You probably have a higher attack surface from the gremlins in your walls. OTOH, Amazon knowing that you use Mullvad is a tangible downside, as they will probably use that to stick you in a marketing group or something. Monero is still an easy solution with the ~same cost if you’re concerned about that.

How would Amazon track a voucher? It’s a physical scratch off code, sealed by Mullvad before they send it over to Amazon. More importantly, if you think that was possible why would Mullvad be unaware of it and/or lie about it? Just go with the vouchers if you want untraceability. They’re also cheaper in USD than other methods IIRC, at $29/6 months and $57/12 months.

Vote with your wallet regards any sort of purchase. By giving money to someone you are giving them the most encouragement possible to continue doing what they’re doing. If you purchase something that you end up not liking, they will still receive your initial vote loud and clear. The gaming industry especially has shown us that companies will happily take both the money and the negative review and say ‘thank you’.

I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that’s not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it’s served as WebP it’s 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It’s a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that’s used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can’t tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people’s data for no reason.

Garf

You can circumvent this by connecting to a router that has no access to internet. It will connect to the router, fail to connect to the internet, and then you can tell it to skip the initial setup and enable sideload mode.

JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.

Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.

Yes it’s lossless. JPG->JXL lossless compression is generally 20% savings for free.

Semi-related, can these automations really be relied upon for quality, or is there a system to help find the best copy? When I’m downloading books I do it manually through Anna’s Archive and I always download as many unique versions of a book that I see, then open them all and compare their internals to see which one I keep. Often not many ebooks are suitable for using my own font and layouts with Koreader.

Arch should be fine for university stuff. The main problem with Arch is not Arch itself, but all the software it tracks being very fresh. You’ll be pulling updates as they come down the line, and that may result in temporary bugs or day-to-day workflow changes - caused by the software developers themselves. I don’t think an Arch system is unusually unstable or prone to breaking, but last year they did brick everyone’s GRUB loaders by pushing an update too early (post-mortem here). It’s up to you, but if you want to err on the side of system/software stability I would go for Mint/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Debian.

I don’t have any practical experience with EndeavourOS but TMK it’s just preconfigured Arch and it uses the default repos, so that sounds good to me. Vanilla Arch is not inherently better or worse, it’s just a more minimal starting point.

The readme links to this one. It will automatically update after manual installation.

Are NPCs silent when talking? If so you’ll need to install faudio into your Wine prefix with Winetricks. Running with Steam may help a little also but l don’t remember if Proton includes faudio by default.

As for the cart crashing that’s probably just Skyrim. The opening cutscene is notoriously buggy.

Remember that cheap subscriptions for digital media is the compromise we made. If they want to fuck around and find out then you should remind them that you can just as easily pay nothing for the same content.

I haven’t used Kali Linux before, but hcxtools is available in the Debian repos so presumably your /etc/apt/sources.list is invalid (probably the LiveUSB has disabled non-iso sources). Can you post what is in that file?

Edit: Actually it looks like Kali uses a single line for its repo. Can you add

deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

to your /etc/apt/sources.list, run an apt update and try again?

Flatpak is like an alternative packaging system that exists outside of your distro’s normal packaging model, e.g. apt/dnf/pacman etc. The killer features are that Flatpaks work on any distro with a single universal package, and that the software versions will be cutting-edge without needing cutting-edge system dependencies. Flatpaks run in their own dependency network and generally don’t rely on anything from the host system - this means that you can have arbitrary software on your machine that your distro/repo maintainers don’t need to compile/quality-control/stability-test/etc. It also comes with an easy sandboxing framework out of the box as a bonus.

In my case I usually use Flatpaks to get more current versions of software without totally messing up Debian’s “Debian does not break” stability model - Debian is meticulously maintained so that its “Stable” branch only has ultra-stable versions of software, at the expense of those packages being older and frozen. If you use a distro with smaller package repos (e.g. OpenSUSE/Fedora/etc) you’ll probably appreciate finding Flatpak versions of software that you’d normally need to manually compile.

Flatpaks are cool, and they have a specific use. They’re not the end-all be-all of packaging and they’re (hopefully) not going to replace apt/dnf/pacman. As for why they hate apt I have no idea. apt is good, and you can even make it a little nicer by installing nala and using that instead of apt.

If the basis of this thread is that you’re digging for distro recommendations I’d personally steer you towards Linux Mint and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for their ease of use. Debian is a little more difficult to set up than Linux Mint but not tremendously so. Arch is more of an “intermediate” difficulty distro where the main challenge is that your system packages are fast-moving and can break/change in small ways from day-to-day. If you aren’t comfortable with Linux you might get frustrated with minor bugs that you don’t know how to troubleshoot. Conversely, if you want to learn Linux then dealing with Arch’s shenanigans will help expose you to various parts of the system naturally.

Did you actually apply the crack over top of the original files? You say you’re running the executable in the CODEX directory, but the CODEX directory would be where the temporary crack files are, not where the game is expecting them. You can also try installing the latest repack from KaOs, which you can find on 1337x by searching for “skyrim repack kaos”. The repack will auto-crack everything so you can be sure that at least that is done correctly.

The video is clickbait and a few of the distros are in categories just for dramatic effect. I personally share Chris’s criteria for “pointless” distros however, and I hope that his main “clickbait motive” was trying to stop people from hopping around from gimmick distro to gimmick distro when the real magic has always been with the Debian/Arch base underneath the hood. I don’t care to give Chris the attention he wants so I’d rather answer your questions instead of talk about the video directly:

I agree that Debian and Arch are “S-tier” distros. Not that they’re better than everything else for every usecase but they are very high quality community-run distros with large package bases, and they accomplish their mission statements with ease. If you’re a Linux power user for long enough you may eventually settle into one of these two distros because they give you a lot of room to mold your configuration without being opinionated by downstream distro maintainers.

Linux Mint is very good, and it’s probably the only “fork distro” that I recommend people use because it makes Debian/Ubuntu very simple and usable for new users, and it’s done so for many years with a great track record. I currently run Debian Stable but if you put a gun to my head and said “you can only run Linux Mint from now on” I’d be fine with it. Specifically, I prefer the LMDE edition but the normal version is good too.

You can run cutting-edge gaming stuff on Debian Stable and Linux Mint by using Flatpak Lutris/Steam, which uses its own cutting-edge Mesa package instead of the system’s, and you can also install a cutting-edge kernel on these stable distros by using Debian backports or e.g. XanMod. I prefer using stable distros like Debian Stable and pulling cutting-edge versions of your important packages through Flatpak or other means, which gives you a “stable base and rolling top”.

I think the general usecase for Arch has diminished from half a decade ago due to Flatpak’s popularity, and IMO a stable base setup makes more sense if you can get everything important that you need from Flatpaks. With Arch, not only are the programs you care about bleeding-edge, everything is bleeding-edge, and you may end up with annoying bugs from packages you didn’t even know existed.

If you want a more modern version of the Linux desktop without the bleeding-edge of Arch I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great cutting-edge distro. They have extensive automatic testing that ensures high system stability even while living near the edge of package freshness. The main downside is OpenSUSE’s smaller package base compared to Debian/Arch-based distros.

The health is listed next to each piece at this URL: https://annas-archive.org/torrents

The torrents are broken up into smaller pieces - don’t be intimidated by the big TB numbers from the sum total. Otherwise donations are always useful.