I’m sorry you and your brother have been through so much and been so damaged. I experienced an abusive up bringing and I know it never leaves you, and shapes who you are for the rest pf your life. For me i was lucky and it shaped me to try to be a better person then my parents and not repeat their mistakes; it sounds like you are also treading that path.

My siblings were not so lucky, they are all damaged and have been unable to live “normal” lives. I lost one brother who died through severe mental illness, another sibling is crippled by mental illness and another is struggling but fortunately getting by.

I’ve learnt the hard way that you can’t fix other people, no matter how clearly you see what is going wrong. You can encourage people to deal with their problems, and you can support them when they try but ultimately they have to want to change or get better. Everything else you do, no matter how well intentioned, will not change anything if the person themselves does not see the problem or want to change.

Regarding your brother, you can reach out to him and try but sadly you may have to accept his life is stuck on a trajectory of self destruction and even sadly violence. I don’t think anyone is born bad, but are shaoed by their childhood. Your step dad and mum are also likely products of bad events or difficult up-bringings and it sounds like they couldn’t change their life paths either. Its a cycle of chaos and tragedy disrupting each generation.

But there is something you do have control over and can change - your own family. You can break the cycle by being a good parent to your children. You are now in the position your mum and dad were, and can be the role model for your kids and ensure they have a happy childhood. That is where you should focus your time and effort.

I’m sorry for your brother, despite his crimes, but your priority should be your wife and children and everything you do has to be focused on what is best for them. Sadly, if that means not including your brother in your lives then so be it. Be there if your brother reaches out for help but otherwise I think your time and energy is best focused on giving your children the upbringing and future denied to you as a child.

You succeeded despite your parents. Ensure your children succeed with your help and support. That will break the cycle in your family and that love, kindness and compassion will be felt by your grand children and great grand children. That is what you can realistically control and that could help many more than one person in your family long term. That choice could have positive echoes throughout your children and their children’s lives.

OpenSuSE - YaST is as good as is made out to be. I like how many fundamental parts of linux are managed via one tool. Other distros I’d used before were heterogenous mix of tools that felt cobbled together and inconsistent, while YaST feels well designed, integrated and consistent.

England doesn’t really have a national flower. The Tudor Rose is a heraldic creation to symbolise the fusion of the House of York and House of Lancaster after the wars of the roses, and the formation of the House of Tudor.

The two houses used white and red roses as symbols, and the Tudor rose was created as a mixed red and white rose which does not exist.

A real rose for England is otherwise a loose thing, not an official symbol.

Disc and disk are varient spellings of the same word that pre-exist computing. Disc is more common in British English, Disk more common in American English. But yeah since computing came along disk has also been used more for magnetic media (hard disk) while disc has been used more for optical media (compact disc). I wouldn’t be surprised if this only happened because of how the CD was marketed and branded as a “compact disc” as a trademark while hard disks and floppy disks etc were more generic terms.

No I thinks is basically right although could be better worded maybe

/sys is virtual file structure for kernel system info

/proc is virtual file structure of kernel process info

My understanding is /proc came first but was abused/free for all and started being used for all sorts of non standard/process kernel access. So /sys was created with stricter rules to make it more standardised.

Yea it is user friendly. If you’re using your computer once a week presumably its for things like web browsing or working with documents - these are very easy and straight forward to do in linux.

The other big benefit is the cost - linux is free and you’ll save £120 on a basic version of Windows which can be used to get get a better PC or just saved.

Add to that no advertising, much more private and entirely yours to do what you like with. And if you don’t like it you can easily install Windows instead, so its zero risk to try Linux.

Might be even simpler - the elderly can decline very quickly mentally and also physically, and that may he what we’re seeing with here.

The article is a bit vague on the pros and cons of reflective LCD screens.

It seems to be pros that it has a good refresh rate, can be used without a backlight so is good outdoors and indoors in a bright room, and maybe better for your eyes due to the lack of the backlight/blue spectrum light. It also may offer better colour depth than e-ink currently.

The cons are not clearly addressed but presumably battery life is worse than e-ink but better than a backlit display such as OLED or AMOLED, that colours are still not as good as other LCDs even if better than e-ink, and it seems cost (although that may be due to the small market at present).

Also there is no obvious innovation noted in the article so its not clear what has changed about these displays? It sounds more like some small companies are just using the displays in a new way to try and mimick paper. But maybe thats wrong or will change?

Maybe this would compete with e-ink if cost comes down. The battery benefit of e-ink with a static image is one of its big benefits, to the point that its being used for shelf labels in supermarkets. E-ink isn’t going anywhere but good to have more choices in the tablet space.

Not heard that one before about the cia but let’s say for a moment that is true - Signal is open source so anyone can audit and work with the source code. Also anyone can set up an independent signal server and network.

And are you maybe confusing Signal with Tor and the CIA with the US Navy?

Maybe worth trying an alternative OS with a different kernel entirely from Linux, as a live USB. For example Haiku or ArcaOS?

However if you’ve tried Windows and not had the issue then it may not add anything as you nay already have excluded defective hardware?

Zuckerberg thinks Facebook should self regulate and that means in this case be free to allow posts of anti-vax propaganda and covid conspiracy theories that literally cost lives.

This is just a great example of why social media needs external regulation.

Trump has cognitively declined since 2016 and is increasingly incoherent and nasty. I think the Dems are gambling that many voters aren’t watching his stump appearances so this is a good way to expose him to voters.

I think its too big a gamble and mute him. I think he will expose himself enough on his own turns to speak.

Isn’t it too late to change VP candidate? I saw speculation on this before and the issues were around the need to reconvene delegates for the RNC to approve the change and also to be on the ballot? Early voting starts in September so October is also too late?

