The oldest intact building in my city is from 1320 - so 700 years old. Baguely Hall, which is an old landowners hall.

The city itself - Manchester - dates back to the roman era and we have the remnants of an old castrum/fort in the city centre dating back to 79 AD - so 1945 years old. Surprisingly there were more complete ruins at the site but much of it was levelled during the industrial revolution.

Why “dr*g”? That’s a wierd bit of censorship - making a joke about drugs and sex workers and feeling the need to censor the word drug? I don’t get it?

I’m sorry you and your brother have been through so much and been so damaged. I experienced an abusive up bringing and I know it never leaves you, and shapes who you are for the rest pf your life. For me i was lucky and it shaped me to try to be a better person then my parents and not repeat their mistakes; it sounds like you are also treading that path.

My siblings were not so lucky, they are all damaged and have been unable to live “normal” lives. I lost one brother who died through severe mental illness, another sibling is crippled by mental illness and another is struggling but fortunately getting by.

I’ve learnt the hard way that you can’t fix other people, no matter how clearly you see what is going wrong. You can encourage people to deal with their problems, and you can support them when they try but ultimately they have to want to change or get better. Everything else you do, no matter how well intentioned, will not change anything if the person themselves does not see the problem or want to change.

Regarding your brother, you can reach out to him and try but sadly you may have to accept his life is stuck on a trajectory of self destruction and even sadly violence. I don’t think anyone is born bad, but are shaoed by their childhood. Your step dad and mum are also likely products of bad events or difficult up-bringings and it sounds like they couldn’t change their life paths either. Its a cycle of chaos and tragedy disrupting each generation.

But there is something you do have control over and can change - your own family. You can break the cycle by being a good parent to your children. You are now in the position your mum and dad were, and can be the role model for your kids and ensure they have a happy childhood. That is where you should focus your time and effort.

I’m sorry for your brother, despite his crimes, but your priority should be your wife and children and everything you do has to be focused on what is best for them. Sadly, if that means not including your brother in your lives then so be it. Be there if your brother reaches out for help but otherwise I think your time and energy is best focused on giving your children the upbringing and future denied to you as a child.

You succeeded despite your parents. Ensure your children succeed with your help and support. That will break the cycle in your family and that love, kindness and compassion will be felt by your grand children and great grand children. That is what you can realistically control and that could help many more than one person in your family long term. That choice could have positive echoes throughout your children and their children’s lives.

Its not about memory size its about the asymmetric sticks. It was a classic problem with OS memory management in the past. Modern OS are better at dealing with it but it is not the optimal set up.

You’re running windows game which use proton/wine that manage memory for the game and use linux for access to RAM. The asymmetry could conceivably cause issues you wouldn’t notice with native apps.

I’d try removing the 16gb stick (or the two 8gb sticks and keeo the 16gb stick; all that matters is whatever ram isnleft is the uniform) and see what happens with the games you’ve been trying. It might not he the issue but the only way to know is to test it, rather than dismiss it because its not what you expected.

The common denominator in your issues would be your PC. If games are working according to protonDB and you’re unable to get them to work on multiple distros that suggests its your PC.

There are two candidates in your specs - your RAM and your Graphics card.

As others have said, asymmetric RAM is unusual and it certainly was warned against in the past as it caused system issues. While OSs may be much better at managing RAM now, that doesn’t mean all scenarios can tolerate it. Given what Proton is doing is complex (running Wine, which is essentially a windows layer) I would not be surprised if the memory configuration is just a step too far - you have windows software using a windows compatibility layer for memory asking a linuxn system for memory access.

An obvious way to test this is to remove the 16gb stick from your machine and see what happens.

The other side is your graphics card - are you using the latest nvidia drivers?

Disc and disk are varient spellings of the same word that pre-exist computing. Disc is more common in British English, Disk more common in American English. But yeah since computing came along disk has also been used more for magnetic media (hard disk) while disc has been used more for optical media (compact disc). I wouldn’t be surprised if this only happened because of how the CD was marketed and branded as a “compact disc” as a trademark while hard disks and floppy disks etc were more generic terms.

The US healthcare system is built around money and profit. A cheaper procedure which does not require general anaesthetic costs less, and reduces profit. That can be beneficial to the providers but bloat is incentivised in the US healthcare system as providers battle with insurance companies for money. Crudely healthcare providers don’t care about saving you money; they want to take as much money as they can get.

Meanwhile, countries with tax funded health care opt for the most cost effective procedures, investigations and treatments. The incentive is to reduce costs and offer the most effective things to the most people possible. That can also sometimes have negative side effects if not carefully regulated but in such systems generally Doctors advocate for the best procedure and best medical practice, as they themselves do not directly benefit financially from which procedure is pushed. The downside is you do get the opposite side of things where patients are dissuaded from things as they’re not deemed cost effective by those who control the spending.

Not heard that one before about the cia but let’s say for a moment that is true - Signal is open source so anyone can audit and work with the source code. Also anyone can set up an independent signal server and network.

