Maybe I’m misunderstanding but wouldn’t diffuse light be what it’s going to be best at? While it’d be worse on a sunny day when there is an optimal single direction for the light to come in?

It’s the opposite of a light house fresnel lens - instead of scattering the light source evenly out, it’ll capture diffuse incoming rays from random directions better and concentrate it on the photovoltaic cell? However it would be at the cost of being able to capture direct sunlight efficiently as only some of the lens would ever be in the best position to capture the direct rays?

That link is for Piefed.world; run by the same team that run Lemmy.world

There are other piefed servers which may have different email requirements. But the most likely reason Piefed.world requires real emails is to prevent bots making fake accounts and also reduce the risk of bad actors making numerous accounts to avoid bans. As it’s hard to get multiple real emails it makes it hard to make multiple anonymous accounts which is unfortunately a tactic of trolls.

You can of course create a dedicated “private” email account on an official service and use that to sign up if you’re worried about sharing your primary email account. A lot of people do this online to have a legitimate email but essentially in it’s own silo separate from other personal emails.

But Kemp, a lifelong Republican and Trump supporter, doesn’t hold that against Trump and suggested he might change course. “I really think he’s gonna do something,” she said.

It’s this kind of thinking I find staggering. Trump has done something - it’s his bill that caused the problem he’s not going to change course. I don’t understand why Trump voters want to judge Trump on his words rather than his actions. They’re amongst those who are going to suffer to preserve tax cuts that won’t benefit them.

Yeah I totally understand that, I’ve played around with immutable distros inside virtual machines and they’re interesting. Also if you like tinkering, Linux is a great OS.

If you do go immutable have a play with KVM - Kernel Virtual Machines - they’re easy to set up and give near native speeds for guest virtual Linux machines (or decent performance for other OS like Windows) It’s a great way to play with Linux inside a sandbox while keeping your host clear; but also a very useful way to run custom software in a flexible Linux guest while on an immutable desktop. E.g. Create a Mint VM to run something that’d be a pain to set up on Silverblue.

Immutable desktop plus KVM guests might be the best of both worlds. Even if you don’t end up on immutable distro, KVM is cool tech that has really advanced in the last few years. It’s better and more powerful than VirtualBox imo, and I use it a lot even on my rolling release distro (I have a VM to run work Microsoft Office, plus a few Linux VMs for a torrent stack and just for tinkering).

So I’m a sceptic when it comes to immutable desktops. What you gain in stability you sacrifice in flexibility and control. If you want to use software outside of Flatpak and your distros repos, immutable can be very annoying to work around.

If you want more control and flexibility, a standard install with a Long Term Support distro will be fine. I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed; I wouldn’t recommend that as it’s a rolling distro but I would recommend OpenSuSE Leap the point release distro. It has good user tools in YaST, it’s secure and it’s reliable, and it has a sensible update schedule. It is also a decent distro for coding. It has multiple versions of Python available which I believe are configured to coexist well, deliberately to make coding and version control easier.

I’d avoid anything directly Ubuntu related due to the reliance on Snap. But Linux Mint is a good variant which has loads of support available online if you want to ease back into Linux. Make no mistake, although it’s user friendly, it’s a full distro and capable of being as powerful as you want.

If you really do want to go down the immutable route, then probably Fedora Silver blue and variants is the way to go at the moment. I second the Kaionite recommendation - KDE is great. It’s well established and popular in the space, so there will more support out there should issues arise (most commonly installing something not in the repos and not on Flatpak). Immutable distros from other big names aren’t really there yet in terms of the user base as far as I’m aware.

Yeah all you have to do is circumvent the security settings in your browser and suppress warning messages to enable Manifest 2, all in 8 easy steps (written as if it’s 6 steps to make it seem less onerous). For now. Until Google switches it off completely.

Or, drop Chrome and Chromium based browsers (such as Edge, Vivaldi, Brave etc) in one easy step. Install a privacy respecting Firefox based browser like Firefox itself or Librewolf.

Clementine hasn’t been updated since 2016. The fork Strawberry is a safer bet; actively maintained.

Elisa is a modern music player from the KDE project. It’s quite slick but not always the most intuitive - some options are hidden away in menus to keep the main interface slick.

It definitely has Repeat One.

