In terms of design, I find Lemmy to be basically a 1:1 replacement for Reddit. It’s a link aggregator with communities, comments, and voting.

I like it a lot, even though the communities are smaller and there’s less content. It’s just a nicer communal experience for me compared to Reddit. I feel more pressure to actually comment since the communities are smaller and every little bit helps, lol.

As others have pointed out, there’s a lot to hate about ads since the industry is routinely dishonest, insulting, obnoxious, deceptive, intrusive, and all manner of unpleasant. I’ve been adblocking religiously for most of my life for these reasons.

So I think a more interesting question might be the other way around: “What do you like about commercials?”

The only commercials I’ve ever liked are the ones for local small businesses. The ones with a nonexistent production budget that aren’t beating the viewer over the head with blatant lies or dishonest sales tactics.

Adult Swim used to have faux-ad bumpers for the fictional business “Strickland Propane” from King of the Hill, featuring the honest-to-a-fault character Hank Hill as the spokesman, which I felt captured that vibe well.

Rhett and Link also made a funny homage to these kinds of commercials in this classic skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs

and connect to it with an iPad that has a Jellyfin client installed?

In my experience, you don’t even need the dedicated Jellyfin client. Just opening it up in a web browser works out of the box, so that’s potentially one less thing to download/install/manage for the clients.

That said, I’ve never tried to access Jellyfin from an iPad/iPhone/Mac so it might not be as seamless as my experiences on Android/Linux based devices. But I imagine they’d be fine; just test it out before you hit the road.

Gotcha. You mentioned you put the PC into Recovery Mode and tried to reinstall Windows, but it didn’t work. What happened that prevented the re-installation of Windows? Did the PC just shutdown during installation, or were you wholly unable to get the Windows installer to run?

If you’re still able to boot into Recovery Mode/Safe Mode, try opening up a Command Prompt and running the SFC Scan and DISM commands outlined here: https://www.howtogeek.com/222532/how-to-repair-corrupted-windows-system-files-with-the-sfc-and-dism-commands/

Could Linux save my laptop?

Depends on the root cause of the BSoD. If it’s a hardware issue, then no, installing Linux won’t fix an underlying hardware issue. What does the BSoD screen actually say? Any specific error code?

My understanding is that Linux is a kind of system that you download the components to a USB or what not and then install it on your machine. Is that something I could do in this case?

Yep, you could do that, but you’ll need a functioning PC to create a USB installer for the Linux OS of your choice. You’ll need a blank USB drive and some software to “flash” the Linux OS installer to the USB drive. e.g.: https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/burn.html

That sucks man. You went the extra mile to be a good host, so you should be proud of that, regardless!

Well, that was fast, lol.

Thanks!

We need @SorteKanin@feddit.dk to dive in and tell us how these numbers work!

I don’t think Reddit-for-nerds (Lemmy) is that great of a place to ask this.

Ouch

Ah, darn. Unfortunately I have no additional help to offer since that particular issue was fixed for me after changing those options in Flatseal.

I’d try running Firefox from the terminal to see what error message you’re receiving when the crashes occur; the unique error message was what led me to this workaround when I was originally troubleshooting.

In Bazzite, you should just need to open the Discover package manager and click “Refresh” and then “Update All” in the top right. Although these drivers don’t appear to be available through the package manager yet; mine is still on version 560.31.02.

If your Firefox crashes are anything like mine were, it should be solved by opening up Flatseal and disabling Wayland rendering for Firefox. See the screenshot shown here: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/nvidia-555-drivers-incoming-important-information/2554

When I first installed Bazzite on my Intel+Nvidia laptop, the Firefox crashes were constant. The workaround here fixed the issue for me.

I’ve had this same experience on Linux Mint. I’ll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won’t load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.

I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I’m like, “Dangit, didn’t realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox.”

I happened across a thread on Lemmy recently that discussed the usefulness of certain extensions, and this “Don’t Bother” section of the Arkenfox wiki was linked:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother

A lot of conventionally useful extensions like Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, Decentraleyes/LocalCDN, etc are apparently not necessary (at least in Firefox) if you have certain browser preferences selected, like Strict Mode/Total Cookie Protection.

I felt outdated cause I still run Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes in my Firefox environments, but it was nice to see that a lot of these “extra” features that used to require extensions are now options built into the browser (or Firefox, at least).

let’s be real, youtube is a big waste of time

I see people say this a lot, especially on the fediverse, and it makes me wonder why people think youtube is a “waste of time” when youtube’s uses are what the user makes of it.

I primarily use youtube for learning things. There are so many thousands of hours of useful, educational content on youtube that I find the suggestion that the entire platform is useless clickbait to be reductive and disingenuous.

Sure, there are channels I watch for typical mind-numbing content like Let’s Plays and such, but I wouldn’t suggest that youtube is wholly a waste of time just because there’s plenty of mindless content on it.

Just like Reddit or Lemmy, I can create an account and subscribe to a bunch of dumb shitposting communities, but I can also subscribe to a bunch of interesting hobbyist/intrigue communities.

I’m no legal expert; I assume support can be either offered or completely avoided depending on the shop owner’s preference. Most Linux distributions come with a “this software is free (as in freedom) and comes with no warranty or guaranteed functionality” disclaimer.

If I wanted to engage more with my clients and build more trust, I might offer some degree of troubleshooting/support for the Linux machines I sold. But I don’t think I’d be under any legal obligation to offer that service just for selling the laptops.

Whether or not the computer shop offers support might affect whether or not a customer wants to shop at my store. Maybe I can sell my laptops cheaper if I don’t offer support, or maybe my laptops cost a bit more because I do offer aftermarket support.

how can Linux be a moderated product to sell for desktop

It kinda depends on each individuals’ use case; there’s lots of different Linux distributions that are better (or worse) for specific workloads.

Any given laptop I’m staring at in a store will probably work perfectly fine as a general-use machine with Linux Mint installed. This is my go-to distro when repurposing a machine because it works great out of the box. If I were running a computer store and wanted to sell consumer laptops with Linux on them, I’d default to Mint.

If someone is looking to turn their PC into something more specialized for gaming, they can look at something like Bazzite or Batocera. These will generally require some tinkering.

If an individual or company is looking to build an office with many workstations and user accounts, they might consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux so they can benefit from official support channels if something needs troubleshooting. Many computer labs at NCSU used RHEL when I attended many years ago.

Want a stable server environment? Debian is a standard pick.

Want a barebones system with no bells and whistles (but great battery life)? Alpine oughta work.

So Linux has many options for end users to pick from, which can be seen as a good thing (more options is generally good), but also a bad thing (many end users might consider the plethora of options to be overwhelming if they’ve never used Linux before).

Linux (or is called unix?)

Linux (Or GNU/Linux) operating systems are a modern implementation of an old research OS that was called “Unix”. Spiritual successors to Unix like Linux and BSD try to bring a lot of the design philosophies of Unix into modern OSes (I believe this is generally called the “POSIX” standard. e.g.: macOS is a POSIX compliant OS, iirc).

If I’ve gotten any of this information incorrect, please don’t tell Richard Stallman.

Lots of people work on weekends.

lol, I feel you there. I got a ruggedized, waterproof USB stick about 6 years ago to keep on my keychain and I’ve used it maybe three times ever. Though I’ve also been working from home for the last 4+ years so, y’know, less opportunities to use it in general.

Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, though.