believing out of obligation rather than genuine conviction, but also I’m pan and Christians have made it very clear that’s not okay with them.

I was areligious for awhile. Which I use because I am still an atheist; I don’t see much evidence for gods, but that isn’t important to Buddhism.

I appreciate the Buddha’s teachings and find them incredibly helpful. I’m calmer, more focused, and over all, happier for my practice. It gives me a spiritual outlet that doesn’t make me feel “dirty” the way Christianity did.

There are aspects to Buddhism that I have to take on faith even though I am otherwise a skeptical individual. But ultimately, those things don’t change how I would have had to live my life. And I believe that a true practitioner needs a balance of logic anf faith: too much logic, and you kill your faith. Too much faith and you wind up in a cult. You need enough logic to stay grounded, and enough faith to believe. But you have to acknowledge that you can rarely prove the things you take on faith and because of that, there will always be non-belivers, and that has to be okay.

I realized the hard truth is you don’t get mad at shit you don’t care about. And suddenly a lot of shit I got mad at felt really fucking stupid.

I also learned to take a deep breath before I act in anger, and it often calms me down enough to find a better solution.

I think Deezer has an electron app or something it uses, but it’s worked great for me so far. It costs the same aa Spotify the last I checked, and has a comprable selection.

Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.

But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it’s very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.

It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.

I’m unsure if GTA V was ever Steamdeck Certified, but I imagine it might have to do with that. They may only offer this for games they said were certified and the devs broke it after the fact. I know Monster Hunter was.

Valve has consistently offered refunds in these scenarios. They’re offering them for GTA V, and they also offered refunds for Monster Hunter when Capcom decided to switch their DRM bullshit and broke it on the Steam Deck. I think Valve has done their part.

This, tbh. Propaganda is a hell of a drug. And the worst part is, it’s not a drug most people willingly take. They’re blindsided, their phycology is abused to suck them in, and before long, without even realizing it, they’re in a completely different reality, scared and paranoid. It’s terrifying and sad.

I’m a huge coffee drinker. Used to have a machine. It broke. Bend using an aeropress and French press for awhile and find that I really don’t miss the machine.

My comment wasn’t “Linux works perfectly in every single regard.” It was “Linux isn’t hard to use for the things that do work on it.” I’m well aware Linux isn’t right for every use-case, nor did I say it was, I said it wasn’t hard to use. Compatibility is a separate issue here.

My guy, there are entire countries controlled by Islamic Extremists where you’re lucky if all they do is kill you when they find out you’re LGBT, and it’s entirely for “theological reasons.”

I put this in quotes, because I’m not nor have I ever been a Muslim. But Islamic Extremists will kill gay people for supposed “theological reasons.”

It’s most definitely not just America doing it because “mah holy book says it’s wrong.”

It depends! You’ll get a lot of recommendations. And they’re probably good recommendations. But there are most certainly Distros out there that are very simple. I would suggest you don’t be afraid to Distro Hop until you find one that you really feel at home on.

If you’re looking for something that’s simple, out of the box, and out of your way, I’d avoid anything Arch based. Ubuntu or Debian based Distros will have the most documentation and therefore minimize the amount of time you spend looking for answers, however, Fedora based Distros, in my experience, are rock solid and sit comfortably between stable and the bleeding edge.

I don’t get all this “gaming on Linux is hard” non-sense. All I have to do is set a specific flag on Steam and click play. That’s it. One step, and 99% of my library just works, sometimes better than on Windows.

If it isn’t on Steam, I search for it on Lutris and Lutris installs it for me, and I click play. And more often than not, it just works.

Hell, the mother fuckers that make Final Fantasy XIV’s quick launcher made that shit a flatpak! And it’s so fucking seemless, not a soul would know that game isn’t a native Linux game!

Where’s the difficulty?

For the most part, it works better on Linux using GE-Proton than it did on Windows. But there are some weird issues with the Action Camera:

If you talk to an NPC with it active, you sometimes have to alt-tab to get it back, and if you have multiple monitors, sometimes your cursor will zip off to said monitor.

Other than that, it runs flawlessly!

Linux culture is about freedom of choice and movement. Any project can be forked, tweaked, expanded, or outright overhauled by anybody with the know-how in order to meet specific use cases. And those use cases are often the same as other’s use cases. But in most cases, they are still rooted in the project they forked from. I.E, any guide that applies to Ubuntu is likely going to apply to Pop!_OS or Mint, since they’re based on Ubuntu. So there’s rarely a downside to niche distros, because you can have something that’s close enough to a popular distro but that caters to your unique needs and wants.

For me, for example, I use Nobara. It’s rather niche and in most cases, it either works beautifully for you, or it doesn’t work at all, honestly. But it’s based on Fedora, so any guide for Fedora is likely to apply to Nobara. I get all the benefits of being on Fedora with tweaks and patches that make my gaming experience much more stable. And quite frankly, Nobara has made my rig run the best it ever has.

Todoist. It’s nothing to do with “productivity” per se, but that is a benefit I’ve reaped.

Instead of having to remember what feels like 100 things all the time and doing 2 of them, I just remember the app. And it’s a hell of a lot less stressful. The sub-task function also helps simplify larger things and makes them simpler to tackle. It’s a game changer as an AuDHD individual.

I would vastly prefer that gas cars be phased out. But I believe that this is a bit different:

Cigarettes don’t offer any benefit beyond making you “feel good.” And you don’t need cigarettes to feel good, and, in fact, literally any other option is better for both you, and everyone around you, save for harder drugs.

Gasoline cars, while poisonous to the world around us, also offer us far greater benefits: supplies and logistics, we can carry goods further, wider, and faster than we ever could without them. And because of that, without them, sure we’d pollute a lot less, but then we’d have a far harder time carrying critical resources to more remote parts of the world where trains and planes can’t reach, and people would starve or lack critical medicine.

As it stands, EVs are not a reliable substitute. They’re getting there, I want them to get there, but I disagree with the notion that cars should be made illegal as things currently stand. I don’t think it’s nearly as cut and dry as cigarettes are. I can only hope to live long enough to see a world where gas powered cars could be outlawed without leaving hundreds of millions of people high and dry.

Surprised to see no one has said cigarettes yet. Not only are you poisoning yourself, it’s harmful to everyone else around you that has to inhale that shit.

I’m a Pluralistic individual. I believe everyone has a reason to believe. But I think the way someone believes is very telling about that person’s personal values.

Ergo, I don’t care what a person’s religious beliefs are, I care what that person’s values are. I believe that is a much more honest approach that doesn’t needlessly alienate anyone or stoke petty, tribalistic behavior.