“Yacht maker who makes yachts for billionaires scrambles to blame the crew so he can save more yachts and not be sued”

That’s the story here. He’s trying to set the narrative as entirely human error rather than a design flaw. For example one concern is how quickly an intact vessel sank - 30 seconds is being claimed in some areas - and the yacht may have an overlong aluminium mast which contributed to it capsizing .

People saying they don’t care about billionaires dying are missing the point. The yachts maker is trying to pin it on the crew before its even been properly investigated.

What you’re asking is if you can run the existing Linux Mint on your drive within Windows running on the same drive?

It may be feasible if VirtualBox or VMWare are able to access/mount the existing Linux partition as if its a virtual drive, and boot the OS but its likely to be difficult. The main issue is that windows does not easily mount Linux partitions. It is also an edge case use for most users so there will likely not be much guidance on how to achieve this easily.

It might work more easily the opposite way round - boot Linux and mount Windows within Virtualbox but is not likely to be straightforward. Windows may be less flexible about being booted into a virtual machine with totally different hardware.

All this may be overkill to the problems you’re trying to solve. You can mount the existing NTFS Windows drive within Linux Mint to access all your windows files without any virtualization. But I’m not clear what “settings” you’re looking at when you boot back in to windows? That seems to be the stumbling block. Is is specific software / tools you’re trying to migrate settings for?

Another approach may be to launch windows, create a new linux Mint VM in Virtualbox, share a folder between Linux VM and Windows host, create whatever settings you’re trying to migrate in your VM Linux Mint, and when happy copy the home folder / settings folders into the shared folder. Then boot your PC into linux, mount the windows drive and pick up the settings files from the shared folder to migrate into your main Mint system. But whether that is even worth doing depends on what you’re trying to migrate.

This is badly written and ignorant article. Fat32 supports up to 16Tb partition size (depending on cluster size - 2Tb -16Tb).

Its microsoft’s windows tools that arbitrarily only allow users to create 32Gb partitions, and it is this that is being changed. This is not a change to Fat32, this is a change to windows. 3rd party tools on Windows and other systems like Linux have long offered more options for partition size.

That its taken to 2024 for Microsoft to fix the command line tool (and still not fix the GUI tools) is ridiculous.

Firefox will support Manifest v3. However Mozilla will be implementing Manifest 3 differently so the routes Ublock and other extensions use to maintain privacy and block ads will still be available. Firefox will support both the original route and the new limited option Google is forcing on Chromium.

Googles implementation deliberately locks out extensions by removing something called WebRequest, supposedly for security reasons but almost certainly actually for commercial reasons as they are not a neutral party. Google is a major ad and data broker.

Apple will apparently also be adopting the same approach for Safari as Mozilla is for Firefox.

Could you give an example of something linux can’t do?

Or are you alluding to windows software not running on linux even with wine etc?

The pollster is kind of right - on paper the economy should be an issue in Trumps favour. We’ve just come out of a period of high inflation and people are feeling the cost of living. Immigration is also supposedly an issue that should be favouring Trump.

That’s not to say that Trump has the answers - he does not - but in a conventional election cycle he would be in the stronger position as the “outsider” attacking the incumbents.

Yet instead the entire news cycle is dominated by Harris and Walz at the moment. Republicans are desperate for Trump to get back “on message” but instead he’s flailing around as his ego can’t take the Dems attack lines, biden dropping out and Harris apparent popularity.

So although the pollster is obviously biased as a Republican, I think he’s right in the sense this not playing out like a conventional election.

Also, I have to say as an outside observer from the UK, the excitement around Harris reminds me of Obama’s first election. Obama came from no where in the primaries and huge momentum built behind him as the hope candidate. Harris has emerged much later in the election cycle, and oddly she feels like the exciting unknown candidate even though she is Vice President. Yet it does feel like the momentum is with her and she drawing in people who have been otherwise alienated by the republican / democrat arguments over the last 4 years.

I have no idea if it’ll carry on to election day. But I must say on a personal note, the more I see of Harris, the more I warm to her. I suspect a lot of voters will feel the same. Her humour, and warmth are in stark contrast to Trumps meanness and petty nastiness. I’m beginning to think Trump is not capable of beating Harris.

I get what you’re trying to say but I disagree with this. Software can be a barrier to switching OS but it very much depends on the individual user’s needs - it’s not as easy as substituting open source for closed, and is only part of the difference anyway. For example, I use Outlook at work; Thunderbird is great but it is in no way a substitute for Outlook. Similarly, I use Microsoft Office 365 at work; OnlyOffice is in no way a substitute for an individual user (it can be for a whole business or for personal use, but not if you’re tied in to an organisation or employer using Office). If you’re tied into those platforms with work, then for occasional use you can just use the online versions of Microsoft Office in Linux via a web browser. And if you need to work from home or do more, then realistically you need to have Windows and access to the full suite installed locally.

But software does not preclude switching to Linux; for example I dual boot between Windows and Linux on my home PC. I have an M.2 drive for Windows and another M.2 drive for Linux. I rarely use Windows at all now, but when I do it’s if for some reason I need to be doing work related stuff from home or rarely if I can’t get a game working in Linux. In Linux I can do all my web browsing, social media, video streaming, music listening, even gaming and I know I’m doing so privately and securely.

I’d say the best way to switch to Linux is to switch to Linux. New users do not have to be “all in” - they can dual boot between Linux and Windows (or MacOS and Linux), and then have a low level of risk to try out the OS. It can even be beneficial in itself as they can compartmentalise work and free time by OS. And if they don’t want to dual boot, then just try it out by virtualisation.