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

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.

I have one that was proven false, and then later re-proven true: the existence of the brontosaurus.

When I was in elementary school, we were taught that they existed, they were big, etc. Then, at some point while I was in college, I discovered that actually what we thought was a brontosaur was a brachiosaur or an apatosaur. And then, when my kids went to school and learned about the brontosaur, I discovered that actually, they did exist!

I also just jumped onto Linux gaming on Mint. Mine is a slightly underpowered laptop, but so far it can run everything in my Steam library (which is a bit dated at this point) with no problem at all.

I’m aware of the feature, it’s been around since before I left. I’m saying that it looks functionally like they coded it to be nothing more than a subreddit named for you, in which you’re the only one allowed to post. They may have put some sort of flashy nonsense over the top of it, but that’s pretty much what it is.

This is actually a feature in Reddit for those unaware.

It looks to me like that’s functionally just posting in a subreddit created with your name, in which you’re the only one allowed to post. So creating a community on Lemmy with your name and you as the only authorized poster would serve the same function.

Yeah that outer edge is called the firmament.

I mean, it’s not the worst name for the CMB.

Looks like “not exactly,” but it’s cool nonetheless:

https://davidbowles.medium.com/pre-invasion-nahuas-and-the-gulf-of-mexico-22f30c515724

Removed by mod

College bros would compete to swallow the roughest and sharpest ones. There would be a Silicon Valley startup trying to “disrupt” gastroliths with a “smart stomach stone” that gathered data about what you’re eating and sold it to McDonald’s and Kroger. Couples who were really serious would prove it by regurgitating and swapping stones. The “raw gut” movement would be trying to convince people that they didn’t need gastroliths, they just needed to eat softer foods.

Oh, interesting! I stand corrected.

“Can I borrow that VHS?”

20 years ago it would have been DVDs. But even before that, we didn’t call them "VHS"es. We called them tapes, or video tapes if we wanted to distinguish from audio tapes.

True. But that doesn’t excuse someone’s decisions when they are presented with the consequences of their actions. Even if it doesn’t affect anyone you know, you can still make moral decisions about how to treat them.

No, I believe it. The problem with capitalists isn’t that they have no empathy; most of them do. They just define very narrowly who that empathy applies to, and mostly that narrow line is drawn right around their immediate vicinity. He was probably great to those in his orbit. He just didn’t see his customers as human.

Ha…ha?

Which is why I said “supposed to,” not “in actuality.”

The people didn’t hold President Yoon accountable. Parliament did.

How do you think representative government is supposed to work?

I’m not so sure.

Let’s compare with the Apollo Command Module heat shield, a remarkably close analogue for the bore cap. They’re a similar weight (3,000 lb for the heat shield, 2,000 lb for the bore cap) and have melting points within an order of magnitude of each other (5,000°F for the AVCOAT heat shield and about 2,800°F for the iron bore cap). They’re even both of a similar shape and aerodynamic profile (disc-shaped and blunt). Both had to travel 62 miles (the distance from sea level to the Karman Line, where atmosphere becomes negligible).

The Apollo CM made that distance in about seven minutes; at 130,000mph, the Pascal B bore cap took at most 1.72 seconds to make the trip.

What was discovered during the development of the Apollo heat shield is that the blunt shape caused a layer of air to build up in front of the spacecraft, which reduced the amount of heating that convected into the heat shield directly. This reduced the amount of heat load that the heat shield needed to bear up under.

Further, it’s also worth noting that the Apollo command modules weren’t tumbling, which the bore cap likely would have been, allowing brief instants during its ascent for the metal to cool before being subjected again to the heat of the ascent.

But probably most critical at all is the remarkably brief amount of time that the bore cap spent in atmosphere. This person did the math on how much power it would take to vaporize a cubic meter of iron, and the answer is 25,895,319 kJ. Now, the bore cap isn’t quite a cubic meter, but we can use all of his calculations and just swap in 907kg (2000lbs):

• To heat the bore cap to iron’s melting point: 0.46 kJ/kg * 907 kg * (1808K-298K) = 630,002 kJ

• To phase change the iron from solid to liquid: 69.1 KJ/kg * 907 kg = 62,674 kJ

• To heat the bore cap to iron’s boiling point: 0.82 kJ/kg * 907 kg * (3023K-1808K) = 903,644 kJ

• To phase change the iron from liquid to gas: 1520 kJ/kg * 907 kg = 1,378,649 kJ

So, in total, 2,974,969 kJ. The Apollo heat shield encountered a peak of 11,000 kJ/m^2/s. Since the Pascal B bore cap was about a meter in diameter and was traveling through the atmosphere for about two seconds, we can very neatly estimate that it absorbed a maximum of 22,000 kJ due to atmospheric compression–not even close to enough to get it to melting temperature.

Interestingly, early missiles actually did use solid metal heat shields; not iron, but titanium, beryllium, and copper. They were effective, but abandoned due to their weight.

🎵 And no one’s gonna bend or break me 🎵

Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. You’re probably right.

Even if it’s a dozen companies making cases for every type of museum, zoo, and aquarium, it’s probably going to be a little bit like Chromebooks where the vast majority of different options are going to look the same unless you stare at them right next to one another or are in the industry. Most industrial design ends up pretty samey because that’s what people expect.