Having your router limit internet connectivity time is effectively the same thing these days. There are some things they can do offline but not much anymore.

Personally, I’d use the router to limit access to locations and times. It’s more reliable, easier to do, and lets you be less picky with your distro.

Using a DNS level content blocker like Adblock DNS is a great option, IMHO, and is super easy to setup.

(For the record, parent of 8 and 11 yr olds)

I have an idea to help more people play our games! Let’s put a kernel-level anti-cheat on them so nobody who uses linux can play them anymore! Oh wait…

No I don’t mind them. I am a linux noob myself and these kinds of posts are what helped me decide to switch.

While we’re complaining, you know what I don’t like? Completely incomprehensible posts about some super specific subsystem. “fdplq updated to 0.5.pi.007.69!” Wow, that will change my life the next time I boot up my computer to read some Lemmy and play a game for an hour or two.

But they are all part of the linux community. I’m not gonna say the way I use linux is any better or worse than anyone else.

And fortunately, nobody is forcing us to click on those posts we don’t care about.

I’m confused by the word “but” in that headline. Seem like they are trying to imply cause and effect when the reality is that readers trust outlets less who use AI whether they label them or not.

I feel like this post is guerilla marketing for “TempleOS”, which I’ve never heard of before and will absolutely not be looking up after this.

I like the idea of this game (and series) a lot. I really have NO interest in a 2D side-scroller, though. I hope the game succeeds and they can make another RoR that’s more in a style I’d enjoy.

They found out what? Their business wasn’t affected at all as far as I can tell. They should have been broken up and shut down but instead they got caught doing the same thing AGAIN.

So yeah, not sure what Tesla is going to find out other than “money means you can get away with anything”, which Musk already knows well.

And just to be clear, I own a Tesla. I just got it back from the shop after ELEVEN MONTHS because those fucking tools would rather sell more cars on false promises than divert some parts to repair the cars they’ve already sold. I love that car but I’m selling it. Nobody should go anywhere near Tesla cars until they get their supply chain shit together.

Hydrogen cars isn’t a new technology and there has been no push toward mass adoption yet. What changed that makes you think hydrogen will suddenly become a thing worth investing in?

It’s funny, as often as I see these posts about free games on the Epic Games Store, I still have absolutely no desire to ever install or use it.

The best way to avoid your ISP spying is to use a VPN. It encrypts all the data before your ISP ever sees the data so they can’t spy on you. I use Private Internet Access but I recommend doing some research and finding one that’s good in your country.

I’m not sure why you had an issue with just changing your DNS. Did you change it in the DHCP settings or somewhere else?

Regardless, just to be clear, changing your DNS won’t prevent your ISP from spying on you. Many of the big DNS providers like Google will absolutely spy on you through your DNS calls so I do think it’s a good idea to use a better DNS. I personally use AdGuard DNS, which has a built in ad blocker that works really well.

My issue is that the cheapo consumer hardware sucks. Using good software on bad hardware doesn’t solve the issue. Unless I can use it on a normal computer… last I looked into it, I don’t think you could.

You got a lot of good answers to this. I’ll add mine:

A router is a device that bridges multiple physical networks (it will have at least two network interfaces) and directs traffic between them. It inspects every packet of data and decides which port to send it to.

In a typical home here in the US, one network is your ISP (connected to your cable modem, for example) and the other is your home computers, consoles and devices via wifi or direct connection (like a NAS drive, for example).

Generally you want a firewall to go along with your router. Instead of blindly passing all data to the correct network, it will decide whether it is allowed to pass or not based on a configured ruleset. Most consumer home wifi routers have a simple firewall built-in.

They also have other features like “load balancing” to prioritize certain data that is more sensitive to interruptions in the data flow (like gaming) over data that isn’t (like video or audio), or “DHCP servers” to hand out IP addressed to devices on the network, or “VPN tunneling” to encrypt data, etc.

A linux-based computer is more than capable of performing all these tasks. If well-configured, it can do it much better than a consumer device, with better hardware and more reliability for less money over time (when taking reliability into account).

I tried using a guide online one time to build a linux router/firewall onto a passively-cooled mini-computer that I could leave on a shelf with no I/O connected… basically a replacement for the garbo off-the-shelf wifi routers that die every year. It worked…mostly. The problem is that the random little things that didn’t work right just were insurmountable for a linux noob who was just trying to follow a guide.

I hate that spending money on the best ones you can buy STILL die after a year or two. And now they all require you to login so even more people can inspect all my network traffic.

I’d love to see a guide that’s kept up to date for building a simple router/firewall, with sections like you have above for more information so people can unlock ports for unusual stuff or whatever. I mean, in a perfect world, you install a LTS OS and set it up and forget about it for a few years. Mine was like that except it required manual intervention every time it rebooted. If that wasn’t the case, it would have been perfect and I would be recommeding it to everyone.

Not sure how old your kids are, but mine are 7 and 11 and I would definitely NOT play BG3 with them. If it were a movie, I don’t think it would even get an R rating given all the sex and gore.

(To be clear, not judging the game. I quite enjoy it. Just don’t find it appropriate for my little ones. Caveat emptor.)

FWIW, I had a lot of fun playing thru Portal with my son. No official co-op mode in the first one, but the second one has it and it’s pretty old at this point so should run fine on older machines.

Will those work in linux?

It’s been bugging me in BG3. Mostly because it takes a while to load and when it’s finally loaded, I have to press a button then WAIT AGAIN for a stupid animation before getting to the main menu so I can then load some more.

Gimme a command line to just automatically “Continue” please. The pretty animtions and menu were fun at first. Now I just want to get back to my brain parasites as quickly as possible. I’m sure that has nothing to do with my brain parasites.

It’s by the GloriousEggroll guys, and I really liked it a lot. I would still be using it if it worked better with my laptop’s hybrid Nvidia graphics setup. When I get around to swapping my desktop to linux, I’ll almost certainly go with Nobara first.

FWIW, Pop!_OS is where I landed for great hybrid graphics support.

I spent a season working in a packing house for watermelons. They’d come in by the crateload and we were allowed to just grab one to eat any time we wanted.

The trick I was taught, and which proved to be pretty reliable over the course of the season, was to feel the veins. (This is possibly what’s being described as webbing here?) Watermelons aren’t smooth, they have wide “veins” running top to bottom and you can feel them if you put your hand flat on the side of the melon. The bigger/poofier/wider the veins, the more ripe is it.

Looking into Manjaro, it sounds like it’s kind of known for having issues with reliability. Seems like that might not be the best pick for something that “just works”. But I’ve heard good things about Arch so I don’t know.