Computer engineer here (well I have a computer engineering degree and have worked on several computer engineering projects at least). The only point of fucking with an i486 in 2025 for reasons besides “vintage computing” or playing MS-DOS games is that it’s probably the most powerful cpu that can still run on a cheap 4 layer circuit board. This cpu is also simple enough that a i486 chipset can be DIY’ed without ball grid array components. Electronic devices with 4 layer circuit boards are less susceptible to getting ruined by tariffs because they can be manufactured for a reasonable price in places besides just China. Ball grid array components require specialized equipment in order to put them on circuit boards. The easier surface mount (quad flat package) chips required to build a viable and performant i486 motherboard are simple enough that all you need is a cheap soldering iron and a steady hand to solder them onto a circuit board.

What I’m getting at is that prior to them dropping i486 support in Linux, it was possible to use cheapo microchips from Mouser, connect them to i486 cpu and singlehandedly DIY a modern-Linux capable computer, in theory at least.

With Linux dropping support for i486, the bar is now much higher. It’s still possible to completely DIY an ever more powerful, non-i486 based Linux-capable computer yourself if you REALLY know what you’re doing (and people HAVE done it).

I wanted to build one just for fun and maybe to use it like super high performance arduino but now there’s a lot less of a point so meh.

I don’t know, but I know of one thing citizens SHOULDN’T do to prevent their country enabling genocide. That is forfeiting their future by electing a dictator that might genocide poor people on the other side of the world a little less in exchange for giving up freedoms. I get it. Voluntarily making our lives worse/harder because it might help poor people in another country sounds like a grand and noble thing to do. But now they’re sending American citizens to concentration camps. If you think this was a fair trade, just block me right now. Don’t be like gen Z and swing voters in the 2024 US election. Sometimes you just have to choose to save yourself first.

I mean, his enablers are just as guilty. The entire christofascist movement would have had a hard time getting anywhere if it weren’t for a few key corporations providing the services and technological development required to enforce or at least facilitate the enforcement of this ideology. I am being intentionally vague here.

All I know is that I go out of my way to discriminate against and fuck over people who support things that fuck me over.

Try not to cum challenge (impossible)

LXDE sucks ass because no one has ever figured out how to mod a search bar into the start menu.

please for the love of fuck can someone please mod a search bar into LXDE.

technically, the command line on modern computers runs in graphics mode and not text mode anyway. It ends up being more efficient to do this because of fonts and font sizes and multiple colors and whatnot. It’s been like this for at least the past 20 years. So the ctrl+alt+f1 screen is still a gui.

I would say yes. Personally it is kind of against everything I stand for to pay a corporation for ai. With that being said: the only reason I personally have not yet set up a completely ai-driven self-hosted lan forum or lemmy instance meant to simulate the Old Skool ™ days of the internet is because a) none of the forum software has an api that’s worth a damn (phpbb for example. gnusocial is also lame and stupid and impossible to work with) and b) lemmy instances are actually pretty difficult to both set up and get ai bots to operate with.

I could definitely hack up some diy python-bottles or django thingy in less effort than it would take to actually pull off any of those other approaches but I currently have marginally better things to do with my free time so it will have to wait.

If I ever finish the mountain of “more important” personal projects I have then I probably would eventually get a completely fake self-hosted self-made ai social media hackfuck.

You’d have to be a fucking idiot to support Trump while being PUBLICLY known as someone that uses marijuana. Once The Party has all the transgenders either killed or in concentration camps, marijuana users will likely be next. This isn’t just stupid this is advanced stupid.

I think it only works if you’re either an absolute KDE config file genius hacker or your distro’s repository has actually good default configs and setup. Installing KDE on arch always works well for me but every time I’ve tried it on Ubuntu I just get an unusable mess. One time I had it such that I had to retype my password all the fucking time to “unlock the keychain” and then the stupid update window would ALWAYS show up during the worst possible time with impeccable timing.

A long time ago I needed to install a program. It needed snap I think. Well I googled and googled and googled and I couldn’t just type “sudo apt install snap” for some reason. But there was a way to get snap if you had flatpak. I didn’t have flatpak So I googled and googled and googled some more and I couldn’t find a way to install flatpak that didn’t involve already having snap first.

