Endymion_Mallorn

No such thing as a free beer, no more than there’s a free lunch.

Does the EFF call it Free?

Anything you might have spent on anime, manga, or games from the publishers or studios involved with this gang…

So what they’re saying is to stop giving any money to a company that’s part of or reports to CODA. Did I read that right?

I just like Archbang.

Unfortunately, given that I’m in the NYC DMA, individual franchisees probably couldn’t afford to cut their prices in half, as much as that sucks to admit. Minimum wage here is $15.49 per hour, which is ridiculous. Utilities, insurance (both for the business and the workers), sanitation, taxes, rent, ongoing franchising fees, and material costs do add up. Plus, they’re not seeing the volume that they had been, due to a combination of people like me who aren’t going there and the fact that they’re open less hours (because reliable overnight labor is too expensive).

For me, McDonald’s is way too expensive for what it is anymore. I’m a little ways away from the $8.29 Big Mac, but not by too much. At my local grocery store, I could put together a better burger for significantly cheaper. That’s even if I buy premade patties, buns, and sauces, rather than make them from base ingredients. Buying pre-prepped veggies could get expensive though. They’d need to drop the cost by about 50% for them to reach a point consider to be value, which they can’t afford to do.

If they’re too expensive, stop giving them money. Make food at home or go to a local small business, not a chain franchisee.

Add in the overhead:

• Refrigeration (electricity or otherwise)
• Labor ($7.25+; $15+ in some areas)
• Insurance (In case you get sick from the soda, and you sue them)
• Sanitation (outside contractor, with their materials, labor, and markups)
• Maintenance (machine repairs, etc)

I wish I could agree they were making that much money. But when you include all the costs that they have to run just the soda machine, with all the varieties of soda that they have, they’re not clearing that much profit per cup.

Yes, but have we gone to Warp? Or have we moved to ArcaOS?

Ah, absolutely not worth it then. I prefer to keep RAM free for games and video rendering.

I mean, I dual-boot Mint now. And at least you don’t come after me for DOS, because that would get me defensive…

Please explain this for a DOS/Windows user?

Wife? What’s that? My Wi-Fi isn’t free, though.

WP Engine has always seemed a very weird business to me. WP is free, and many hosting & domain providers just offer it for free with your hosting. If you don’t want to host yourself, why not just use WP.com and do a redirect? I’ve just never understood the value-add.

Don’t be shocked when ninjas appear.

I’m not going to be tolerant of the watermark, and I don’t feel like using PowerShell to get rid of it - plus there’s drivers to consider. It’s just faster and easier for me to grab an activated OEM version for the computer I have.

Key bindings can be changed, but I’ve never found the place to do it easily in the GUI in Mint. I touch the Linux command line for curl and ping, and that’s about it.

I already play Wesnoth, and I haven’t touched 0 AD in years. I prefer OpenTTD, Oolite, Endless Sky, and Minetest, along with occasionally poking at WarZone 2100. But that doesn’t replace the DOS and Win9x games from my childhood. I don’t use Valve’s DRM platform (nor the one from Epic Megagames), and it’s rare for me to pay for anything on GOG. But there’s no other game that exactly hits the fun for me of Sid Meier’s Covert Action, Shadow President, SimCity 2000 & 3000, Starfleet Command II: Orion Pirates, or a couple dozen others. Yes, it’s nostalgia. But it harms no one.

As for the tax thing, I’ll look into it, but I don’t expect it will do what we need. We need to pay for the more expensive software because of our tax situation (don’t want to get into detail for obvious reasons).

Sometimes the impetus to change OS is not UX related.

In my current case, it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with liking or not liking Windows. I actually like Windows 9x, XP, 7, and 10. I bought a computer and wanted to install a clean OS on it (it came with Ubuntu, which I loathe visually and general UX-wise, because it feels like a Mac and seems like no matter what I do, something breaks). I had a choice: go through the effort on my other machine of pirating Win10, or just install Linux. I decided to go with Mint, because it supports the software I want and there’s a feeling of familiarity, so muscle memory still works. I had to learn things like using Alt+F2 rather than Win+R, but I feel like I’m in a safer environment to learn than just “here’s a new OS, good luck”, because I can access those things in the GUI until I learn to do otherwise. Having Wine and DOSBox-X are because I have software that’s for Windows or DOS that I like. I still haven’t found a solid replacement for Notepad++, for example; and that’s not including games.

There’s also the “use Linux to make old machines work better and safer” use-case, especially for older people. My mom, for instance, is almost 80. She knew DOS, and she’s been acclimated to Windows over 30-odd years. If I want to make her older machine safer and more efficient, I’d install Mint on it compared to something else (I actually can’t, because her tax software is Windows-only and does not work correctly in Wine), because again, she’ll feel that she’s in a safer environment. She already uses OpenOffice (specifically not LibreOffice, because of the print layout differences - seemingly small things like kerning and the like can have a significant effect), and Firefox. She was using Thunderbird for a while but switched to webmail, just for simplicity. I’d have to walk her through PySol, AisleRiot, or another solitaire program, but I’m pretty confident that I could do that. So it should work like Windows for her, except for all the things she won’t use.

Nor should it be the last. Just be glad that Micro$oft doesn’t see it as being more valuable than just including WSL.

Um, what’s the difference between this and Zorin OS?

It’s Linux with Wine, that has a theme that looks like Windows. I’ll be honest, I’m running Mint with Cinnamon, and since I was already heavily in the FOSS world for gaming, etc., when people see my current PC at a glance, they can’t tell the difference between it and my Win10 PC (except for the LM logo on the start menu). I have Wine and DOSBox-X installed too, so I don’t need VMWare or another VM set up.

Some people absolutely do want this. Some people even want it in a ‘push-the-button’ style solution. We call those people ‘users’.