If I understand that article correctly, this should be the case, yes. Unfortunately I’m unable to find any official statistics on that matter.

According to the second source „energy recovery“ isn‘t included in this statistic.

Oh boy, here I go ranting against misinformation about recycling again.

Your claim that 60% of these bottles will be burned is false. The recycling quota for single-use plastic bottles in Germany is 97.6% (2023; source).

60% was the quota of all non-recycled plastic packaging material combined, back in 2018. This quota has further decreased since, and is now at about 30% (2023, source), so almost 70% of all plastic packaging in Germany is recycled. It’s still not perfect, but far, far better than just burning everything.

Recycling isn’t an easy and cheap process, but it can definitely work and be steadily improved, if it’s properly implemented. I’m so tired of this dumb suggestion, that recycling is bad because it’s not perfect (or, in the case of the US, full of corruption). Every bit of plastic that isn’t polluting the environment is a win. And recycling is definitely helping with that. As opposed to propagating false information on the internet.

Cool project, but it seems to be very similar to PairDrop with the major downside of not being open-source. What would be the advantages of using this project over existing FOSS-solutions?

I think Ghostfolio might be what you’re looking for.

And that arrogant “I understand it, why don’t you?!”-attitude is exactly what’s so often the main issue in the design process of open source software.

I’d recommend watching this recent talk by Tantacrul, the design lead for MuseScore and Audacity. In it, he shows some videos of first-time user tests he conducted for Inkscape recently. It’s really fascinating to see, how users fail to do what they want because of confusing UX choices. And often it isn’t even that hard to fix. But open source image editors are just full of these little annoyances by now, which really smell like the result of inadequate user testing. And no professional would prefer to work all day with software full of little annoyances when there are alternatives.

I mean, just try adding text in Krita, for example. There’s a giant pop-up where you have to format your text without actually seeing it on your image. That’s just klunky and far more time consuming than a WYSIWYG approach would be.

This isn’t Adobe.

And as much as I want to like Krita, GIMP and such, their workflows just can’t compare with proprietary software in many cases. Also, especially for photo editing, their feature sets can’t compare with Adobe’s or Affinity’s either.

I use Krita, GIMP and Affinity Photo pretty regularly, and while there have been great improvements to the open source alternatives recently, I just get stuff done with Affinity, while still having to constantly search the web for things Krita and GIMP hide somewhere deep within their menus.

All open source image editors I’ve used are in dire need of a complete UX rework (like Blender and Musescore successfully did) before being more than niche alternatives to proprietary software.

So, as of yet, I can definitely understand the wish for a feature-rich and easily usable image editing suite on Linux.

I disagree with that assertion.

While not in power, the conservatives have shifted their position to what was considered to be the far right only a few years ago. For example, one of their main messages during their campaign was to close Germany‘s borders for refugees, a position that was only supported by the far-right AfD beforehand (and which is violating EU law).

Their main target during the lead-up to this election wasn‘t the far-right, it was the green and left-wing parties. They ranted against renewable energy, taxes on gas, the legalization of Cannabis and such, instead of fighting against the rising far-right extremists.

Friedrich Merz, the conservative’s candidate and likely future chancellor, is an opportunist. If he expects to win something from the talking points of the right-wing extremists, he has absolutely no issues embracing them. He’s very, very different from Angela Merkel.

He already voted with the AfD against the other democratic parties a few weeks ago, which he explicitly ruled out only two months earlier. I have no reason to believe him, if he says he won‘t cooperate with them again.

My educated guess would be that it would require a lot more work for very little benefit.

Officially supporting another platform is just more work for the developers, QA and the support team. Their games do run very well on Linux using Proton. Diablo 4 has even been marked as Steam Deck Verified before its launch on Steam.

And they work without them having to implement things like a Vulkan renderer, having to test on even more system configurations and having to teach the support team how to handle issue reports on Linux.

So I think they‘re okay with how things are right now. Everyone can play their games on Linux, but if something breaks, it‘s not their problem.

And, having played their games on Linux for many years now, I‘m personally okay with that. Proton, DXVK and all the other tools are so advanced by now, that I don‘t think there would be much of a difference if they offered native game builds for Linux.

I unfortunately can’t really see how a browser could still be nice to use and properly resist fingerprinting.