And are you maybe confusing Signal with Tor and the CIA with the US Navy?

Good news but also shameful - Asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999 for example, and even that was regarded as late after initial partial bans in 1985.

Why has it taken so long for the US to completely ban asbestos?

You can add games to Steam to use proton so where they came from doesn’t matter. You can also use Proton forks and bypass steam altogether - much of the underlying tech is Wine; proton is a patched and optimised version of Wine not a stand alone Valve product. Its great what they’ve done but it is still a collaborative open source effort.

As for which store, I go on price and sometimes go with GOG even if more expensive because of DRM, and sometimes Steam because of the convenience of the workshop.

I don’t think it needs to be any more complex than that - these are company’s taking your money for the same product. Its kinda pointless being “loyal” to a retailer - its more important to focus on value for money and quality of service for each purchase.

I think you’re absolutely right.

The announcement of dropping SMS at the time gave those vibes. They were basically saying to users “we know what’s good for ypu better than you do”.

It was a huge strategic misstep. SMS was the perfect route to get people to use Signal - you’d start with SMS conversations and then as people joined signal conversations could switch to secure chat. Now its very hard to persuade people to switch to Signal.

Now google has used the same trick to push its own messaging standard RCS.

Its been a gradual decline over many years. I’d say the tipping point was Microsoft Edge or Windows 10 itself - that’s around the time the explicit attempts to “monetise” users started.

When Windows went “free” the focus became how to extract as much money per user all the time, so the advertising and edge based spying / data harvesting stepped up a gear.

Its not a surprise looking back - the drive for all these companies with stock holders is “growth”. That really means growth in the share price which means growth in revenue or profits amongst other tricks. Everytime a new generation of managers comes through they scrape the barrel for ideas and things get worse and worse.

I only use windows at work now; I’ve migrated all my devices to Linux (desktpp, laptop, media PC)

So is the issue your co workers or is really that it bothers you so much?

Maybe the real thing here is you need to learn how to let the crazy and annoying wash over you. Because at the moment you’re letting that leak into your personal time - you’re thinking about things that are annoying you when really, why should they?

They’re “winning” not because they annoyed you at work, but because you’re letting it bother you when you’re not at work.

There are skills in being able to ignore things that annoy you, or learning to let things go or even compartmentalising parts of your life.

I do - there are old sites that have gone off line that I search the Way Back Machine to look at. There are also lots of archived files available that I’ve used more than once (Amiga files for example, Usenet archives and even old magazines).

It’s not really a day-to-day tool for everyone, but when you need it it’s irreplaceable.

Then I’d definitely set up a test system in a VM on your own PC (I.e. not the actual server machines). Even if you don’t want to use Docker, you can set up a complete version of your new server and practice deploying Jellyfin and Plex, and then test accessing it “remotely” to manage it. You can then decide whether switching away from Win11 is worth it.

If you’re not familiar with the process of setting up a linux server then I’d actually suggest Debian instead of OpenSuSe. Looking at the Jellyfin guide for example it specifically covers the steps for installing directly onto a Debian host (while OpenSuSE set up means using the Fedora RPM guide). There are also straight forward guides for setting up a Debian server.

Personally I’m not a fan of Ubuntu (because of Canonical and Snap etc) but there may also be a good choice just because there are so many guides out there for setting up Ubuntu server.

Docker is pretty easy to use, and is easy to play with either on your own system (linux or windows) or in VM guest system. The learning curve isn’t that high and Jellyfin for example has a clear set up guide for docker on their wiki.

But radarr, sonarr etc can be installed directly within linux without docker. The Servarr wiki (that these projects use officially to share information as they’re so similar) has lots of straight forward guides for set up on Linux, Windows, Mac etc as well as Docker.

I have a Linux guest VM set up with a Radarr, Sonarr etc set up, VPN and torrent set up. It was easy to do and means its network activity is all securely contained away from my host system. The tools let me set naming rules and file preferences. The library is a shared n folder in my host system, and that is included in my Jellyfin library. So all I have to do is subscribe to something i am interested in and it will just appear in my library once downloaded. The servarr tools are extremely convenient and worth looking at if you’re adding to that 30tb library over time.

OpenSuSE is a good distro with nice tools like Yast that have a decent CLI interface, and has server releases. The leap edition is stable but relatively up to date.

But there are lots of viable alternatives, and if you’re going to use Docker then the host distro is probably not as important as you think.

Simplest route may be to set up a demo server within a VM and see which one chimes the most with your style of use and maintenance. You could have a functioning demo server with docker and deploy both jellyfin and Plex in 20mins.

Oxford University is older than calculus.

As a kid Amiga Workbench was my first desktop environment, and then later Win 3.11 in MS DOS.

I remember my dad toying with Linux but can’t remember which one (he did settle on SuSE though I recall). My first linux distros was Ubuntu.

Dunno, I think its supposed to be phantom of the opera but obsessing over meat? So without heathcliffe it males no sense to me - unless he thinks its actually supposed to actually be a joke about organs and meat?