lmao this is a targeted campaign to fuck with you. Look at people in your circle of family/friends/acquaintances/enemies and you’ll find your suspect. Real viruses don’t do anything as remotely entertaining as this, they just steal your passwords/crypto/etc, ransomware your files, or turn your PC into a botnet for internet spam or mining.

Download a fresh install of debian, flash it onto a usb, and do a reinstall. Use different root/user passwords that you’re certain nobody knows, and ensure you lock the computer whenever you step away. Also, obviously, be careful with what software you’re installing.

Lol imagine getting filtered this hard, and publicly posting it. Some people have a humiliation fetish I guess.

MSVC redistributable dependencies are also a problem on Windows. If you try to run an app built with a version of the MSVC runtime that’s not installed on Windows, you’ll get an error telling you to install it. Microsoft doesn’t ship all possible versions of that with Windows, so users are on the hook to install it themselves (if it’s a big publisher though, they’ll typically include it as part of a installation wizard, and Steam handles it automatically behind the scenes).

make sure it’s compatible with other software you have

Not sure what you mean by this, as wine software is contained within a wine prefix. If you have dependency conflicts within a wine prefix, you can just create a separate one. Apps like Lutris make this easy to do via a GUI, and they even have community sourced installer scripts for well-known software that automates installing dependencies (like MSVC, fonts, or other bullshit you’d normally have to get through something like wine-tricks).

The outcome is the same, but the meaning is scarier. In the first case, it’s a corrupt/incompetent politician being corrupt/incompetent, which is nothing new (Bush is the same redneck dipshit who purposefully lied to justify a war with Iraq)

This time, it’s a competent judge outright refusing to enforce the law even after he himself found them unambiguously guilty of breaking it, and even found they destroyed evidence to try to avoid getting caught. The rot has crept into the judiciary, which is supposed to be America’s final line of defense against corruption and injustice.

I think I’m going to start investing in crypto, or maybe launch some AI-powered botnet to scam vulnerable grandparents out of their life savings. The age of honesty and integrity is officially dead.

To be fair, Microsoft’s slap on the wrist came from Bush forcing the DOJ to settle. In this situation, it’s a spineless judge refusing to enforce the law in the first place.

Another reason to use Linux is to spare yourself the Windows CMD prompt syntax

Rug pulling a blog service? Seriously? Any first year student can make something like this. The name/brand is probably the only part that’s remotely valuable, and a rug pull is a good way to fuck that up.

With old hardware, beggars can’t be choosers. I get the appeal of the nouveau driver, but if your goal is to save a machine from the landfill, it’s probably the better compromise to use the proprietary driver and keep it actually competitive for as long as possible. Those 900/1000 series cards are still plenty powerful today, even if they can’t quite do AAA gaming anymore.

Bazzite. Every other recommendation is wrong.

Bazzite is “immutable”. What that basically means is that you won’t be able to break it even if you try. And if it does break somehow (for example, because of a bad update), you can fix it by doing a rollback, which is literally a one-line command: sudo rpm-ostree rollback

Sure, there are other immutable distros out there, but Bazzite is probably the most popular right now, and it ships with Nvidia drivers so it’s ready to go for 99% of people with no changes necessary.

being inserted automatically.

Aka the entire point of RAII

This non-sarcastically. The operating system is better at cleaning up memory than you, and it’s completely pointless to free all your allocations if you’re about to exit the program. For certain workloads, it can lead to cleaner, less buggy code to not free anything.

It’s important to know the difference between a “memory leak” and unfreed memory. A leak refers to memory that cannot be freed because you lost track of the address to it. Leaks are only really a problem if the amount of leaked memory is unbounded or huge. Every scenario is different.

Of course, that’s not an excuse to be sloppy with memory management. You should only ever fail to free memory intentionally.

Software. It’s a phone that can’t make phone calls, with a camera that can’t take pictures. It doesn’t matter if some coding genius manages to port Crysis to it, if the phone can’t phone, it’s DOA.