Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.
I am curious as to how out-of-touch your single downvoter is. Because you hit that nail right on the head.
Like, for my current place I’m still designing a CCTV system. But it will be using dumb PoE cameras, hardwired into a traditional NVR. But everything will be shielded, airgapped, and using dumb(ish) components that do not “phone home” to their manufacturer in any fashion.
I’m even looking into solid state and mechanical components for other home automation functionality. Like, nothing computerized to any degree, and therefore, incapable of being a threat or a data leak.
Almost every refuge in internet is for profit data hungry giants. Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
Honestly, here’s the thing. My PC is still running Win10. It just works. My life is stressful and chaotic and my escape is gaming. I love modded Skyrim and I love gaming and when I get a chance to sit down at my computer I just want to fucking escape. I don’t want to troubleshoot, I don’t want to fiddle, I just want to load my game and have fun.
That is what has been keeping me from switching to Linux these past few years. I have Win10 tweaked in the registry so it can’t run copilot or AI, the start menu can’t connect to the Internet so it can’t show me ads, it’s still Microsoft and I don’t love it but I don’t have to think about it.
If someone came along and said hey, for $100 I’ll install Linux on your computer, make sure all your drivers are installed, make sure all your hardware works, and get your games and files moved over, tested and working, and be around to troubleshoot in the future and teach you basic troubleshooting if you need me (for an additional reasonable fee), I’d pay it. I’m not made of money, but I don’t want to spend my time or limited brain power doing that stuff and I’d be more than happy to offload it to someone else.
Probably a good thing you haven’t switched then. In my experience setting up mod manager and any external tools (like Nemesis) was not easy, but it’s doable. Mods themselves may not work though, especially if they are more external to Skyrim. So, for example, you can forget about ENB shaders. I mean, when I tried them they worked, but basically no other mods and in an empty area with 7fps is not exactly playable (on Windows it was unstable ~30fps with mods).
Vortex is a flaming turd on linux. I recently deployed a 2300 mods collection for CP2077 with it. It took around 35 hours - with a premium nexusmods account, and thr download itself was only around 1 hour. In comparison, the multiplatform NexusMods App they mothballed completed the same task in about 3 hours, but since it never was really finished, it failed at the end of deployment. There is a community fork of the Nexusmods App available, but it sadly failed the same way - it can’t cope with really large collections, and i am not good enough of a programmer to really help out - i can read code as long as it does stay simple, but writing it is a completely different thing.
Apparently there is such a thing as a “Nexus Collection Downloader” for Mod Organizer 2, although I’ve never tried it. MO2 generally works fine though.
Will give it a whirl. My experience with Vortex after seeing the NexusmodsApp, that was coming along nicely, being shelved to go back to their tech-debt ridden piece of shit client (even back when i used it on windows it was a buggy mess, and the experience on linux is far worse with awful r/w performance and loads of different UI glitches. Once the whole window just collapsed into a 1x5 cm square with one black and 3 white borders while i was doing something else on the pc not even involving the app - unrecoverable. I became so infuriated that i even posted on the nexusmods forums (https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/13543600-useable-linux-support/ - i was somewhat surprised that the mods approved the post at all, but since noone engages with the post, i will probably not get any response regarding their plans)
Official NexusMods tools aren’t ready yet. But there is a fully functional mod manager for linux you can install and use now. It even installs and loads collections.
I had heard it was an issue in Linux. I’m running Lost Legacy and Yggdrasil (Skyrim VR) which are both 100+ gb mod packs (and highly recommend them both, Lost Legacy is breathtakingly beautiful). Lost Legacy is also very stable and runs very smoothly, especially compared to some of the other pre built mod packs I’ve tried.
If I did get brave and make the switch, is this something that theoretically could be run in a Windows VM or would it be better to dual boot and keep Windows hanging around for Skyrim?
As someone who does Linux tech support for 2 people as a hobby/because I love them, it would cost you more than $100 for all that.
But $300 for the setup and then $100 per year for support would be reasonable as long as you don’t expect me to drop everything and rush over when something changes/breaks.
I hear you. It’s a pain even when you have the skills to do it. I am looking for a secondary income stream and want more people using Linux, so maybe I should offer that for people. But ugh, the ways a computer can break can be so stupid.
