Yeah, I think “forumverse” isn’t bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can’t really put my finger on. I’ve been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it’s just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a “forum” seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.

(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name “threadiverse.” The word “thread” definitely seems like it arose from there.)

Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I’m yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.

Definitely agreed.

I don’t think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.

By contrast, the microblog “like” (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn’t do anything other than express appreciation.

Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They’re hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads (though I think that it does so in a much more clumsy way).

(Edit: by “don’t they have votes?” do you mean polls? Because that’s a completely different function altogether than the Lemmy/Reddit vote.)

I’ve been calling them “Redditlikes” or “Reddit replacements” in ordinary conversation. We won’t need terms like that forever, though.

What about “Fedivotes” or “Votiverse?” Upvotes and downvotes are pretty key distinctives to this form of social network.

Samsung actually added Knox to their Android implementation a few months before iOS added Secure Enclave. I think Qualcomm had some sort of trusted execution environment around that time, too, if I recall correctly. And Google added Trusty to the AOSP two years ago. So it’s already running on Android, and has been for ages.

But I’m not convinced a TEE would be necessary for a device that doesn’t run any third-party native code. Browser tab sandboxing is already pretty robust; I haven’t heard of an escalation exploit being found in ages on any major JavaScript engine, meaning that the risk of data exfiltration or bootloader compromise are extremely remote, and would be much quicker (and less risky!) to patch via browser updates than firmware/OS updates.

The only other reason I know of that you’d need a TEE is for DRM, and I’d be willing to wager most people who would want a FirefoxOS phone would actively prefer not to have that on their device.

Honestly, I think the old FirefoxOS could do well these days. Literally everything an app can do can be done by a browser with a decent caching/local storage scheme. Slap a decent camera on that and it would be amazing.

There’s also a complete rehash of the Wikipedia article about the game, its release and reception, and maybe even a slideshow of memes before you get to the “No confirmation” part. And then a list of all the times the developers have said, “yeah, if they want to do another one, we’d take their money.”

Looking through their portfolio, I honestly don’t know how XDA and Android Police maintain their quality levels. Everything else is Taboola-level click farming junk.

Mass layoffs, though. That doesn’t usually presage a great time in a news site’s life.

Aftermath is the only gaming site I really pay attention to anymore. I still have Kotaku and PCGamer in my RSS reader, but I don’t really read any of their articles.

Because this here is for support. That there is for evangelism.

It’s not thinking. It’s just spicy autocomplete; having ingested most of the web, it “knows” that what follows a question about the meaning of a phrase is usually the definition and etymology of that phrase; there aren’t many examples online of anyone asking for the definition of a phrase and being told “that doesn’t exist, it’s not a real thing.” So it does some frequency analysis (actually it’s probably more correct to say that it is frequency analysis) and decides what the most likely words to come after your question are, based on everything it’s been trained on.

But it doesn’t actually know or think anything. It just keeps giving you the next expected word until it meets its parameters.

I’m a newcomer to Linux (only about a year in), but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Mine wasn’t at all. Valve has done a lot of work to make this seamless so that more games can be played on the Steam Deck. Check the Proton DB to see what your games look like.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

I have very little experience with this, but probably. Linux users tend to be tinkerers.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

Same answer for both: There’s Wine, and a whole bunch of setup scripts that can get even stuff like Adobe Creative Suite working with it. Worst case scenario, there’s VirtualBox for the one or two apps you might need to run Windows for. But I find that the open source options, while they might have a learning curve, tend to be substantially better than either of those options.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

More or less, but you can pick and choose what updates you want to install and when. Most distros have a package manager that’ll let you update the kernel, the drivers, the middleware, the desktop environment, all your apps, and even the package manager itself on your schedule, from one interface. You can also just ignore it and never update anything, though I wouldn’t recommend that.

How does digital security work on Linux?

Very well. It’s much more locked-down by default, for one thing.

Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?

Quite the opposite. Open source projects are well known for being less vulnerable out of the box; Linux in particular is used by huge companies as a lightweight server OS, so it has a lot of highly-paid people committing security fixes back down to the open source project.

Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Antivirus is a bandaid on Windows, provided because the OS was written with certain naive assumptions that let attackers get access they shouldn’t have. On Linux, those assumptions were not made. No application can be installed without your root password, for instance; downloaded files can’t even be executed without specifically making them executable; and access to edit system files is restricted by a very robust permissions system.

All of that, plus Linux’s much lower market share, also means that no malware authors are really wasting their time trying to write Linux malware. The attack vector just isn’t worth the extra effort.

So no, there’s no integrated antivirus; but for most users in most situations, it’s not needed at all.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Your mileage may vary significantly, but anecdotally it seems like most architectures from AMD and Nvidia have good support.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

Maybe, but like with Windows, I assume you have to really go out of your way to do so.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

I’ve only used Ubuntu and Mint. Mint has so far been the easiest and most user-friendly of the two. It’s also regularly touted as the best for newcomers.

Ah yes, the recommended oil checks on a famously electric vehicle. /s

I get what you’re saying, but more likely is that nobody would ever notice. Which also seems unlikely, since we’re quite an oversharing culture.

Sure, but then you’d also expect to hear about Teslas with odometers that massively underreport the distance, too. Or that fail altogether. And while no one would be likely to report the former, the latter might be a bigger deal.

This ain’t it, Chief.

You got lucky. Somebody snuck a wyrm into my codex that got all of my thralls mining for coin bits.

“Oh, dude, you gotta stop using TJ’s Action Rune of Changed Files. That runebook has a backdoor to one of the hells now. Didn’t you see the patch notes?”

“Thank you for playing Wing Commander”