MudMan

It is between 0.1 and 0.05% the size of Reddit.

So yes.

I guess that’s a fair point, but there are a few things I’d point out in response.

For one thing, nested threads weren’t that rare, even early on. I refuse to give Reddit credit for that one. Pair that with the fact that around here the upvote sorting is far less relevant and you have a more forum-like arrangement. It’s definitely not the “only the most upvoted post counts” thing over here. You have very long threads with a lot of different responses and responses to responses. The filtering and bubbling up based on popularity is not quite Reddit-like.

For another thing, and perhaps more importantly, social media isn’t just defined by its features. Reddit is the way it is because of how people engage with it and how large and anonymous it is. The entry points are different, the connections are different, the reliance on discoverability tools is waaay different. This place doesn’t feel like Reddit because even if it has a few of those tools it doesn’t much need them. You can parse the entire firehose. You can’t be Reddit like that.

“My team”? What team would that be? Cause my elected officials, that I voted for, are very much in the “arrest Netanyahu for genocide” camp, with my full support.

If you’re not American my claims don’t apply to you (unless you were a non-American peddling anti-Harris online propaganda during the elections, and then you’re as much to blame as the rest of the idiots that did this).

It is.

But I’m not making it worse and we’ve staved it off so far.

So I will keep trying to not make it worse.

Which American leftist cosplayers spewing self-defeating, self-righteous maximalist crap to get Trump elected can’t say.

Trust me, I would much rather be dealing with their self-righteous crap than with Trump. But since we’re here, and since we tried to tell them, at least I can pop up to go “told you so” before I go back to blocking Americans and their nonsense from my feeds and try to survive their ongoing spiraling.

Hey, it would be great to be in a world where we can test that hypothesis.

But you made it not that world by electing this particular turd. So what we know for sure is this: you didn’t make it better.

So it’s your fault.

So you don’t get to go “boo hoo the other guy was Israel’s bitch, too”. Your self-righteous leftist cosplay may give your denial room to pretend you didn’t make it worse (you did), but now we know for a fact you didn’t help.

When the rest of reality dawns on you feel free to poke me again. In the meantime, deal with whatever amount of it your psyche can parse in your own time.

Plenty. But I voted for a government that wouldn’t do this, and they narrowly won, so I have that going for me. What’s your excuse?

If anything I’m surprised by the constant Reddit comparisons, because this has never felt like Reddit to me.

It feels like a 90s forum. Small, focused on a handful of topics, you always argue with the same five guys about the same five things… It’s not a Reddit replacement at all. Which is why I’m here, I don’t contribute to Reddit and never have.

Yeah, no offense, but nobody cares about how you cope or whether you leave. This isn’t about you.

We’ll all pretty ok with you guys stewing in your own fascist soup. You made that bed. The concerning part is how it’s affecting everybody else. If this was entirely a you problem I would be much less worried.

That’s not relevant. The fact is this entire situation is developing this way because Trump is both extremely willing to go along with Israel and terrified of looking weak.

That he would give Bibi everything he wanted and make the situation worse was both known from his actions last time and a common warning to “the Dems are just as bad” delusional morons during the campaign, to their protests.

And now here we are. Delusional morons are still out there, still in denial and still entirely wrong.

Anybody who “didn’t even vote” is responsible for this. At least the 1/6 are trying to hide their guilt behind excuses. Eff all fascists, of course, but hey, at least that subsegment of them aren’t lying to themselves about it.

Oh, no, you’re not.

You’re a speck of the nameless hordes in a rogue superpower. A collaborationist in a fascist nuclear state.

You have zero relevance as an individual. You are, fundamentally, just a small part of a big problem.

I have no obligation to care about your “individuality”. I care about your victims. Which exist. You have real, human victims now. And I really hope if you’re being honest about your self-righteous denials throughout this thread, that it at least triggers some self-awareness about that.

I don’t care. You did this.

Drag every dumb American leftist that was here during the election claiming this exact thing, or that Harris’ support of Israel was too much and Trump wouldn’t do the same. Collaborationists one and all. May as well have given the order today.

You live with that now. And as it continues to get worse I sure hope someone in your life slaps the self-serving excuses right out of you so it dawns on you, because you will have to stew in this the rest of your life.

You are the enemy, just as much as the average noncommital fascist was in the mid-20th century. You are a cautionary tale for some kid studying history in a century, assuming we get to have kids studying history in a century despite your best attempts.

And maybe I could get to some more in-depth solution that sorts it out, but that’s me spending time on a problem that a) I shouldn’t have to, and b) I have a functional workaround for already.

