I’m not sure this true - PDF is an open standard. The issue isn’t generally with layout and reproducibility - a good PDF maker and a good reader will give you an accurate representation of how it looks on all devices once the PDF is created.

Certainly there isn’t a dedicated FOSS tool for make PDFs; Libre Office and Inkscape do a decent job but not perfect which may be what you’re referring to. And they’re not dedicated PDF makers plus the real problem is building fillable forms and signature tools.

But there is a proprietary alternative called Master PDF that is a dedicated and supports all the PDF standard features I believe; one perpetual license is $80 compared to Adobe subscription based charging. I’m not aware of other options myself but they may exist. But it’s a viable alternative to the “adobe tax”.

Also of course if you have Office 365 from Microsoft, you can use Word to export docs to PDF reliably (in my experience). Obviously as far as you can get from FOSS, but it is an option on Linux via web browser if you have it from work for example; at least you don’t have to pay Adobe but it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for this threat I know!

Firefox can do basic annotating, adding text and adding pictures but it can’t make a new PDF from scratch.

You may be confusing Adobe Acrobat Reader with Adobe Acrobat? Full Acrobat is the proprietary tool to make a PDF file from scratch including some of the more complex functions.

PDF is an open standard and has been for a while, so there are now plenty of alternatives for most of the functions. LibreOffice Draw and Inkscape can do a lot of PDF creation functions but not all. There are also “print to PDF” options to create basic PDF documents too.

However some of the more niche functions are not widely supported or well supported; and there isn’t really any opensource dedicated PDF maker that I’m aware of. Layout tools are abundant but I think it’s things like building forms and document signing that is less easily replicated. There is Master PDF - a fully functional PDF maker which is proprietary and available for Linux; it $80 for a perpetual license. I’m not aware of any other alternatives myself.

“Anyone” is a bit of a stretch. I think this is an example of how fragmented media and experience has become.

Selling millions of copies in impressive but there are billions of people in the world. And there is also new stuff being released all the time in the worlds of music, tv, film, books and gaming. All of this is jockeying for media attention and peoples attention.

These things were important to you as they were part of your formative years or had some emotional resonance., so it makes sense you are aware of them, but your lived experiences aren’t the same as others.

For example, I’m a gamer, I’ve heard to Trine but never played it.12,000 reviews on Steam is pretty impressive. But its a 16 year old game and when it comes to older games there are huge titles like Skyrim or GTAV that dominate attention still from that eraor earlier.

The Road to Perdition is a decent film but have a look at a list of Oscar winners - how many have you actually seen? The Oscars isn’t representative of films that were widely popular but rather films that were popular or important to people on Hollywood itself, or to the movie makers. It won one Oscar for cinematography.

And it grossed $180m - not bad but if you look a box office mojo the top 3 films in 2002 were Lord of the Rings 2 towers, Harry Potter and Spiderman. Road to Perdition was the 25th biggest film of the year, and bigger films includes Gangs of New York, Catch me if you can and Minority report. It was a decent film in a year of bigger films commerically.

As for Everclear, sorry to say I’ve never heard of them. Looking them up on wikipedia, they didn’t seem to troubled the charts outside the US and Canada, and for some reason New Zealand. And they did well in the Alt Music charts but they never broke the top 10 in the popular charts. So they are a bit niche even if they were popular in their own right and did well.

All of us have different things we love or were formative for us, and even the “mainstream” that gets the attention is still really only a fraction of what’s going on.

And I’d add the nature of taste and preference is so different that the stuff that gets big and crosses over into a mega hit is either generic/inoffensive commerical slop backed up with massive marketing or rarely so extraordinarily good that it spreads through word of mouth. There are so many gems out their like Trine or Everclear but most people will never come across them. Keep spreading the word about the things you love so others can enjoy them too.

The guy is ranting about a criminal investigation into why his polling numbers are so low. He’s quite literally a demented old man. I think he really isn’t rational enough to see that that he is harming the man he wants to win.

