Soleil (she/her ♀)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Ares as a project has a goal of accuracy at any cost, so tends to need a lot more resources than most other emulators. Before the tragic loss of Near, they wrote an absolutely exceptional article about the development of bsnes/higan and how much power it required for cycle-accuracy of SNES hardware, and it’s way more than you would think is feasibly necessary given that emulators like ZSNES (or Gens, as was my Sega emulator of choice at the time) ran under a crappy Celeron in the 90s.

    I will say your CPU will likely throttle back well before it’ll shut down due to overheating. It might affect emulation performance some, but your PC shouldn’t shut down or anything.




  • …Except Debian wasn’t even user-friendly when I used it two years after Ubuntu’s release. Red Hat Linux (not RHEL, which came later) was the only distro I’m aware of before Ubuntu that was more UX-focused.

    Edit: I forgot about a few others — SUSE, Corel Linux, Lindows/Linspire, and others. Buuuuuuut most of those distros don’t exist anymore. I still stand by that Debian didn’t used to be as noob-friendly as it is these days.


  • Oh hey, I was thinking about DSL recently and was bummed that it’d been discontinued for so long. It was my first Linux distro, downloaded over the course of I think a day and a half over rural dial-up. I moved to Ubuntu once I was able to get blazing fast 1.5 Mbps “broadband” but DSL still holds a special place in my heart. Going antiX-based was probably a good move to make it a bit more manageable, and while I downloaded it originally because it was 50MB I agree that it’s probably more realistic that people will download it with a connection much faster than dial-up, and the hard cap on a CD-sized image is I think a good compromise. It’s still, as the name says, damn small, at least by modern OS standards.



  • I’ve run Ubuntu Server frequently on VMs for work, but I could kinda go either way on it. The majority of people who have issues with Ubuntu have philosophical differences. I’m inclined to agree for my personal stuff (in principle I’d rather not get my packages from a single source that works on their own whims, in practice I never use anything but Flathub unless I need a package with deeper permissions) primarily because I believe that Linux should be as open as possible. That said, I already mentioned that my principles there only apply to machines I own, so I guess I’m a bit of a hypocrite 😅






  • Is it a Core i7 or a Core 2 series processor? 2007 would suggest the latter, and I would absolutely argue for either that you really should prefer something with Xfce or a similar lightweight desktop (maybe Cinnamon or MATE).

    I’d probably recommend Linux Mint as a lightweight user-friendly distro, and I’d suggest any of the three available variants based on what you like the most aesthetically.

    Additionally, if you haven’t opened them up for a while, pick up an inexpensive SSD for both of them if they don’t have them already. Modern OSes really expect an SSD over a spinning disk as the boot drive.




  • Hi, I have an iPhone and like it because it’s the best device for my needs and Android doesn’t have a critical app I use, and workarounds on Android break things. My case is rare, I admit, but it’s true. I would happily switch to a Pixel once that app’s available on Android.

    Assuming that just because I buy a company’s products means I like everything they do is an awfully Rossmanny take though. I like the guy well enough but the blanket statements on things where he doesn’t consider any reasoning other than his worldview absolutely frustrates me.

    But the same can be said for some Apple fanboys. The absolute foaming at the mouth when some people get a green text message blaming the customer for buying an Android phone rather than thinking about Apple’s lack of interest in industry standards absolutely baffles me.

    Android has many issues with privacy that don’t apply to iOS. While you can degoogle Android, some services don’t work as well and some apps won’t be available at all.

    And hey, maybe that’s okay with you! Maybe your phone isn’t as big of an extension of your digital life as it is mine. Maybe it is, but you can get by on exclusively FOSS apps. I think all of that is fantastic, but I am not you, and you are not me, and I think the real sucker is the one who’s sowing division amongst people over how they use their personal devices.