Communal troubleshooting is the nature of Linux desktop, but also a massive problem. You shouldn’t need communal troubleshooting in the first place. It’s not a stand-in for proper UX, hardware compatibility or reliable implementation. If the goal is for more people to migrate to Linux the community needs to get over the assumption that troubleshooting is a valid answer to these types of issues.

Which is not to say the community shouldn’t be helpful, but there’s this tendency to aggressively troubleshoot at people complaining about issues and limitations and then to snark at people actively asking for help troubleshooting for not reading documentation or not providing thorough enough logs and information. I find that obnoxious, admittedly because it’s been decades, so I may be on a hair trigger for it at this point.

The other option is to just use Windows, which is the issue with these types of hardware incompatibility. I also have an ASUS laptop that won’t use their slightly weird speakers correctly and, again, that whole thing makes it much less practical to boot into Linux instead.

I tried fiddling with the Windows settings, but that didn’t fix it immediately, and the sound is clearly wrong on Linux even with a power cycle. And googling for it I’m not alone in having issues and support for the thing is patchy. I mean, rebooting should have fixed it anyway. There’s no reason why either OS wouldn’t initialize those things on boot.

I am not particularly commited to the thing, so I wouldn’t buy an upgrade. The only reason I have it is at some point I ended up with a motherboard that wouldn’t do 5.1 out of the box, so I got something relatively affordable to slap in there. It sounds noticeably better than integrated audio, though, so now that I have it I’d like to use it, even if I’m not on the problematic old motherboard.

But again, I dislike the tendency to recommend functional hardware or technical support. It’s kinda frustrating. And frankly, it works on Windows, so if I was looking for a fix, that’s right there. The onus is on Linux for support in this type of setup where the issue is not on the Windows side that’s a reboot away.

That’s fair, and I don’t have a problem with that. I’m just annoyed by the tendency of the community to react to criticism with technical advice, which I find to be a frustrating crutch.

FWIW, the card is a Sound Blaster X AE5 (that name sure has aged poorly), and I’ve had similar issues with it in both a Manjaro and a Bazzite install.

When I was in school they had Apple II’s and pretended using LOGO was learning how to use a computer. Chromebooks are closer to real world computer usage than we’ve typically had, barring whatever ten-to-fifteen year period where school computers were Windows PCs, which may or may not have happened at all depending on where you live.

The loss of literacy has way more to do with moving from old CLI-based OSs and to GUI OSs and eventually phone and tablet OSs. Not that I’d want to go back to MS-DOS, but the only reason anybody had any understanding of where every part of the OS went and what it did is having to navigate it from memory and it being built from two sticks and three rocks.

Nah, it’s just not supported. Or rather, it’s poorly supported so it sounds worse than in Windows and it just doesn’t want to properly dual boot without a power cycle. Honestly, I haven’t checked if the soft reboot issue has been reported. Pretty sure it hasn’t. I could be nice and go find where to file a bug, but I haven’t gotten around to it and, frankly, there are enough other problems with this particular setup that nobody is fixing and are getting dismissed with “it’s the manufacturer’s fault” that I’m not particularly inclined to go out of my way.

We don’t talk enough about how spotty new motherboard support is for Linux, either. At least sound is a recurring talking point. But yeah, newer motherboards often don’t pick up networking and audio hardware out of the box and need a lot of troubleshooting. Everybody is so proud of how well Linux revitalizes old laptops but nobody likes to talk about how that’s because they’re old, and newer stuff may not work well or at all. Early adopting hardware platforms on Linux can be a “going on an adventure” Hobbit meme experience.

And you’re right that it’s not so much about audio getting reingeneered again as it getting done right. I just don’t know that the current patchwork barely holding together can be salvaged by bolting more pieces on top. Every time Linux needs to replace something this way it’s a years-long argument between nerds and a whole damn mess (see Wayland still being litigated, somehow). Audio never gets enough attention anywhere and I have very low trust that a new attempt wouldn’t end up in the same mess they have now, at least for a long while. It extra sucks because Windows audio used to be kinda bad, but now it’s… kinda not? So being a dual-booter it’s just an extra reason to make that choice of which boot option to pick from the menu.

We’re not doing this. People in the Linux community are so tweaked by years of bad support that they assume every complaint is a call for help.

It is not.

I know what’s broken, I know why, I know it’s not easily fixable, I have a workaround. This is not a tech support thread.

I don’t need information from users more savvy than me, I need the bad sound firmware they’re loading in lieu of specific support for my audio card to be fixed, or even better, replaced by actual specifically supported firmware so my card works. In the meantime, crappy on-board audio and wasting money on hardware I’m not using it is.

You would friggin’ think.

And yet.

Turns out a DAC is a fairly complicated and self-sufficient bundle of software and hardcore electrical circuitry, so apparently you can mess it up so badly it will remain broken across soft reboots. Who knew!