Second for The Rest is History. Its on all major podcast platforms and on YouTube. It has two hosts who take it in turns to talk about a topic while the other asks questions. Its full of gentle banter, and light humour but deleves in depth into topics. Some topics are covered in a single episode, others in depth in multi part series.

Its got a huge backlog of episodes, clearly labeled by topic and covers the full breadth of history. The two hosts are British but it covers global history, and it doesnt have biases. It does a “warts and all” approach to any topic.

Strongly recommend it.

The removal of the black gradient at the bottom is a plus.

Putting the controls in their own grey capsules so they still standout is a plus.

The moving of the volume button to the right is a negative.

I dont like change just for changes sake, but in fairness some of this is a good idea and a welcome design shift. I just hopebthey move the volume button back as having on the left with the main controls is pretty widespread and common design.

Travel Agents. I remember growing up they were all over the place and people had to go to them to book flights and hotels or buy package holidays.

They’re all but gone now. I’m vaguely aware there may still be some specialist ones left catering to elderly boomers?

Its an entire business and career path thats completely gone, replaced by websites and at a push generic call centres (some people still book over the phone I guess?)

This 100%. Tesla remains massively overvalued, and it’s on the basis that in the future the company will dominate with self drive cars. It’s vaporware on a scale never before seen.

Tesla has fundamentally flawed self-drive technology because someone stripped out essential tech to save money. Lidar is essential to self driving cars but some genius decided they knew better than their own engineers and the self drive industry as a whole and instead made their vehicles and tech camera only. That genius? Elon fucking Musk.

The guy’s an idiot. The company is an overpriced joke.

Regardless of OS version? That sounds like nonsense. Only someone who doesn’t know how Linux works would believe that.

glibc is a fundamental library that underpins Linux. Its been going since the 1980s and is constantly updated and patched.

Similarly the Linux kernel undergoes constant evolution and change.

No one can promise to support Linux regardless of the OS version because by necessity it is constantly changing. Even slow release cycle distros like Debian move forward with each major release. Backwards compatibility is actually a bit of a nightmare on Linux. Ironically it can be easier to get old windows software running on Linux than old Linux software.

People running systems older than glibc 2.31 really should patch and update their systems. That package itself is already 5 years old.

No, if you like mint and cinnamon then why change?

The only reason to change would be if you want a different desktop environment. You could do that with mint or go with a distro that mains a different DE.

Mint is popular and reliable, so only change if you fancy trying something new and are willing to reinstall if its not to your liking.

I used to be on Mint and left it when I decided to move to KDE. It worked fine in mint but I had lots of app duplication in the menus. I also wanted more cutting edge versions.of software so wanted a different district for that. So I switched to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed (a rolling release distro).

If you do want to tinker and try out other distros then you could also play with distros in virtual machines (KVM or Virtualbox) or if you have a desktop get a second harddrive and install a different distro on it. Its easy to dualboot Linux distros (and safest to have separate hard drives so you don’t make mistakes when partitioning).

Yes and no. The US chose to project its power around the world after WW2. It used that military power and umbrella protection to shape free trade deals, and preferential deals for US interests.

From a US perspective whats happening is the destruction of something extremely powerful to the US interests. US power and influence will be massively diminished in an era when China is on the rise.

Europe will be able to afford to go to 3% of GDP on military spending. It’ll be painful in the short term but worth it for Europe as it will give them independence. Its not a threat to European tax and spending - that remains its aging population. Increased military spending will be a marginal problem.

Trumps destruction of US dominion is going to reduce their influence and power on the global stage. Even if the Americans elect an outward looking president next, Europe and other NATO allies can no longer rely on American promises as Trump has shown how quickly american orthodoxy can be undone.

The US spends 3.4% of its GDP on its military and for that it got an extraordinary amount of influence and power. The US will continue spending that much but will now be getting much less value for its money.