I understand that you do not want to fiddle with a computer, I was once like that and that is what kept me from switching to any OS on my computer. I want to let you know as an experienced Linux user though that once you setup linux, you do not need to do any more fiddling. For the files and personal stuff, just back it up to an external hard drive. That is pretty much it. I could help you for free, but I do not really have somewhere to message anyone.
This is completely false ime. Updates can break your setup, though on stable distros they usually don’t. Also anytime I installed a game I’d have to invest time to set it up. For older games this could take an hour or more to get everything working. For newer games some features might not even work.
I ditched Linux for a reason. It was useable but I need my gaming machine to be stress free, not another work project.
Not sure unless you find people that want to switch over to non Microsoft etc products and you help them. I had a decent side gig getting people out of marketing companies by building them basic static websites and an email. Mainly plumbers, machine shops etc. They went from paying over a grand a month to like 20 bucks. It got out of hand from word of mouth and my lack of knowleges pretty quickly though
This might not be your issue but replace the subscriptions you use with FOSS ones.
Windows for Linux.
MS365 Office for LibreOffice (although I guess you could say Google docs too).
DropBox for Filen (or other services).
… Gameing for retro Roms?
Etc.
Theres also lots of foss support for pirating streamed media.
I couldn’t belive how many my live at home 18yr old cousin was paying for.
Got a kickstarter for a cool idea, and a friend with a podcast with like 12 million subscribers? This is about the barrier to entry. But you’re going to be OK, maybe you go take a boring, stable job like a state university, and make up the difference in pay by consulting during work hours. Maybe it’s not so bad.
I’ve spent the past couple of years moving away from Apple devices and commercial software, into self-hosting as much as possible. While at this stage I wouldn’t go back to my previous set up, there’s no denying that it’s nowhere near as stable and easy to maintain.
Home Assistant, for example, is an incredible tool; that fails to turn some lights on and off far more often than Alexa ever did. It’s frustrating. Not so much that I’m going to bin it off and go back to relying on Amazon, but enough that I mostly just end up feeling kinda pissed off that the big companies have pushed me into a place where I’ve had to learn how to be a part time sysadmin, alongside my 9-5.
This is the biggest issue I have with smart gadgets and home automation - they fuck up. Not even getting into the additional pains of fixing the automation when it fails, I’ve literally never gone wrong with pressing a light switch, or possibly pulling a cord. Full 100% success rate without rounding, even when the wifi’s down. I have to walk past the switches (and cords) to enter and exit rooms, so not pressing them on the way past doesn’t even save me any actual time.
Most of the automation I see seems to be the same - it introduces a chance of failure to something that already works, and/or imagines itself a solution to something that isn’t actually a problem. Boilers, fridges, toasters, beds - these were basically solved technologies until someone came along and decided to reinvent the wheel.
There’s a handful that do provide quality of life improvements to disabled people, but the overwhelming majority just seem to be parlour tricks that don’t reduce the human workload.
For me, the utility is in being able to turn a bunch of lights on and off at the same time. We have a number of lamps, or light strings or what have you, rather than one or two big lights. Put them all in Home Assistant and I can set all the ones I want to turn on half an hour before sunset without having to touch a button. And 99% of the time it’s fine.
Equally, I can have a few lights turn on in the bedroom shortly before I go up to bed, then turn off half so there’s enough light to read by, then turn off every light in the house with the press of a button. And it is a button, because I don’t have a voice assistant set up.
Also, I have a bunch of temperature sensors around the house.
None of it is essential, but it’s a nice quality of life upgrade for my wife and me.
Technology nowadays is basically a cult, a coercitive cult.
They often take technology as an end in itself rather than as a means to other ends, they reify it and even deify it, and they treat any moderate stance as an enemy and as a brake on their shitty eschatology.
Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.
I am curious as to how out-of-touch your single downvoter is. Because you hit that nail right on the head.
Like, for my current place I’m still designing a CCTV system. But it will be using dumb PoE cameras, hardwired into a traditional NVR. But everything will be shielded, airgapped, and using dumb(ish) components that do not “phone home” to their manufacturer in any fashion.
I’m even looking into solid state and mechanical components for other home automation functionality. Like, nothing computerized to any degree, and therefore, incapable of being a threat or a data leak.
the scythe was peak technology, actually
Almost every refuge in internet is for profit data hungry giants. Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
they’re right here actually
All over the place, they just don’t get indexed high in search…
I still blog. Nobody reads it because search sucks, but I keep blogging. Others do too. There are dozens of us.