So then I never fucked with flatpak or snap ever again except for that one time I installed gzdoom in flatpak and it actually worked for some reason, the end.

idk about 2025 but as of a few years ago, Slackware used to not have a dependency resolver in whatever it uses to download packages. You had to resolve dependencies manually.

Luckily I switched to Gentoo and 3 years later after my system was done compiling, it was already out of date so when I used emerge to update my system, it borked itself because it was so out of date.

ACKTUALLY they’re on the verge of dropping i486 support. Fucking bullshit if you ask me. Now they expect us to upgrade our computers more often than once every 40 years? Homebrewers ARE JUST NOW figuring out how to diy i486 motherboard chipsets.

Next thing you know we’ll need a 3090ti just to boot into Grub.

obligatory LXDE is actually also really good but you know what would make it 10000000000000000000000000000 times better? If there was a Windows 7-esque search bar on the start menu so you could search instead of painstakingly browse through all the stupid icons like its Windows 95.

I always post a comment like this in discussions about desktop environments in the off chance someone found a way to mod a search into LXDE’s start menu.

I hate Gnome because it doesn’t give you taskbar boxes to show all the open windows. There is a extension for this but it’s almost always out of date. How the fuck is anyone expected to get any work done like that? Pressing the “windows” key to show that tile view is a thing but I want to see what all is open without pressing a button first. It’s fine for watching youtube or playing games. And the ui looks really cool if you’re high off your ass, but that’s it.

Dolphin is the worst file manager, mostly because of how it doesn’t give you a file copy window but also because it’s just a shittier version of Nemo. Nemo is superior except that most of the time you can’t drag and drop files from a zip folder window into Nemo but only if you’re using KDE. Cinnamon is pretty much the only other DE I can stand and Nemo lets you drag and from from zip files all the time on Cinnamon but it’s otherwise worse than KDE.

Gnome is better than KDE wow what a typo. KDE is better than Gnome. With that being said, the dolphin file manager sucks ASS. The Nemo file manager is superior, except depending on which way the wind was blowing while you installed your distro, you have a 50/50 chance of being able to drag and drop the contents of zip folders into Nemo when running KDE. Dolphin always works when you do this on KDE but that’s Dolphin’s only positive aspect. The ui and button placement is worse, there’s no file copy progress bar window and the file transfer notification it does have is awful.

Cinnamon works with Nemo and zip file drag-dropping works all the time, but then you’re using a 10% shittier DE just to be able to drag and drop. Cinnamon doesn’t fully support wayland yet and its beta wayland support is terrible and slow so it’s a pretty bad one to be using right now.

I wish there was a fix. I would suck dick for fix to the “you can’t drag and drop the contents of zip files into Nemo on KDE except for if you got randomly lucky when installing the distro in the beginning” bug.

In the US it’s almost possible for 1 person to fully support themselves working 2 entry-level jobs at 40hours a week each, at least in places with lower costs of living. People act like doing full time college while working a full time job is normal and if you can’t make it work you’re a loser. A good portion of people get “really good” jobs where it’s possible to sustain yourself on 1 salary but it’s almost harder to get those jobs than it is to win the lottery and even harder to KEEP them. Many of them end up being a 70+hour a week gig anyway and once the bosses start demanding even more from you it’s all over. I have 2 degrees even. Corporations have destroyed our society.

Christianity has done more harm to modern society than drugs ever could

The average Trump supporter basically does think you can self finance your way out of this: Electricity and a/c isn’t a necessity for living and people lived without that stuff 100 years ago. Internet isn’t a necessity and neither is having a cell phone. Owning a vehicle isn’t a necessity, simply walk or add 3+ hours a day you don’t have to your commute waiting on public transportation. The average person is always fighting weight gain, so cut food costs with controlled starvation rationing. Deodorant, toilet paper and hygiene isn’t a necessity either. Needless to say no one deserves to be happy and you should be spending no money on video games, eating out, or anything fun. But spend money on dating and having kids because our society definitely deserves you give them more workers. Also, privacy isn’t a necessity too so if you aren’t sharing a studio apartment with 4 other people you have nothing to complain about. If this is an issue than you should have chosen to get lucky and be rich, maybe pray about it too because God knows best.

This is unironically my boomer evangelical mother’s opinion.

please no. If we elect another fascist in the off chance it might help Gaza i’m going to go fucking postal.