Otherwise Strawberry is probably the best bet. It’s not the slickest looking in terms of modern UI design but it’s rock solid and still actively maintained. It’s basically the continuation of Clementine (which is largely untouched since 2016) which itself was a continuation of Amarok.

I like Strawberry but I do find the UI a bit jarring in the modern era. It’s feature rich and stable though.

And yet we’ve had numerous terrorist attacks in the UK involving explosives. That is both northern Ireland related terrorism and Islamic terrorism.

We just had the 20th anniversary of the 7!7 bombings of the London underground where 3 separate suicide bombings detonated.

Such events are thankfully rare and very difficult to pull off, but unfortunately it only needs to happen once to be a “success” for terrorists. While the police and intelligence services have to stop every single potential attack to be successful.

Sadly I think OP is right. There will eventually be a successful terrorist attack involving drones. After which, attitudes to drones will harden.

It’s very difficult to get explosives and it’s very difficult for terrorists to get a explosive to a target. Unfortunately drones make the both potentially easier.

Listen: the world is not as bad as news media and social media make out. People love wallowing in misery - don’t let them bring you down.

In many ways we are living in a golden age - technology has never been so advanced, you have at your fingers more power, knowledge and freedom than any generation before has ever had. And despite all the gloom and doom, renewable energy is exploding electric cars are everywhere, people are living longer and healthier, poverty is down across the world and falling. Good news doesn’t cut through on social media or news. Seek it out - it’s all around you.

The world is far from perfect but it’s also no where near as bad as it sometimes seems. The world has always been in a state of flux and changing. We lived through a brief period of stability after the fall of the Berlin wall but normal service has resumed. Somethings will get better, some things will get worse. Sometimes good politicians will be in power sometimes bad.

Trust me as someone now in their 40s, you will look back and wonder why you wasted time worrying about things that ended up not smattering. When I was 20 it was all about George W Bush dooming the world and America. It wasn’t about the positive things that actually happened - like the mobile phone, the internet, falling poverty, rising living standards around the world, the solar panels, and wind turbines and electric cars, and so much more. I work.on Healthcare - diseases I learned were death sentences like cancer or even diabetes and HIV are now treatable and some even curable. Others realistically look they will be cured in my lifetime. When I was 20 those possibilities were all dismissed as wishful thinking, and the main worry was narrow stuff about a politician you probably barely know about and a war people don’t care about anymore.

And now - the world has moved on and now everyone is agnosing over Donald Trump. We’re still worrying about climate change but we’re still not talking about the global renewable energy revolution.

The last 20 years have been nothing short of miraculous in many ways, yet you’d think from social media and mainstream news that the Human race is already extinct and we’re just waiting for the lights to go out. Fuck that. Ignore the shit, get out and live your life. The world is amazing. Go out and see it.

Mate, you need to switch off from it.

Take it from someone older - the news is always bad, the world is always in trouble, whatever is happening today is supposedly always terrible and it can seemingly only get worse. A lot of it is actually total rubbish and nonsense and you need to tune it out. News and social media grab your attention by trying to be shocking and proactive - and they do it largely for money.

Put things in perspective a bit. We are living in the most technologically advanced time in human history. People are living longer and healthier. Cutting edge medicine is allowing more and more people to survive from cancer. Renewable energy is growing at record rates, and electric cars are booming - things we were told only 10 years ago wasn’t going to happen and we’d all be doomed.

And when it comes to Trump - remember he has been president before. The world didn’t end and it won’t this time. Politicians are being politicians and there is fuck all you can do about it so tune it out.

When I was in my 20s it was all about how evil George W Bush was and how he was destroying America and so on. Trumps a shit but the older you get the more you’ll realise how much a lot of the talk is hyperbole and exaggeration. After Bush came Obama. After Trump someone else will come and you can have your say in the mid term elections in a year and presidential elections in 3 years. In the meantime, forget about it and live you life.

Get away from social media, get away from political news and websites. It’s just going to make you feel anxious about things you have no control over and a relentless negative message. The most you need do is vote when the next election comes around, and maybe donate to causes you believe in when you can afford it. Anything else has to come from within and if it’s not there then is not worth wasting your time on it. Live your life and ignore the shitshow. Be a decent person and treat people with kindness and fairness. That is all we can expect of anyone.

The world is not as bad as social media and the news makes it out to be. You’re in part experiencing catastrophe fatigue - the constant negative bombardment of news and opinion that tries to grab your attention by being dramatic and negative. So cut it out.