Me too. With no telemetry or interaction I don’t even know if even a single person has read my dump of thoughts.
WordPress has the ActivityPub plugin, which is the only way I’ve managed to disseminate my articles and have people interact with them.
Who’s your webhost? The data is almost certainly there.
It’s just a static jekyll server I host on my own.
I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging
I don’t know though
Maybe this is it
Neocities exists
YouTube?
Just seeing all those thumbnails with the shocked face and stupid arrows makes me want to scratch my eyes out.
But without the red circle and arrows how will you know you’re supposed to be looking at the exploding police car?
But also open source, self hosting, and diy tech is booming
how can I use it to feed my family? I’m genuinely asking, I lost my enterprise job I hated.
Honestly, here’s the thing. My PC is still running Win10. It just works. My life is stressful and chaotic and my escape is gaming. I love modded Skyrim and I love gaming and when I get a chance to sit down at my computer I just want to fucking escape. I don’t want to troubleshoot, I don’t want to fiddle, I just want to load my game and have fun.
That is what has been keeping me from switching to Linux these past few years. I have Win10 tweaked in the registry so it can’t run copilot or AI, the start menu can’t connect to the Internet so it can’t show me ads, it’s still Microsoft and I don’t love it but I don’t have to think about it.
If someone came along and said hey, for $100 I’ll install Linux on your computer, make sure all your drivers are installed, make sure all your hardware works, and get your games and files moved over, tested and working, and be around to troubleshoot in the future and teach you basic troubleshooting if you need me (for an additional reasonable fee), I’d pay it. I’m not made of money, but I don’t want to spend my time or limited brain power doing that stuff and I’d be more than happy to offload it to someone else.
Probably a good thing you haven’t switched then. In my experience setting up mod manager and any external tools (like Nemesis) was not easy, but it’s doable. Mods themselves may not work though, especially if they are more external to Skyrim. So, for example, you can forget about ENB shaders. I mean, when I tried them they worked, but basically no other mods and in an empty area with 7fps is not exactly playable (on Windows it was unstable ~30fps with mods).
Vortex is a flaming turd on linux. I recently deployed a 2300 mods collection for CP2077 with it. It took around 35 hours - with a premium nexusmods account, and thr download itself was only around 1 hour. In comparison, the multiplatform NexusMods App they mothballed completed the same task in about 3 hours, but since it never was really finished, it failed at the end of deployment. There is a community fork of the Nexusmods App available, but it sadly failed the same way - it can’t cope with really large collections, and i am not good enough of a programmer to really help out - i can read code as long as it does stay simple, but writing it is a completely different thing.
Apparently there is such a thing as a “Nexus Collection Downloader” for Mod Organizer 2, although I’ve never tried it. MO2 generally works fine though.
Will give it a whirl. My experience with Vortex after seeing the NexusmodsApp, that was coming along nicely, being shelved to go back to their tech-debt ridden piece of shit client (even back when i used it on windows it was a buggy mess, and the experience on linux is far worse with awful r/w performance and loads of different UI glitches. Once the whole window just collapsed into a 1x5 cm square with one black and 3 white borders while i was doing something else on the pc not even involving the app - unrecoverable. I became so infuriated that i even posted on the nexusmods forums (https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/13543600-useable-linux-support/ - i was somewhat surprised that the mods approved the post at all, but since noone engages with the post, i will probably not get any response regarding their plans)
Official NexusMods tools aren’t ready yet. But there is a fully functional mod manager for linux you can install and use now. It even installs and loads collections.
After using https://github.com/Anon00b/MO2 to install MO2 for Linux I just used MO2 the same way I used it in Windows and all my mods played nice.
I had heard it was an issue in Linux. I’m running Lost Legacy and Yggdrasil (Skyrim VR) which are both 100+ gb mod packs (and highly recommend them both, Lost Legacy is breathtakingly beautiful). Lost Legacy is also very stable and runs very smoothly, especially compared to some of the other pre built mod packs I’ve tried.
If I did get brave and make the switch, is this something that theoretically could be run in a Windows VM or would it be better to dual boot and keep Windows hanging around for Skyrim?
As someone who does Linux tech support for 2 people as a hobby/because I love them, it would cost you more than $100 for all that.
But $300 for the setup and then $100 per year for support would be reasonable as long as you don’t expect me to drop everything and rush over when something changes/breaks.
