The game requires windows, just because you’re able to make Linux run it doesn’t mean the game supports it.

Windows doesn’t usually need them as most games are native, and Mac doesn’t do Vulkan (in their immense wisdom Apple decided to invent Metal instead) so it can’t use dxvx. Valve could still have wine there which would work most of the time, but it might be a lot of support for a janky experience at beat.

It is a red flag for them. Just like how before proton lots of us said “No tux, no bucks”, just because it’s not a red flag to you does not negate their opinion of it.

Because Steam only uses proton on Linux AFAIK, and the guy said he’s running Mac, so it it’s not native it’s not available to him.

Sharks are so old that I’ve seen other comparisons, had never seen the milky way one before, that’s very interesting, the other ones I knew is that sharks are older than:

• The rings of Saturn
• Trees

So when sharks first evolved Saturn had no rings and trees didn’t exist yet.

I tried that, unfortunately my last name is also a brand of water. So I had to use @lastname.co which was available, but people kept adding the m and I missed on emails so I had to not do that hahahah

Nope, this one is in the bible (old testament), roughly in the same place where these are also listed as sins:

Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.

Do not practice divination or seek omens.

Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.

And my favorite to point out to them:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Also the same book prohibits eating shrimps, and many other things that they will quickly jump to say it doesn’t apply anymore, because most christians do a pick and choose of things in the bible they follow and things they don’t. There’s a game where you and a group of friends follow everything on the bible, the last one jailed wins.

It’s not literal like it would be for Dwarf Fortress, the game just has A LOT of content. Even FO3 or Oblivion have a ridiculous amount of content, where you need hundreds of hours to do all side quests.

I don’t think there’s anything on a personal level that you can give them. I personally have accepted that I won’t convince people to switch so I use WhatsApp. That being said, up until very recently you could use the “hidden in the crowd” excuse, e.g. there’s no way for them to monitor every single thing that goes through them effectively, this has changed with the advance of LLMs.

This might not concern them, but the truth is that nothing you do in WhatsApp is private, the fact that you can read the same messages on two different devices at the same time without having had to input any sort of password is a dead giveaway that the information is stored unencrypted in the servers. This means that every message someone has ever sent on WhatsApp is likely stored on a huge database that can be scrapped by LLMs to find out information on an unprecedented level. Finding every user who has broken the law by for example mentioned using weed or illegally downloading content or finding all of the password for all of the accounts people have sent over Whatsapp is as easy as asking it in English. And the question you gotta ask yourself is “Do you trust Meta not to abuse that power? Do you trust every single employee at Meta with access to this database not to scrape it for personal gains?”.

But realistically that would fall on deaf ears. If you truly are serious about this you should flip the script, e.g. “Signal can do everything that WhatsApp can, AND it’s secure, which is important to me even if not to you. If you decide to use WhatsApp you’re saying that my opinion doesn’t matter, because you have no argument other than inertia. It’s like if a friend of yours developed an allergy to shrimps and you decide to still keep meeting in a Bubba Shrimp restaurant weekly because that’s what you’ve been doing.”

The thing you got to understand is that the energy of the crash has to go somewhere. The same energy will apply to both cars, the modern car will absorb a lot of it by deforming, the old car won’t absorb any in that way because it’s a hard piece of metal. And you have to wonder, what is more important to you, the car chassis or the people inside? You might as well ask “why do we put packing peanuts if nails are a lot tougher” or “why do we ship eggs in weird cardboard boxes if a metal square would be more resilient”

You’re completely missing the point. Discord is a chat app, not a package manager, therefore it should NOT update things EVER. You’re complaining that discord tries to do something it shouldn’t, fails and somehow you seem to think that’s pacman’s fault.

The “issue” doesn’t exist on flatpaks because discord probably checks if it’s installed via flatpak and runs an update using the flatpak command without your say so. The “solution” is to stop discord from trying to be “smart” and failing and let it be updated when pacman decides to.

The idea of a package manager is to let it manage your packages, if you want self-updating apps you don’t need a package manager, and good luck with dependencies and overlapping libraries.

I have only ever had this issue with discord on arch.

The issue you describe is not Arch specific and it’s not an issue. Using a package manager means using a program to manage your packages. Things can’t auto-upgrade, that breaks the point of a package manager.

Whenever discord has an update, it will not fetch the update, but it tells me that an update can be downloaded.

Of course, if you install discord through pacman, then pacman manages the update.

As for the JSON file that’s a very hacky approach, discord shouldn’t outright fail to launch if there is an update. And in fact the Arch wiki says it has a flag to skip the version check completely:

To disable the update check, add the line “SKIP_HOST_UPDATE”: true to ~/.config/discord/settings.json. If the file does not exist, create it and add the following:

~/.config/discord/settings.json

{
  "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true
}

More info on https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Discord

What is the air branch? Discord has a package on pacman, so it should just get updated with your normal system update, there’s no config or anything that could prevent that, pacman doesn’t care. What JSON do you have to edit and why?

All of the things you mentioned are annoying level problems.

ATMs

Card payment should still work, ATMs are more of a footnote in today’s world. I can’t even remember the last time I used one. If I were to use one and it didn’t worked it would be annoying.

There is a lot of industrial machinery running Windows 98 or XP to this day.

And there are lots that don’t. Plus, wine has excellent support for old windows versions, I would be very surprised if something didn’t just worked. So there would be some downtime while people annoyingly set things up with wine.

A lot of POS devices too.

