If you’re not actively curating your own choice of reading material and are relying on unknown others to make those choices for you, then you absolutely deserve everything you are “forced” to read.

But even that is far too generous: nobody held a gun to your head loaded with the article you clearly did not read, lol.

Akshara Ashok @happyfluffcomics

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)

Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.

Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.

I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.

I can’t judge you for that, I feel like you probably got the very best Copilot has to offer, lol

With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. [1]

Does anybody actually believe that 68% of consumers use or even want Copilot? But they included a source for this very generous assertion at the bottom of the page:

[1] Based on Microsoft-commissioned online study of U.S. consumers ages 13 years of age or older conducted by Edelman DXI and Assembly, 1,000 participants, July 2025.

Oh yeah, that’s compelling: US consumers, 13 years old and older. An entire thousand of them!

So the only question I have left is which junior high principal Microsoft “compensated” for this survey, and what happened to the 320 summer school attendees who said fuck you, no anyway.

I followed this tutorial on YT after a failed Win11/Linux dual boot that crashed Win11 completely and only booted into Linux, and it worked perfectly.

Essentially, this guy’s strategy is to create a second EFI partition for the new Linux install, remove the boot flag from the original Windows EFI long enough to go through the Linux install, then put the boot flag back where it was and update GRUB accordingly, allowing GRUB to find and note any other operating systems on the disk. After that both Windows and Linux stay in their own walled spaces and Windows never gets to overwrite the Linux EFI, which is the source of all the misery.

There’s more to the detail, of course, but that’s the gist of it. I have dual-booted Linux with this method solely on single partitioned disks, and never on different disks, so I couldn’t tell you whether a separate disk is a guarantee of anything or not, but after I started deliberately creating separate EFI partitions for dual-boot situations I’ve never had a problem.

This video is specifically for Zorin but I’ve used the same strategy successfully on other distros. He has also done specific dual-boot walkthrough videos for a number of other dual-boot installs and troubleshooting as well, so check the channel if you want to find other distros. I did not see Bazzite specifically, but I saw plenty of Fedora. (No affiliation with this channel, I’ve just used a number of his videos and appreciate the specific care and accuracy he gives his tutorials.) Hope this helps.

deleted by creator

Exactly. And for all of this “the exact lesson from apartheid” we’re all supposed to have taken to heart about the uselessness of non-violent protest, remind me again because it’s been some thirty years since I last heard about it . . . where is apartheid now?

I love when these fifth columnists show up to shit on any individual effort toward change, no matter how tiny, and to shower any “I can” idea with contempt, because it tells me who they are, and confirms that my own infinitesimal contribution, in combination with millions of other like contributions, is anything but useless.

Clearly it does matter what we think, very much.

This AI response is weak.

Don’t get too excited: the titles have NOT actually been stripped, he has simply “agreed not to use them.”

From further down the page:

For context: Prince Andrew’s statement earlier said he had taken the decision, with the King’s agreement, to no longer use his titles. Stripping him of his titles would require an act of Parliament - a legal mechanism last used following the First World War.

and further down still:

As a reminder, Prince Andrew has voluntarily decided to stop using his titles. He will remain a prince as it is a title from his birth, as the son of the monarch, with the titles he has since lost only given to him later in life

The nonce formerly known as Duke of York also remains eighth in line to the throne.

I hear ya. I had to get away from MS for the same reason: I can’t have my PCs turned into data collection points for MS to make a withdrawal from whenever they like. But these old MacBooks are fire on Linux.

If you can successfully navigate the average Windows setup and you don’t have any non-standard partitioning needs you’re golden, especially if you start with a beginner-friendly distro like Zorin or Mint, both of which worked perfectly without further configuration on my 2010 MacBooks that have 64-bit Intel processors. You learn as you go along. I watched a lot of install videos too, especially when I knew I was working with distros that I knew were going to ask me for knowledge I do not now have (Arch, btw, and honestly the latest Fedora KDE that was insisting on Btrfs volumes for whatever reason and I was trying to do it without a working mouse, lol).

But that’s the cool thing about live trials: boot off the USB and test drive the OS experience, with no need to install anything at all until you’re certain.

Hit me up if you get stuck and I’ll help however I can. First, though, start with your Mac hardware: figure out what you already have. Then go from there.

As someone running two 2010 MacBooks on Linux, most of it is straightforward but I would add a few notes:

1. It was helpful for me, as someone very familiar with OSes and hardware but NOT Linux, to pull detailed hardware reports off my Macs before I wiped MacOS off all the way, and to have the specs either memorized or within easy reach whenever I started reading the technical stuff, because there’s a good bit of that unless you happen to find a first distro that matches your hardware exactly. Instead, it’s more likely you’ll kiss some frogs before you find The One. Some distros are worth the trouble of making them work, some are not, but either way know your exact specs, especially for your wifi chip, so you can recognize them when you see them mentioned.

2. If you think you may ever run MacOS on them again, for any reason, but do not have another Mac handy, go ahead and make a MacOS bootable install drive now of the latest supported OS and throw it in a drawer. I never thought I would need it, but I did it out of an abundance of precaution and ended up using it multiple times, to my own surprise. But it’s damned difficult to do without another Mac around to create the install media for you, so cover your ass and do it anyway if that MacBook is the last Mac you have.

3. I made a GParted Live USB and it’s become one of the most used USB drives I own. No matter the OS, no matter the fuckery you’ve gotten yourself into (and clearly I have), if you can boot off USB it submits to the magic of GParted. Strong recommend.

4. Know that you cannot use Ventoy on MacBooks. At all. It kept crapping out on me, I spent hours on it, but when I read the forum (and the dev’s comments to others with the same problem) turns out that nope, Ventoy does not work with MacBooks. Don’t waste your time – or do, if your nihilistic enjoyment of futility needs a strenuous workout.

5. If you don’t already have a handful of available USBs, buy a ten (or more) pack of 8GB USB drives somewhere cheap, and just start rolling. They will all get used and reused as you go about trying out various distros and then comparing the ones you liked best, and you will appreciate not having to reformat the same USB every time you want to go to something different.

6. You’ve been told about Live USBs, but the thing with these older MacBooks is that a lot of it’s just a pure crapshoot when it comes to a specific distro making happy times with your specific hardware. Usually it’s the older Broadcom wifi chips, but I’ve had other problems. So when you boot into a live trial, you really want to make sure you’re testing ALL the hardware that matters to you (wifi, Ethernet, sound, mouse, trackpad, display, camera, etc) and not just assuming.

And even then it’s not certain: I just recently put Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my mid-2010 MacBook and it sped through the Live USB trial and even the netinstall process on wifi, but as soon as it was running on the installed OS I had download speeds in the fucking bytes before I understood that the Live USB and the OS were using different Broadcom drivers. I found a guide and it was an easy enough fix, but definitely a pain in the ass. These things happen, so expect them.

7. Linux will recognize memory that MacOS will not, so go ahead and fill your actual motherboard capacity even if Apple says it’s unsupported. Chances are good you’ll want to upgrade other hardware as well; I’ve had good luck using iFixit for guides and it’s worth the trouble to ask around for recommendations on where to buy, but in general avoid Amazon, especially for batteries.

8. After you’ve installed Linux, run it on a stand for good airflow, open the case and really clean your fan, and/or replace your thermal grease (which it’s past time for anyway) because Linux does tend to run warm on these old MacBooks.

That said, these are excellent machines, a fun project, and honestly I think I like them more now than when I first got them: I never knew how versatile they could be. Hope some of this helps you.