I’d happily pay that if it allowed me to not have to deal with it.
I’m not a technological idiot, it’s just not my thing and I find it very stressful to deal with. It would be worth it to me to not have to.
I hear you. It’s a pain even when you have the skills to do it. I am looking for a secondary income stream and want more people using Linux, so maybe I should offer that for people. But ugh, the ways a computer can break can be so stupid.
I understand that you do not want to fiddle with a computer, I was once like that and that is what kept me from switching to any OS on my computer. I want to let you know as an experienced Linux user though that once you setup linux, you do not need to do any more fiddling. For the files and personal stuff, just back it up to an external hard drive. That is pretty much it. I could help you for free, but I do not really have somewhere to message anyone.
This is completely false ime. Updates can break your setup, though on stable distros they usually don’t. Also anytime I installed a game I’d have to invest time to set it up. For older games this could take an hour or more to get everything working. For newer games some features might not even work.
I ditched Linux for a reason. It was useable but I need my gaming machine to be stress free, not another work project.
I was referring to stable distros. But once you got all your games set up, aren’t you kinda good to go? But I get your point still, though.
Not sure unless you find people that want to switch over to non Microsoft etc products and you help them. I had a decent side gig getting people out of marketing companies by building them basic static websites and an email. Mainly plumbers, machine shops etc. They went from paying over a grand a month to like 20 bucks. It got out of hand from word of mouth and my lack of knowleges pretty quickly though
This might not be your issue but replace the subscriptions you use with FOSS ones.
Windows for Linux. MS365 Office for LibreOffice (although I guess you could say Google docs too). DropBox for Filen (or other services). … Gameing for retro Roms? Etc.
Theres also lots of foss support for pirating streamed media.
I couldn’t belive how many my live at home 18yr old cousin was paying for.
Got a kickstarter for a cool idea, and a friend with a podcast with like 12 million subscribers? This is about the barrier to entry. But you’re going to be OK, maybe you go take a boring, stable job like a state university, and make up the difference in pay by consulting during work hours. Maybe it’s not so bad.
I’ve spent the past couple of years moving away from Apple devices and commercial software, into self-hosting as much as possible. While at this stage I wouldn’t go back to my previous set up, there’s no denying that it’s nowhere near as stable and easy to maintain.
Home Assistant, for example, is an incredible tool; that fails to turn some lights on and off far more often than Alexa ever did. It’s frustrating. Not so much that I’m going to bin it off and go back to relying on Amazon, but enough that I mostly just end up feeling kinda pissed off that the big companies have pushed me into a place where I’ve had to learn how to be a part time sysadmin, alongside my 9-5.
This is the biggest issue I have with smart gadgets and home automation - they fuck up. Not even getting into the additional pains of fixing the automation when it fails, I’ve literally never gone wrong with pressing a light switch, or possibly pulling a cord. Full 100% success rate without rounding, even when the wifi’s down. I have to walk past the switches (and cords) to enter and exit rooms, so not pressing them on the way past doesn’t even save me any actual time.
Most of the automation I see seems to be the same - it introduces a chance of failure to something that already works, and/or imagines itself a solution to something that isn’t actually a problem. Boilers, fridges, toasters, beds - these were basically solved technologies until someone came along and decided to reinvent the wheel.
There’s a handful that do provide quality of life improvements to disabled people, but the overwhelming majority just seem to be parlour tricks that don’t reduce the human workload.
For me, the utility is in being able to turn a bunch of lights on and off at the same time. We have a number of lamps, or light strings or what have you, rather than one or two big lights. Put them all in Home Assistant and I can set all the ones I want to turn on half an hour before sunset without having to touch a button. And 99% of the time it’s fine.
Equally, I can have a few lights turn on in the bedroom shortly before I go up to bed, then turn off half so there’s enough light to read by, then turn off every light in the house with the press of a button. And it is a button, because I don’t have a voice assistant set up.
Also, I have a bunch of temperature sensors around the house.
None of it is essential, but it’s a nice quality of life upgrade for my wife and me.
Technology nowadays is basically a cult, a coercitive cult. They often take technology as an end in itself rather than as a means to other ends, they reify it and even deify it, and they treat any moderate stance as an enemy and as a brake on their shitty eschatology.
Theyre still tools, still utilities. Just because douchebags are using them in power games more often doesn’t make them any less so.