Yesterday we saw the biggest increase in signatures in a single day, even compared to the start of the initiative.

This isn’t change.org or a twitter poll.

It’s an official EU citizens initiative, hosted on the EU web portal. The one maintained by the EU for the very purpose of digitally facilitating any and all citizens initiatives.

No, I’m not.

Ok

I’m saying this is a waste of time.

I… What? Is that not a mutual exclusivity argument? For you to have a point, this time and effort would need to be better spent elsewhere. I not only disagree with that, but I have the time and energy to do the other things you are claiming will make a difference.

Oh shit forreal?

Does that mean I can pay for shit online with made-up credit cards?

Citizens iniatives may be a form of petition, but the difference is they come with actual legal requirements.

This isn’t some change.org bs, a list of names totaling some arbitrary number. That’s why it has a hard deadline. And requirements for how signatures have to come from more than one country.

This is a pre-existing system for the people of the EU to force it to tackle an issue. Most EU countries have equivalent systems locally, as well. This isn’t new or unusual for us.

Legal precedent is how the US works. Where lawsuits catalyzing the setting of new standards for what is legal, is the most common way the law changes. If you thought that’s how EU legislation got done, then you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Almost everything the EU does, is based on proposals. Not legal cases.

Those can happen in the EU, too, but we have additional ways to propose law as citizens, and legal cases are more common on the national level, rather than the continental level.

If you can gather proof (signatures) of concern on a given issue, you can force a proposal through the door that normally has to come from elected representatives.

Right. Because caring about A means you can’t care about B. If you support legislation, you must be boycoting nothing, because no-one in the history of existence has ever done both.

You’re claiming mutual exclusivity where none exists.

You sound more like you’re scared of the implications of this passing, because you’d have us voting with out wallets rather than… actually voting. Nevermind that even games not worth buying should still also be preserved.

Pre-orders, micro-transactions and battle-passes are still a thing, no matter how much we’ve shouted about “big company bad”. This type of crap isn’t something we solve by any one method alone.

And you don’t need to engage with youtube or any other social media, to accept that the phenomenon they enable, occur. To dismiss that reality would be idiotic delusion.

Millions of views is a lot, when all you need to get started, is one of those millions to sign a petition.

I… What?

Botting something like a citizens initiative, where every signature WILL get scrutinized by government would be seriously stupid. Or are you saying commenters like me are bots?

Is it really that hard for you to imagine the possibility… that people care?

Or are just not aware of the chain of youtubers doing a call to arms on this, getting millions of views, completely explaining the signature spike?

In case you’re wondering, the graph looks like this. There have currently been 16k new signatures today. The required pace to make it would be 10k a day. Yesterday the count increased by about 30k signatures.

TL;DR Keep spreading this to people you know, and keep signing. It’s working.

intel-undervolt/amdctl for cpu, lact for amd gpu, gwe for nvidia gpu (although voltage control on linux with nvidia is not possible, you can get a similar result by overclocking+limiting power)

Undervolting is great on gaming laptops. Usually nets you a performance boost simply by reducing thermal throttling.

Even just a few mV has made a difference for me.

They mean other platforms like GOG or Epic, not stuff like consoles.

Steam games mostly work, with some exceptions. You can check out ProtonDB to see more precisely what games work, which ones straight up don’t, and which ones need a fix. ProtonDB will usually also tell you what that fix is, which is handy.

But most of the time, you can just hit play and not worry about it.

A note on dualbooting. Linux uses different filesystems from windows. It can access windows NTFS partitions, but it’s not a smooth experience.

A common pitfall is trying use your game library while it is still on a windows filesystem, from linux. Since you can see the folders, and even add them in steam, it’ll seem like it should work. But you’ll run into issues actually running the games. It’s technically possible, but not worth the hassle.

Generally you really want to either format your storage and redownload your games, or if you have the space, copy them over to a fully supported file system.

What I do, is have a minimize keybind.

When I want to quickly do something with a window below the one on top, I hit that minimize keybind, do my thing, then alt-tab.

Unless I interacted with a third window, the one I minimized comes right back.

Or are you looking for something more like picture in picture? A pinned window you never interact with, only look at?

Edit: what if you flip this the other way around?

Make the windows you want to be interacting with transparent, and keep them on top. You’ll always see the window you want to see, through them.

Some of it, yeah.

All a distro is, really, is a preset. It comes with some package manager or other, along with a collection of pre-installed packages.

The reason one chooses one distro over another, is because it’s closer to what you need. I could install arch, and spend a day setting it up exactly the way I like. Or, I could start with Endeavour, and get to essentially the same state in an hour.