As for your girlfriend be honest with her and how what she is sharing is impacting you both negatively. If she can’t stop then maybe it’s time to move on.

There is so much more to life than worrying about an 80 year old fat orange man.

Yeah… Except he makes the “freak kid” live under the stairs and neglects him compared to his own son. Kinda hard to redeem the guy by him being otherwise average.

Yeah, how’s that going with Hungary? We cannot rely on the EU to enforce civil rights or freedoms. The UK needs to sort that ourselves.

Bringing in proportional representation is far more important than rejloining the EU in my opinion. That would be better for repairing the UK.

Yeah that’d work if there is no special treatment for French farmers etc too. People like to paint Brexit as a simplistic thing - some kind of simplistic jingositic thing - but actually it was complex and multifaceted - the common agricultural policy, the democratic deficit in the centre of the EU, the constant paralysis instead of decision making. All these things contributed as different people voted on different grounds. The loud and bombastic voices of Farrage and Johnson may have dominated the media narrative but it barely scratches the surface of how deep the divisions over Europe actually go.

The reality is I don’t think the UK would vote to rejoin even if people regret leaving. Any deal to rejoin would be worse than what was lost particularly around joining the Eurozone and the disproportionate cost of membership in terms of subsidising CAP etc. It’d be a very difficult sell to the UK voters and as we get further from Brexit the damage is perceived to be less and less.

The EU needs serious reform. I wanted to remain as I thought Britain could have besn a voice to push that but looking at how the EU is currently I don’t want to rejoin. I wouldn’t want to be be in the EU while Hungary can hold everything up and is not accountable for its loss of democracy. Poland just avoided a damaging right wing government for now, but they already diamantled much of the liberal state and the left are struggling to rebuild it. France is divided 3 ways and the upcoming presidential election brings much uncertainty. I can’t imaging any politician in Europe wants to even think about Britain rejoining, and in the UK it remains a highly divisive and controversial topic.

I’m glad people in the EU are patriotic about it, and want it to succeed. As a Brit I want it to succeed too. But genuinely as much as I wanted to stay I would vote against rejoining if asked right now. There is not a clamour to rejoin at the present - people may regret Brexit but that is not the same as wanting to go through the bruising process of rejoining.

I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.

There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.

I’ve been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.

First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you’ve not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don’t want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.

I also recommend Pihole - it’s an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It’s really improved my experience on all my devices.

Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.

Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.

Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.

You can do lots of things with both, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

People have used Lutris for other apps because it was a more convenient wrapper for Wine than the defaults offered but it’s not primarily designed for it and support will be limited. Lutris is designed to be a games library and that’s it’s focus.

I personally wouldn’t recommend wine newbies to be using Lutris to run everything because if nothing else it would be annoying for the Lutris dev team to be dealing with “I can’t get Microsoft Word working”.

I also personally wouldn’t recommend Bottles for games because of all the other features Lutris offers. I have a huge library of games and I wouldn’t want to manage that in the Bottles interface. But I’m aware people use it for that and Lutris is one of its supported runners.

Bottles and Lutris complement each other and work together well. But lutris is designed to be a games libaray while Bottles is designed to be for everything.

I personally use Lutris for games (most of my wine use) and Bottles for a few other windows apps.

But the real star of the show is under the hood - it’s wine and Proton doing the heavy lifting. Lutris and Bottles are tools to get the most out of them and it’s choice which you use and how.

Lutris is for managing games, and can use multiple different engines. Proton is one, but also Linux native games, dos, ScummVM, etc. Lutris also interfaces with popular stores like Steam, Epic, GOG etc. It’s a game and gaming library tool.

Bottles is a general purpose wrapper for Wine. You can run games but also any wine software. It’s a general purpose wine tool.

Lutris makes running games in proton easy. Bottles makes running apps in wine easy.

I’m not too bothered by variable lengths but I do think the lack of time constraints can lead to bad writing and show making. If the episode needs to be 40 mins, fine, but sometimes it just feels like as no one is saying “cut this back, tighten it up” so episodes become uneven or series sprawl and never get to the end.

There is an official Jellyfin plugin that adds DLNA support; content can then be accessed via any DLNA client including VLC (built in support). MPV can also use DLNA with it’s own plugin.