Patch 4.3 is in open beta right now, which means it’s just around the corner, and it will bring massive changes (mostly positive, it seems). So if you want to get into the game right now, maybe wait a little longer until 4.3 is final. Then dive in.

I’m a rookie in this game (like better than newbie but not really intermediate yet) and I play only with non-gameplay-changing mods. My mod list is something like: UI Overhaul Dynamic + Extended Topbar + Tiny Outlier, Tech Tiers Revealed, Immersive Galaxy and Skybox, and a couple of music packs.

I still like Arch the most. Since ~22 years now.

Mint or Fedora(KDE) are great choices. Kubuntu, PopOS or OpenSuSE might also be suitable for beginners. Stay away from Arch-based distributions until you are at least a bit more experienced.

Intel (anything) works without problems on Linux (in fact, Intel is among the most Linux-supportive companies out there and most or all of their drivers are open source and part of the kernel, as it should be in the Linux world).

Nvidia GPUs used to be problematic in the past, it’s better now, still not as great as AMD GPUs are on Linux (they’re literally plug and play these days) but I think when going with the distro mentioned above it’s going to be just as easy Just make sure to enable support for NVidia drivers or “enable 3rd party drivers/repositories” (you’ll be asked during setup) so that those distributions will also install those slightly non-standard Nvidia packages which they might not do otherwise for “purity” reasons.

Wichtig dabei ist auch: ein Datenschutz der nur auf rechtlicher Ebene existiert ist zu schwach und existiert damit quasi nicht. Das sehen wir ja in Europa seit vielen Jahren. Vieles was US Big Tech Firmen sich in Europa erlauben, ist nicht legal. Aber sie konnten die Masse davon überzeugen dass es “egal” oder sogar “praktisch” sei wenn sie alles an Daten sammeln, und sie konnten die oberste irische (d.h. in diesem Fall die gesamteuropäische) Datenschutzbehörde unterwandern (eine Ex-Lobbyistin von Meta (einem der datenschutzfeindlichsten Konzerne der Welt) ist Chefin der Behörde. So einen Vorgang nennt man auch “regulatory capture” - wenn die Aufsicht besetzt wird von denen die eigentlich beobachtet werden sollten. Logischerweise passiert dann entweder in den meisten Fällen gar nichts, oder es gibt nur Taschengeld-Strafen.

Yes, and they intentionally want those lines to be as blurry as possible.

In Nazi Germany, most concentration camps were also “just” meant as additional jails for the ever-expanding list of “criminals” (according to the criminal regime of course). They had inhuman conditions because it was cheaper and no one cared too much about the inmates. Later on, some of those concentration camps became literal death camps.

I think still too many people missed the turning point when Microsoft suddenly stopped releasing products/software that were superior in basically all areas to their previous versions. I think that turning point was Windows 8 already, for many who consider Windows 8 a single-time mistake like ME or Vista it was Windows 10, for others it took until Windows 11 until they noticed the decline of Windows as a whole.

And it’s not just MS, but a lot of consumer tech is growing anti-consumer and gets enshittified to the point of where you really have to think hard whether or not you even want the new stuff they’re spewing out. My consumer habits have certainly changed to be much more rigorous than, say, 10-20 years ago. I read a lot more reviews these days and from many more different sources bevore I even think of buying something new.

“AI PCs” will increase your dependency on MS’ online services (which is probably the main thing that MS wants), decrease your privacy even more (also what MS wants - that’s a lot of data for sale), consume even more energy (on a planet with limited resources), sometimes increase your productivity (which is probably the most advantage you’re ever getting out of it) and other times royally screw you over (due to faulty and insecure AI behavior). Furthermore, LLMs are non-deterministic, meaning that the output (or what they’re doing) changes slightly every time you repeat even the same request. It’s just not a great idea to use that for anything where you need to TRUST its output.

