The maintainer’s claim is that it was a small hobby project at the time. If their security record since gaining more users is acceptable, we probably shouldn’t rake them over the coals for leaving an unsafe debugging option turned on at an early stage.

I see where you’re coming from now. In most English-speaking cultures, it is not conventional to use hand gestures as a substitute for spoken words in a conversation. Breaking social conventions for no apparent reason is at least potentially rude.

You’re translating those conventions directly to chat. Chat is not spoken word, and it is conventional to use emojis, at least the really unambiguous ones, instead of typed words in chat some of the time. People do not usually do this with any rude or insulting intent.

It depends on what it’s in response to.

Dinner at 6 at Greasy Spoon?
👍 

Entirely reasonable.

Should we do the project in COBOL?
👍 

Entirely unreasonable, but not rude.

My cat just died.
👍 

Rude.

Kind of defeats the purpose

That’s why the why matters. Some people might just not trust Windows to keep private data secure, but be comfortable running certain software on it in a VM, possibly a VM that isn’t usually allowed network access.

If you’re sufficiently motivated to get off Windows to invest time learning different workflows, there certainly are options. It sounds like you’ve tried some for image processing and found gaps. People might be able to help fill them if you go into detail about your current workflow, but there is no 1:1 replacement for Photoshop on any platform. If you’re a heavy Photoshop user, there may be no path to happiness for you.

There’s surely a 1:1 replacement for Visual Studio outside of Windows-specific development (which wouldn’t make much sense to attempt on Linux anyway).

I really want this to work out.

Why?

I don’t ask that to talk you out of it. I like desktop Linux. I’m typing this on desktop Linux. I’ve been using desktop Linux for most of my adult life. I ask because your reasons will inform the advice people can give you.

I do a lot of .NET programming and photo editing [with Windows-specific proprietary software]

There isn’t necessarily a good solution to this. Those are large, complicated programs with very deep workflows that are almost certainly going to be dissimilar in any substitute software, which is itself going to be large and complicated with its own ways of doing things. Using those specific programs may be more important to you than what OS you run them on.

It looks like Photoshop is probably usable with Wine, while Visual Studio isn’t. Using Wine means putting up with occasional instability and reduced performance. If you spend a lot of time in Photoshop, this may not be for you.

Another option is to run Windows in a VM for those apps. This will likely work smoothly with regard to the apps themselves, and generally performs near native, but does mean a less polished interaction with the rest of your desktop.

If you’re patient and want to gain a deeper understanding, try Arch itself rather than an Arch-based distribution that’s easy to install.

You’ll spend a long time on the initial installation and setup and you’ll read a lot of documentation in the process. When you have a usable system, you’ll understand what’s installed, how it’s configured, and why. Expect to spend a couple days just to get it usable though - this approach isn’t for everyone.

The Arch docs are top tier, but they’re not necessarily step by step guides because there’s more than one way you might choose to set things up. The docs tell you how the pieces can fit together, but it’s ultimately up to you to to do the assembly.

It makes my phone just as secure or insecure as my PC. I’m good with that.

If I was at higher risk of being directly targeted for attacks, I’d probably rethink that.

I insist on having root on principle; if I don’t, the device isn’t really mine.

In a practical sense though, ACCA is probably my biggest use case for it. I could work around most everything else.

Thanks for your lists. It’s hard to find mobile games that offer fun and a fair deal.

See also https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/

Many of these are paid, but they’re one-time payments and usually a reasonable price.

The article only tests whether the batteries get hot. High electrical loads, both charge and discharge can also degrade batteries directly.

I’ve been setting limits with ACCA for years on my Pixel 4A because its battery is difficult to replace. I didn’t expect to keep it for five years, but there isn’t a new phone I would like better.

My standard limit is 60% charge and 500mA charge rate. Sometimes I increase the limit to 80% or the charge rate to 1000mA for convenience. I rarely allow 100% or the full 3000mA charge rate, and it’s set to pause charging in response to temperature.

Who had concentration camps on their 2025 bingo card?

It’s OK not to know what you want. It’s especially OK when you’re 18 and in high school. It’s OK to choose an option now and change your mind later (though if you choose no, she probably won’t be available to you later if you change your mind).

It’s even OK to tell her that you don’t want to talk about your relationship, but she’s probably going to take that as you not wanting to be in a relationship with her. If you don’t want her to take it that way, then you need to talk with her about your relationship even if the thing you have to say is you’re unsure. Of course there’s a good chance she’ll respond unfavorably to your uncertainty; most people don’t like being a second choice or a backup plan.

I’m seeing a little of what I’d describe as toxic monogamy in this question. That’s not to imply a monogamous relationship isn’t right for you; it’s what most people want, so just statistically, it’s probably what you and your girlfriend want.

What I mean by toxic is that the belief that it’s unacceptable to be friends with an ex or that you can’t be in a relationship if your feelings for a former partner aren’t completely gone can poison relationships. People are usually more complicated than that, and while both of those things sometimes lead to problems, they don’t have to. Talking to your partner about their feelings surrounding the issue and agreeing on boundaries that are acceptable to both of you will prevent a lot of problems. That brings us to…

she asked me about our relationship and I told her to stop talking about it

I don’t usually like to speak in absolutes when it comes to human interactions because different people are different. I’ll make an exception here though. This was the wrong answer if you want to have a relationship with her.

It’s still the wrong answer, and that’s where you left things. If you don’t want it to end there, your best chance is to tell her you know that was a mistake, apologize, and offer to talk about your relationship as much as she wants to.

With ten finger typing, having the most-used keys on the home row is a significant advantage for speed and ergonomics. With swiping, having a sequence of characters close to each other makes it hard for the algorithm to predict the intended word. With tapping, it’s a disadvantage to have adjacent characters in a sequence on a small touchscreen because it increases the chance of fat-fingering them.

Maybe. I use Dvorak for real keyboards and QWERTY on my phone. I tried Dvorak on my phone and didn’t see any benefit.

Heliboard offers the option. The ideal layout for a small onscreen keyboard may be rather different from one for typing with all your fingers though.

Anything to weaken Trump will help.

Calling your senators and representative to urge them to vote against specific legislation sometimes has some impact. It’s my understanding that phone calls have a bigger impact than emails or letters.

While it’s essential for keeping devices safe, it can sometimes interfere with third-party app installations.

That’s… kind of biased language. I can’t keep my device safe without Google playing sysadmin for me?

I learned about it looking through lists of projects using ActivityPub. Decentralized Reddit seemed like a good idea, so I checked out the dev-operated lemmy.ml and found little other than far-left and CCP-sympathetic politics. There was maybe one other operational server I could find, and it was pretty dead. I stuck it in the back of my mind as something to check out again later to see if things changed.

Reddit pissed a bunch of people off, and I saw that the team behind the generally well-regarded mastodon.world was spinning up a Lemmy server, so I joined it and started participating regularly.