It works in Canada without a SIM. I know because my son did it on his “wifi-only” tablet.

Do you need a phone plan at all for emergency calling? It’s required for all carriers to take 911 calls in Canada.

I knew about the Debian > Ubuntu ordering, but I take it Debian is still often used as a desktop environment, which is what I thought.

Oh, that’s very good to know. That’s a big limitation. That might make moving to Linux at all DOA for me. I’d likely need to do everything for work in a VM, but then what’s the point?

Unfortunately, I’m tied to Excel 2024. I make heavy use of new functions, like SORT that aren’t available in any other desktop app, and the web client doesn’t allow for VBA scripting, so it’s not suitable, either.

oh, shit:

The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoyingf

You’re right. I have a crappy work-supplied Windows laptop that has exactly that installed. It would be nice not to need to boot into that when I need to work on the server from home, but it’s not a deal breaker.

No other specific non-web-based software is needed for work, aside from the aforementioned OneDrive and Excel 2024.

Edit: Your last paragraph is exactly what I’m asking about; I’m capable of doing slightly involved tinkering, but it would need to be something that I can Google Fu through each step of someone walking through most of the steps. I don’t know it at all well enough to go completely “off script” and just tinker with confidence.

It sounds like you’re suggesting that going for something mainstream and getting it to work for games is likely a better option, particularly for someone with limited Limits experience?

Good to know! I use it at work for a server; ngl, my non-Bazzite distro search hasn’t been extensive, except getting to the point that I think I don’t want anything Ubuntu-based.

Thanks for the reply!

A few thoughts:

I was thinking Win 10 EOL won’t matter if the VM has no Internet access. Linux would sync the files for me, so the Windows VM can just run Excel (and maybe Word, since I’m setting up Office 2024 anyway) using the files synced by abraunegg’s onedrive, so it doesn’t need internet access. (Assuming there’s a partition format that works well for both Windows and Linux that I can use for onedrive, which I assume is a “solved” problem by now—i remember this being hard 20 years ago.)

And his package apparently works in Fedora 42 with docker, which I assume should work fine.

But yeah; maybe what you’re suggesting makes more sense. And that VM definitely would need web access, then, so Win 10 is a non-starter. The database work I do is likely easier in Linux, but that’s likely easy enough to get data files out of the VM for just that work, I would expect.

Another question now comes to mind; I’m going to look this up now; how hard is it to copy/paste between Linux and a VM? Edit: As I’d hoped, this is also apparently a solved problem and sounds easy to configure.

If Firefox continues to work, does that mean that it can be used as a workaround, potentially? I guess it depends on how the DRM works, if something like running it in a Firefox tab would work.

And surely blocking Firefox would be a bad move for Google since that would clearly be using monopolistic power in one market to gain advantage in another, right?

I mean, sure… But a whole lot of people use Photoshop professionally without a license.

Krita is great, though. Their Android version is even fully featured, so you can use a tablet with a digitizer if you don’t have a drawing pad for your desktop.

JFC. Stand-up meetings with people dialed in to the speakerphone. Buzz-screech all meeting every meeting.

Not the one. I love it, but it’s not a good first game suggestion, ha ha!

Thanks for the link and the rec!

I was taking book notes for a bit, but I had a hard time keeping up with it. I usually read most before bed, when I’m trying to wind down. I found note taking interfered with my sleep.

I should probably get back to it, though. I can likely find time in the morning if I remember.

Thanks for the link and suggestion!

With my ADHD, I just don’t have the memory for ongoing series.

Does anyone know of any way to find when light novels complete? Does someone maintain a just somewhere? I used to depend on Reddit for this, but I haven’t been back to Reddit since June. And even then it was hit & miss.

I was looking for someone to mention “opinionated”. I’ve been using computers since the 386 days, mostly on Windows, granted, but with some Linux tinkering here and there, and I have no clue what that means.

Still, maybe I should just jump into Bazzite regardless since gaming performance is a consideration for me.

ngl, I had to read the article before I could parse it.

This makes more sense to my brain:

“Reddit updates branding 6 months after mass user protests ahead of rumoured IPO”

It’s all to do with the terms of the contract and collateral.

Bonds are guaranteed by the collateral of the ownership of the company. If the company defaults on their loan, then ownership transfers to the bond holders, so the bond holders now own all the equity in the company (and previous equity holders get nothing.)

There are no collections agents for companies because once they default, all of that is essentially triggered automatically contractually. There’s a bit of wiggle room with negotiating changing terms on the loans and such before a default happens, but that’s the broad strokes.

RCS falls back to SMS/MMS, so it’s not another app, it’s a replacement for texting (and iMessage).

iMessage is, basically, just a proprietary way of doing what RCS is designed to do, so Apple can use peer pressure to get teens (and adults) to exclusivity buy iPhones so their messages are the “right” colour.

Isn’t it CPU overhead for the encryption? It needs to encrypt like 3-400 MB/s, so it seems pretty reasonable that it’s a lot slower. The drive’s lifespan shouldn’t be affected for any reason I can think of.