Portugal., heck yeah!

I got Boulder, CO for Foxygen, Broken Bells, and Blind Pilot.

Aw, I thought this was about actual Mastodons.

Actually, your response is a dumb take, and I don’t know why you’re acting so offended about facts–lol. Let’s just look at your comments one by one:

Higher demand makes energy exploitation cleaner? Is that way oil and gas and strip mining is so clean nowadays? Lol.

Yes, batteries are expensive. Higher demand does drive more production, but lowered price of goods is only a textbook theory nowadays. Or is that why food has gotten so cheap lately? Is that why vehicles are so cheap post-COVID, because demand is so high? Lol.

I’ll be waiting for your miracle battery, but it’s still a leap away–we’re not going to see exponential gains in battery capacity like we saw with computer processors. We literally cannot cover “75% of transportation emissions” because less than 60% of transportation emissions are derived from light road vehicles, most of them being trucks and SUVs: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-06/420f23016.pdf Sure, we can see that 58% shrink, but it’ll be picked up in part by electrical generation and industry with more frequent vehicle replacements. But the corporations will be happy with your purchase. Lol.

People paying for luxury goods isn’t what made cars take off back in the day. It was Henry Ford demanding his company produce a car that anyone could afford. As long as people keep buying expensive luxury EVs, they will always be out of reach of the regular person. You’ve been brainwashed. Lol.

Besides–I’m not against electric transportation. Bring on the electric powered buses and trains. Instead of morally pressuring people to make expensive purchases, why don’t you lobby your government to invest in city infrastructure and design to reduce the need for personal transportation in the first place?

Now are you going to stop acting so upset now that I’ve set you straight, or are you going to come back with another unwarranted, unnecessarily snarky remark?

I’m not against change, and I encourage it. But We also can’t put all of our eggs in one basket. I am glad people are buying EVs, but we can’t let a market for an inherently disposable item dominate over another option (ICE vehicles) that will outlast an EV a substantial proportion of the time. The automotive producers are licking their lips at the thought of getting us all into vehicles that will be be effectively unusable in 10 or 15 years–batteries age with use and also time, unlike steel and aluminum.

I am an environmental engineer and I have worked on remediation projects for oil and gas, as well as other types of natural resource exploitation such as mines. The damage caused by mining metals from the ground is extreme, and it will last decades, if not forever. “Centralizing” pollution isn’t a good thing–we’re best off distributing our pollution so that the Earth can have a fighting chance of repairing it piece by piece, which may never happen in areas that have undergone certain types of mining and other industry. Look at an old oil and gas site, and you would never even know it was there after 10 or 50 years. CO2 is a problem, for sure, and so is methane, but methane degrades in the atmosphere after just over a decade. Mining causes damage to the air, ground water and surface water, and to the nearby wildlife. Look up Tar Creek in Oklahoma, the Questa Moly Mine in New Mexico, and do you remember what happened in Colorado when the EPA accidentally released an entire mine full of acid drainage into the nearby river? Nothing but dead marine life for miles and miles. Mines take some of our most beautiful natural areas and destroy them.

If you think modern mines are going to circumvent all of these issues, they aren’t. They’re going to have accidents and cause damage just the same as the fossil fuel industry–some ways, even worse.

People already have ICE vehicles, and they’re going to last for decades to come. I have a diesel Mercedes from 1980 that still runs and works just fine. No battery is going to last 40+ years, and the move to battery powered vehicles is unwittingly entering us all into a “subscription” based transportation society, much like literally every other device in the world that takes a battery. Oil and gas emissions aren’t ideal, but neither are the environmental issues that originate from mining. Mining causes massive amounts of environmental damage to wildlife and the surrounding natural ecosystem, watersheds, and has its own brand of air pollution. Read up on the Questa moly mine is Northern New Mexico if you wish. We’re talking rivers that turn blue, depleted salmon populations, -permanent- groundwater contamination, acid ponds, and heavy metal dusts blowing into nearby towns and exposing people to lead, uranium, and cadmium, among whatever else. Why are people so eager to attack oil “barons” nowadays when the health, tech, and banking industries are bleeding us dry at every corner? At least we’ve got remote work options nowadays–can you say the same for your home loan?

This sums it up pretty well. Battery powered EVs are still a luxury item both financially AND in terms of lifestyle. Most people don’t have the finances or the ability to accommodate one, and I think the people who own them forget that as they spout tone deaf positivity about the virtues of owning an electric vehicle. But tbh, I am not even sure what maintenance you’re talking about that’s such a big deal. You’ve still got tires, brakes, suspension, and steering components to worry about. All that’s missing over the typical <100k mile life of a vehicle are fluid changes every now and then. My understanding is that if you own a Honda, you can do basically nothing but oil changes and tire/brake maintenance and the car will still last forever lol.