I don’t think it will be a particularly good deal. And nothing MS or these other companies that are in the AI business say can ever be taken at face value or as truthful information. They’ve bullshitted their customers way too much already, way more than is usual for advertisements. If this was still the '90s or before 2010 or so - maybe they’d have a point. But this is 2026. Unless proven otherwise, we should assume bullshit by default.

I think we’re currently in a post-factual hype-only era where they are trying to sell you things that won’t ever exist in the way they describe them, but they’ll claim it will always happen “in the near future”. CEO brains probably extrapolate “Generative AI somewhat works now for some use cases so it will surely work well for all use cases within a couple of years”, so they might believe the stories they tell all day themselves, but it might just as well never happen. And even if it DID happen, you’d still suffer many drawbacks like insane vendor dependencies/lock-ins, zero privacy whatsoever, sometimes faulty and randomly changing AI behavior, and probably impossible-to-fix security holes (prompt injection and so on - LLMs have no clear boundary between data and instructions and it’s not that hard to get them to reveal secret data or do things they shouldn’t be doing in the first place. If your AI agent interprets a malicious instruction as valid, and it can act on your behalf on your system, you have a major problem).

Linux Mint

Linux Mint is often recommended to users coming from Windows, so… Kubuntu, Pop!OS and OpenSuSE are maybe also decent for that use case.

Manjaro isn’t recommended. They made lots of weird decisions and mistakes in the past, maybe still do. Wouldn’t trust them. Endeavour or Cachy are the current recommendations for “easy Arch”. If you’re able to install and maintain vanilla Arch, I’d recommend Arch though. Cut the middleman.

I’m only a little bit familar with the TUI browsers. I’m also not sure about gemini and gopher support so you have to look that up on each project page, but I can give some general directions:

• Lynx is basically the oldest TUI browser, so probably not the best and no modern choice, but still maintained I think
• ELinks started as a fork of Links (and Links started as an alternative to Lynx, so both ELinks and Links are newer than Lynx). It has a lot of features and is actively maintained, so it’s decent I think. Probably better than Links (and Links is probably better than Lynx)
• Links2: no idea, just know that it exists. If it’s still actively maintained I would suggest comparing it to ELinks because they’re both probably similar (both related to but newer than Links))
• W3m is the one I’d recommend, it’s powerful and can be integrated more easily into other applications. For the classic TUI browsers, it probably comes down to the choice between w3m and elinks
• There’s also a modern project called Carbonyl which is essentially Chromium running in a terminal, so this one might be “better” than all of the above in terms of features and modern website compatibility. But again, it depends on what you want out of a TUI browser - if you only need something basic this is probably overkill. But I didn’t try it out.

The gullible/naive ones. Right-wing extremists are generally quite good at promising simple (but wrong) “solutions” for complex problems that lower-educated people can easily follow and then feel like they’re on the correct track. That’s also why they produce so much easy-to-digest propaganda on the web.

But it’s all lies, accusing others who have nothing to do with the real problems, not making anything better except for the elite, and causing unnecessary cultural wars within the population instead of necessary class wars.

The elite generally wins when parts of the population are in-fighting against other parts of the population. Right-wing extremists love that and regularly pour more oil into that fire due to their general dividing and hateful nature towards all kinds of cultural opponents and minorities, and the elites love watching us fight each other while enriching themselves further and eating popcorn, because they know that when we’re busy in-fighting, we aren’t fighting for more equality or to change things in any meaningful way.

Jep, kein Geld mehr und (möglichst) keine Daten (= Geld) mehr. Im Kapitalismus ist euer Konsumverhalten bzw. wem ihr Geld gebt im Prinzip genauso wichtig wie eure politische Stimme. Vote with your wallet.