I’m familiar enough with linux that I could strong-arm any install into doing whatever I need, but at times, to get from preset A to preset B, it’s faster to just start over from a known preset that’s closest to what I want.

Rolling releases typically mean the software available is recent, but that’s only one aspect of what your starting point could look like.

“Gaming” distros are going to be a preset that contains a bunch of configurations, defaults and software, that gamers typically care about. That steam is usually already installed, is an example of one such thing. The same way my mention of GPU and CPU support is only an example.

Maybe instead of “They tend to make sure stuff that gamers care about are up to date and working” I should have phrased it “They tend to make sure things that gamers care about are easy to set up and supported, if not even ready to go, out of the box”.

This looks fine.

I have a massive library of various games, and three years in I haven’t really come across any cases where I want to tear my hair out.

If ProtonDB says a game doesn’t work, you’re not gonna tweak your way to having it run. If it says it does, and it didn’t run right away with no problems, you can usually just apply the fixes other users have found, and be off playing your game.

In fact things are often simpler than on windows, because all the fixes have been gathered on protondb. While on windows you have to google-fu your way to finding someone on reddit or the steam forums who has the exact same problem, and also figured out and posted the fix.

Sometimes.

They tend to make sure stuff that gamers care about are up to date and working.

You’ll likely need the newest kernels and software packages if you’re running the latest gen of GPU and/or CPU, to get the most out of them, or even get them to work at all.

My first one to switch did so recently. Gave him an open offer to help get going if he ever got interested, then proceeded to just go about using my linux system for our multiplayer gaming and couch gaming hangouts.

It took a little less than three years from when I first switched for him to follow.

My sister is also on linux, has been since she took my gaming laptop as her own, and she never felt a need to switch it back to windows.

Well, I’d start with physical buttons. Forget stuff like face ID. A button that scans your fingerprint is a lot simpler to “get”. Same goes for volume keys.

Automatic screen brightness is pretty good, but if it weren’t a thing, buttons would work there. That’s how laptops do it.

I’d add a feature that makes certain settings reset to “default” after a configurable amount of time (or never). Airplane mode or mute could turn off over night, so grandma can never “disable” her phone and become unreachable, or unable to reach anyone. (Except by turning it off, a concept almost no-one has to be taught)

Give me the ability to disable quick settings in the notifications shade, grandma doesn’t need to toggle nfc, wifi, her data connection, or start screen recording (I literally tried to remove all the quick settings, but there’s a minimum!). Hell, get rid of the notification shade completely and make it a physical button that just opens your messages from whatsapp, sms and email, all in one list.

I don’t think we need to dumb down everything a phone can do. And I think we can assume an elderly person can get help with changing settings or setting it up to begin with. As such, what I wish fir, is for the simple stuff to be even simpler, and for the complicated stuff to be hidden away and essentially have configurable child locks, so they can’t be touched, except by someone who knows what the stuff does.

It should be possibly to put a device in a mode where it is “senile-proof”. But it isn’t. My grandmother can, and has, put her devices in a state where they do not work, simply by turning on airplane mode without realizing. And our current solution is to use Life 360, so we can check that her phone is still “online” and have someone visit her to fix it, if it isn’t.

I’ve done it over phone many times. I have a system.

I have them read whatever is on screen until I figure out what they’re looking at.

Then I use one of my own devices to follow along, so I have an idea of what they’re seeing, so I can give extremely specific instructions.

Sounds ok.

But limiting. My grandma is still able to learn and think.

She currently uses a tablet and a phone. Android, set up by me, and locked down as much as possible.

One home screen, with the apps she wants on one half of the screen, and a widget that shows notifications on the other half. (Limited only to notifications from apps like whatsapp, etc., she doesn’t need see that the phone updated the OS during the night etc.)

This way, all I had to do, was tell her how the home button works, and how the back button works. No explaining quick settings or the notification shade.

From there, she’s slowly learned each app, always safe in knowing she can hit home/back if confused, and take it from the beginning.

The notification widget has been especially good, as it is always there showing her her messages, and she can tap them to go straight to replying.

It’s infuriating to me that all modern devices require extra steps, just to see messages you’ve received. The way a message would be shown on the lock screen and then be “gone” upon unlocking the screen was infinitely confusing to her.

I’ve never lost patience with my grandma like that. She’s old, a sweet person (most of the time) and perfectly intelligent if you let her be.

In fact when guiding her with tech, I hate the way she calls herself stupid and slow when she makes mistakes.

We just don’t make tech for old people the way we should. There are “accessible” phones but the ones I’ve had experience with are atrocious hackjobs with deal-breaking quirks, when the whole point is to be simple.