The site https://amiunique.org/fingerprint tries to fingerprint your browser and lists the used attributes along with their uniqueness within their dataset. And while a browser could pretty reliably lie about its User Agent or Platform, it’s often just necessary for a modern website to know, for example, what your view-port’s resolution is or what kind of audio/video codecs your device supports. Going through my own results, I’d say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me, even though I’m pretty privacy-conscious.

Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, but I think preventing fingerprinting would need a regulatory instead of a technical solution. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem very likely anytime soon.

I think Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais explained their plans for a Steam Deck 2 pretty well in this interview (starting at 8:36).

Paraphrasing: They are happy to work with other companies, but the people at Valve also have their own ideas and goals for hardware. And they want to be able to set the bar for these ideas themselves. That‘s why they‘re working on a Steam Deck 2.

And when you look at how well that setting the bar worked with the Deck, I‘m really glad that they want to follow up on that.

I own a GPD Win 2, a handheld PC from a few years before the Deck was a thing. That device couldn‘t be charged while using it, it had its speakers wired the wrong way, it constantly overheated and was a pain to use because of that. Ever since the Deck came out, the whole handheld PC market, including GPD, improved their device quality by a country mile.

And that‘s one of the best things about the Deck, in my opinion, and will hopefully also be one of the best things about the Deck 2.

I think Valve should really make the current „Betas“-Feature more prominent, and rename it to „Versions“ or something. It should* be pretty easy for Firaxis to just offer an old, cross-play enabled version there, while updating the regular version more frequently on PC. That would make disabling such features unnecessary.

I’ve seen only a few developers actually making use of „Beta“s in that way, but I think it would be very useful in cases like this.

* there could, of course, be other technical issues preventing them from doing that, which only their developers know of

Edit: They’ve actually added a console-compatible “Beta” yesterday.

I‘ve been using Kagi since September 2023.

The biggest difference to other search engines is really the quality of the results. Before Kagi, I‘ve used DuckDuckGo for a few years, but had to switch to Google more often than not, as I just didn‘t find what I was looking for. Most alternative search engines only use Bing‘s index, which just isn‘t any good in my experience. Kagi‘s results are built from quite a few different sources as well as their own index. Seeing how crappy Google‘s results are at this point, I don‘t think you can get better search results right now.

Also, the ability to rank and block specific domains in my results is something I really like and wouldn‘t want to miss anymore.

Lastly, I really enjoy using a search engine that isn‘t being optimized for advertisers, but for the user. Kagi‘s team is very receptive for feedback. For example, they’ve implemented an icon for search results with paywalls, because users asked for it. There are many small, nice details like that, which can save you a few clicks or just improve your general experience.

After spending ten minutes on the toilet pondering, I think „growing facial hair“ is the best counter-example I can come up with.

Or I just don‘t know enough women who like growing facial hair.

Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.

I think I‘ve stumbled across this at some point, but I think it has been updated since.

Thanks for finding it, I‘ll keep it in mind when I get around to trying VR on Linux again in the future.

I’m doing all of my PC gaming on Linux for years now. Except for VR. It’s unfortunately not running well at all for me. I’m running an Nvidia GPU with a Valve Index and whenever I was able to even get a picture on the HMD in the first place, the latency from movement to screen was about a second or so. Which is an incredibly efficient way to feel incredibly sick.

I’m not sure about your setup, maybe it’s better supported in some way, but, from my experience, I’d unfortunately recommend keeping a Windows partition for VR and saving yourself the (quite literal) headache.

I‘m personally very happy with kagi when it comes to features and, most importantly, the quality of search results. But, as they don‘t have ads, it’s pretty expensive to use.

I agree that both the map and the statistic I’ve posted don’t take those country-specific characteristics into account.

I’m not sure how important that difference really is, though, as both the US and Germany seem to have pretty similar degrees of urbanization (US: 83.3%; Germany: 77.8%; source). So the rural population isn’t really that big in either country, relatively speaking.

I’m not trying to say that the rural population isn’t a factor, I’m just not sure how big that factor really is.

(source)

Not a map, but at least some more data from some other countries. The own car is unfortunately the most used mode of transport for commuting in every surveyed country, but the US seem to be especially far behind when it comes to alternatives.