In more or less random order:

• Org-Mode is one of the most amazing packages for Emacs. Some people use Emacs only for that. I personally use it for second-brain style note taking, TODO lists, simple presentations, PIM, Wiki-like articles, writing docs (and then exporting it to other formats), and even some simple integrated spreadsheets/tables including some simple calculations
• Magit is a really good Git frontend. Some people use Emacs only for that.
• Use “use-package” to install/configure packages. Streamlines configuration a lot, compared to the old days.
• Use the “no-littering” package to move a lot of randomly generated files into centralized directories
• Use winner mode to undo/redo window configuration changes
• Use which-key to show a popup of available keybinds when typing something
• Use the integrated “time” package to create a world clock view
• Use the integrated modus-themes for highly configurable themes with a nice contrast (since I’ve spent some time configuring that theme, I’ve stopped using any other theme)
• Use hl-todo package to highlight keywords like “TODO”, “NOTE”, “WARNING” or “DONE”
• Use doom-modeline for a nice modeline
• Use nerd-icons to add nice icons to many views
• Use avy to quickly jump to specific locations, lines or characters using different keystrokes
• Use eshell for a quick shell (which works the same on every Emacs, regardless of the OS) and/or either vterm or eat if you need a full-fledged terminal emulator
• Use embark as a “context menu” when cursor is over anything (bind embark-act to e.g. “C-.”)
• Use editorconfig package to specify/load different editor configs per project
• Use treesitter and eglot (or lsp-mode) for modern syntax parsing using language servers
• Use neotree (or treemacs?) as a file tree viewer, but dired is also cool if configured well
• Use org-modern package to beautify org mode display
• Use org-appear to hide formatting characters unless cursor is directly next to them
• Use Unicode characters to beautify otherwise ugly or bland default characters, e.g. set " ▾" for org-ellipsis
• Use gcmh or similar packages or config settings to improve general Emacs UI responsiveness
• Use packages which improve the minibuffer, buffer switching, completion, and basic things like that. There are several good ones and you can’t really go wrong with any, I just think the newer, more well-integrated ones like consult, vertico, orderless, marginalia, and so on are “nicer” than the older less well-integrated ones like helm, ivy and so on
• Bind “goto-last-change” to a nice keybind
• Bind “quick-calc” to a nice keybind
• Bind “org-agenda” to a nice keybind
• Bind “toggle-truncate-lines” (line wrapping) to a nice keybind
• Bind “kill-this-buffer” and “kill-this-buffer-and-window” to nice keybinds (e.g. C-x k / K)
• Bind “consult-line” (or something similar) to e.g. C-s
• Bind all window and buffer cycling/management related commands to nice keybinds
• If you want an easier entry into Emacs and are already a Vim user, try the Doom Emacs distribution. If you want to start with Vanilla GNU Emacs but want a decent but minimal default configuration, try emacs-bedrock.

I was like that ~20 years ago. But since around ~10 years ago I realized that Emacs basically includes Vim. And much more. Yes Emacs is hard to get into and has a weird language, but it’s immensely powerful, extensible and also extremely reliable and future-proof. No you probably shouldn’t do everything inside Emacs. But several things are powerful, well-integrated and efficient.

Vim is still great though, I use it in the terminal for quick random config file edits or over ssh sessions (haven’t gotten around or used to trying tramp mode in Emacs). It’s great because some variant of it basically exists on every Unix-like system. And I also highly recommend learning modal editing with the Vim keybindings, which works inside Emacs as well of course. The default Emacs keybinds are unergonomic at best. But it also includes a mode for using Vim keys, and that mode is basically just as powerful as Vim itself. Not half-baked at all, which you might assume in such cases.

Probably, but it’s still much-needed actual retaliation against the regime. Doing nothing besides complaining helps even less. Wars aren’t being won in an instant but as a result of many cumulative small victories.

8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wireless here (but only using it wired, on PC, Linux). Good Xbox-style controller.

Microslop Crashpilot

I’ll always call it Microslop from this point on. Although that term, while true, also detracts a bit from the other problem this causes: 100% surveillance by Microsoft and 0% ownership of your documents/data. Personal and business alike. But anyway, it’s a term that Nadella doesn’t like so please keep using it.

This behavior is to be expected since the EU is heavily vulnerable to blackmail due to its many hard dependencies on US-based software and services. I suspect that many EU leaders can easily be bullied into submission by the current kleptocracy in the US.