And a lot of POS don’t, the ones that do would have to change OS, an annoyance.

Almost all accounting is done on Windows.

The ones that don’t would receive lots of new clients, and the rest would leave clients annoyed while adapting.

The amount of chaos if it disappeared would be immense

I think you’re probably exaggerating the proportions, nearly 100% of the hardware that runs Windows runs Linux. Yes, there would be some chaos until things migrate, but there are alternatives that are reachable and usable.

Linux is probably still worse because it would mean that more than half of smartphones are suddenly bricked,

That’s an annoyance. It’s not just some phones, it’s absolutely every network connected device that is not a Windows or apple thing. If you Google something on your phone yo go through possibly 20 different Linux devices back and forth.

literally all of the internet just stops working

This is the big one, removing Linux menas breaking the internet (and most intranets). And it’s not breaking one thing or another, it’s breaking every single internet service, the ATMs in your windows example wouldn’t work, nor would any PoS, since they usually depend on inventory management and card connectivity.

And it’s not a “until people reinstall their system” deal, it’s breaking in an essentially unrepairable way. There’s a very high chance that outside of a very small subset of devices there’s just no alternative to Linux. That’s the difference, Windows disappearing is a hiccup while things adapt, Linux disappearing is chaos without a foreseeable solution, 90% of electronics become e-waste.

Yup, that sounds like a good approach. I could even see people doing Pacman -> Flatpaks -> AUR and it would make sense to me.

What makes it confusing to you?

Your question is not Arch specific, it’s “should I use flatpaks?” And the answer in my opinion is probably no.

Flatpaks are a good idea to isolate certain applications and to provide a uniform way of installing packages. So there might be some apps that are not available in your native package manager, but do provide flatpaks. For those cases flatpaks are probably preferred. But Arch based distros have the AUR, so there are a lot of apps that aren’t packaged for Arch that you can still get as a native package. Sure, using the AUR is risky and if you’re not on actual Arch things might break sporadically because of mismatched dependencies (although I think CachyOS is full parity of packages with Arch, so that’s maybe more of a Manjaro warning).

But flatpaks are clunky, bloated, require annoying permissions to be set to do basic things, and require you to update two package managers to do a full system update. They are more appealing for systems where you don’t want to give users root access but still allow them to install programs, but for your own computer I have never seen the appeal.

One of my favorites are the chains between Spanish and Portuguese:

• Garbage in Spanish is Basura
• But Vassoura in Portuguese means broom
• But in Spanish broom is said Escova
• Which in Portuguese means brush

Or

• Tea cup in Spanish is Taza
• A Taça in Portuguese is a wine cup
• But in Spanish wine cup is a Copa
• And in Portuguese a Copo is a regular glass
• But in Spanish regular glasses are called Vaso
• Which in Portuguese means vase.

Or

• Cutlery in Portuguese is Talher
• But Taller in Spanish is a workshop
• Which in Portuguese is Oficina
• Which in Spanish means office
• But in Portuguese you say Escritorio
• Which in Spanish means desk

Or a short one:

• Your last name in Portuguese is your Sobrenome
• But in Spanish Sobrenombre is your nickname
• While in Portuguese nickname is Apelido
• But in Spanish Apellido means last name

Another one I like is Vamos a chatear 1 rato which in Spanish means “let’s chat for a little while” but in Portuguese means “let’s bother a mouse”.

Sure, but “camera” doesn’t really mean room, it means chamber, which is a small enclosed space, and if you grab a box it is a camera by definition (just a very small one). And if you close every place where light can get into a small chamber you get a “camera obscura” which just means a dark chamber. And if you poke a hole on a camera obscura you will see an image of the outside being projected on the opposite wall. This was a very common trick in pre-industrialization, and became known as Camera Obscura, from then someone had the idea to put photosensitive material, also known as photographic, on the opposite wall and created the first photographic chamber, or “photographic camera”, which eventually was abbreviated to camera.

So yeah, they mean different things, but not really.

Yes, that should work, but as someone who went through that phase before BTRFS was a thing keeping /home in a separate partition helps quite a lot, because then reinstalling the system is just a 15 min afair and you’re mostly back where you were before except some programs you might have installed that you will need to do so again.

The next logical step for me was to keep a list of those programs, so I could just run a single command and get all of them installed. That eventually evolved into convincing me to use Gentoo, since it has this concept baked into the system. But compiling everything wasn’t for me, so I went back to Arch where I stayed for over a decade. And even though I almost never broke my system again, I always had that fear. I even switched to BTRFS when it became more stable, but never had to use a snapshot, so can’t help you on how much it restores.

Recently I’ve migrated to NixOS, and I’m very happy with it. The appeal of it for me was how the system is declared, which is a very advanced version of my packages in a file that also includes configurations. This makes it so that making changes to your system requires you to modify those files and rebuild your system, and at boot time you can select from the previous generations of the system in case you broke something. In short, this makes your system unbreakable because worst case scenario you boot into the previous generation that worked and figure out what you did wrong.

That being said, it’s learning curve is very steep, but the payoff for those of us who like to tinker is huge. If you’re interested I recommend checking vimjoyer’s YouTube channel, he has several videos about it, and since you’re already used to running things in VMs to test it should be easy for you to get started. And the best thing is that once you’re done with configuring the VM, almost the exact same config would work on your main machine out of the box and give you the exact same system (the only caveat is that there’s one file that relates to hardware which would have to be different, but it gets auto-generated during the install process).