"Yet throughout this period, the actual share of electricity use accounted for by the IT sector has hovered between 1 and 2 per cent, accounting for less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions."
> If I'm writing a document for human consumption then why would I expect the dates to be sortable by a naive string sorting algorithm?
If you're naming a document for human consumption, having the files sorted by date easily without relying on modification date (which is changed by fixing a typo/etc...) is pretty neat
My experience among HN, and nerds in general is that it is common to find people who like to take a 'neutral' stance in a debate, verging on being the devil's advocate, and trying to find the good on both sides.
I think it comes both from a love of rhetoric and from a point of view that being a contrarian can make you appear smarter, or more interesting.
I know I've been guilty of such behavior.
I did not follow the Roe vs Wade thread specifically, so my view may be out of touch, but from what you describe it seems to be closer to this kind of behavior rather than actual conservatism
I understand your frustration, but to me the 'any updates' is a signal that someone actually cares and is impacted by an issue, which can help for prioritization when the backlog is long.
There are ways to do it properly of course, and I understand that this kind of pings can be annoying, but people usually have no ill intention/expectations. Take it as a lame way to put a +1 on an issue
Good thing it's the third paragraph of the link provided then.
> Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not.
> Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!
Syncthing is a great tool : I've been using it for years for backups, picture synchronization between phone and computer, and as a way to share a KeePass DB.
In all those years, not a single issue arise : you connect a device, decide what to share or not, and then just forget about it
I think the point about root is not so much about whether Xorg is run as root, but rather that any application can then elevate itself as root by listening to the key events to catch your password (for example when unlocking your screen) and then sudo with it.
I agree with your statement that a desktop should Just Work, and the Linux desktop experience is not perfect, but you seem to have had a harder experience than most would.
I don't expect you to get back on Linux or anything, but paying for known supported hardware (e.g. Dell XPS 13) goes a long way to have a 'no-tinkering-needed' experience (pretty much like OSX run better on its own hardware).
For the record, HiDPI works flawlessly and responsively with a Dell Precision 5510, including when using projectors with different resolutions. Never had an issue with my Bluetooth headphones, and the system does include a braindead, just-works backup-and-restore system : deja-dup, which works with Google Drive out of the box after inputing your credentials.
Applications that don't have a Linux version can be a pain, but most have perfectly good alternative (Google Docs, Flux, Zeal for Dash).
Some of them don't really, or require a big change (typically, Photoshop/Gimp), and those can indeed require one to stay on a specific OS
I looked for evidence for your claim as in my mind, energy consumption for the ad industry would not be that impressive.
I found a paper written in 2010 for the Netherlands [1], claiming that :
"Thus, web advertisements increase
the total energy consumption of PCs by 3.4%."
That's not counting the cost of running the infrastructure, and I suspect ads and tracking probably did not evolve in the right (i.e. less energy hungry) way in the last 9 years.
As for the current consumption of power by 'client devices', it is estimated to consume 5% of total world electricity [2]
I could not find any number on the energy consumption on the other side, i.e. servers/infras.
As a (very) rough estimation, without taking into account the 'server' side of ads, we can estimate the energy cost of ads to represent ~0.17% of total energy produced in a year.
In the end, I stand corrected : the amount of energy consumed is far from negligible at that scale. However, while it is definitely not negligible on absolute terms, I think there are lower hanging fruits to focus on to fight global warming, such as reliance on fossil fuels, common use of products made on the other side of the world, meat consumption...