Why is everybody so erect for EVs? They save you gas and some maintenance, but that’s about it. They increase tire wear for sure, and weigh a heck of a lot more which wears the roads down quicker (roads wear with the cube of weight). They use less gasoline at the expanse of the poor third-world countries which front the environmental cost of mining and battery production, not to mention their archaic worker’s rights.

In 20 years, we’ll realize that EVs were probably about as bad as gasoline vehicles–what we should be focusing on is public transportation and updated city design to reduce our need to travel in the first place.

Sure, a split of electric and gasoline vehicles is beneficial, but they’re not the environmental panacea they’re being pushed as. So please keep the whole picture in mind when you’re telling people to suffer and sacrifice to give up a cheap, convenient gasoline vehicle.

It’s not free. They take your data while alsp giving you ads. A quick Google suggests they have about 280 billion in annual revenue. Which part of that is free?

Could you explain what you mean by that comment?

It feels like a culture war between corporations and the OG user base. They reeled us in and monopolized the market with the idea of “free”. Now that competitors are few and far between, they want to change the game and reel in literal billions. I have absolutely no sympathy for their “lost profits”. They are making enough as-is, and I have no problems saying that out loud.

I’m in the same boat here. I used to be cool watching the ads, but then they just got ridiculous. If I’m forced to watch ads, I’ll just do something else. I can reserve YouTube for only necessary viewing like DIYs that will save me money. I can skip the “entertainment” style videos which are 95% of my viewing and do literally anything else with my time lol.

From my understanding, there’s definitely driver support all the way around. I have a 1070 in my laptop, so it’s old enough that everything is probably about as developed and compatible as it can be. Theres an open source driver available, but most people say to simply stick with the proprietary Nvidia one, which is what I’ve done. The OS/driver manager should pick out the most stable and best tested release version for your system. I would guess all the distros can use the Nvidia drivers just fine, it’s just a matter of getting it installed one way or another, if the distro doesn’t have a driver manager. I’m just the newbie, so, I don’t have a lot of experience.

It’s kinda like installing windows, but the process is way faster during the actual install, and the initial setup. The OS is much smaller and took maybe 20 minutes to install after I got my partitions set up properly. After Linux is booted up, every program I needed to get going was easily located in the built in software package downloader. I didn’t have to go to NVIDIA’s website to download drivers because they were already accessible from the built-in driver manager. Telegram, Steam, and whatever popular software you want is just a quick search away and a button click from being installed as a flatpak application. Firefox was already installed. It didn’t ask me to log in to a Microsoft account before I could move on to using my computer.

I don’t have numbers, but I’ve seen comments/reviews that suggest they’re all within a percent or two in terms of frame rate. Like, how much thought should someone put in to getting 101 fps instead of 100 fps, you know? After using Mint for a bit, I’m probably going to stick with this for a year or two before trying out other distros, if I even feel the need. I think there is also value in giving a couple of them a try as you learn more.

What would make Nobara better for gaming than Mint? All of my Steam games have worked fine. Do the things you’re talking about matter for games that are not in Steam/Proton? Just wondering!

Mmhmm. I’ve started doing this and it does work fine. I think I saw a comment once that noted they compile faster in-game anyways. So that makes me feel better about skipping lol

I am new to Linux and never used it regularly before a couple months ago, but I’d recommend just going with Linux Mint to start off. I don’t know much about Arch, but from all the jokes I see on Lemmy, I get the impression it may be a more advanced distro for people who know what they’re doing? I wanted to try PopOS! because people said it was good for gaming, but the install wasn’t as streamlined for a dual boot Windows/Linux setup.

Linux Mint just kind of works and installed super fast. And my Windows partition is still intact and functional (but I’m wondering if I even need it tbh). My only holdup is Microsoft Office. I still haven’t tried to get that working inside of Linux, but if it’s possible, then I will certainly delete my Windows install.

But anyways, don’t over think it. Just do Linux Mint and then after a while, you’ll be able to understand why or if you should consider another distro I would guess!

I play mosty either indy games or just older games on an older gaming laptop (geforce 1070m based HP Omen) and Steam/Linux Mint work pretty great. Outer Wilds works even better in Linux now that I’ve begun using CoreCtrl to disable CPU power throttling. Otherwise, it runs about like it did on Windows. The MCC runs flawlessly. Recently purchased No Man’s Sky and it runs pretty well and is actually incredibly smooth–no idea how that one runs in Windows because I’ve been just using Linux full-time for maybe two months now.

There is some weirdness like having to process Vulcan Shades before games boot up which can be annoying, but it hasn’t discouraged me yet. You can also skip that and the only difference is there might be a bit of stuttering for the first bit of game play. After going back to Windows to compare performance, I think it does this stuttering thing anyways?

Man, I feel like that used to be true–maybe. I feel like the bags are only 1/4 to 1/3 full now. And the chips are still mostly crushed. I feel ripped off even buying chips, so I’m trying to stop entirely. Win?