flabberghaster

flabberghaster wrote

I think I started using it around 2012 ish because I was tired of reinstalling Fedora every six months for a new release.

I would say it takes me between a half hour to an hour to install, assuming I have a second computer to look at the install guide, but I've done it a few times and could probably just do it without if I had to. Might take slightly longer if you've never done it, or it might be way faster, if you just used the arch install script they have now, I have not tried doing that.

As for day to day use, mostly you just sudo pacman install something and it usually just works. You choose what to install so you choose what to run. Then maintenance wise you just pacman update and that's usually all you need.

It used to be more unstable and things needed tinkering after an update but that's not really been a problem for me in a few years. Mostly it's just a Linux install that feels like any other, to me.

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flabberghaster wrote

People say "I use arch BTW" as a joke bragging about being a Linux expert but I have found it pretty easy to use. Idk your level of wanting to fuck around with installing it, it's not that hard to do if you have a little bit of experience and they even have the arch install script now (which I have not used, so I can't say how good it is) but once it is installed I have had very few problems with it ever breaking that were not directly my fault.

I run an encrypted root right now, it was pretty trivial to set up. The disk has two partitions, 500 megabytes for boot (which is way more than necessary) and the rest is a big LUKS volume atop which I have an LVM to split it into home and root volumes. You could also just run it directly off the Luke partition with no LVM, if you don't care about doing a separate home partition.

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flabberghaster wrote

I would even go as far as there's a canonical reason you can't do the imperious curse. Like you can trick people with magic, and you could marionette someone with magic like telekinesis (like just move them around yourself, if you wanted) bit it would be obvious what was happening, and you can't directly compel someone to do something.

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flabberghaster wrote

Yeah the house elf thing was, for me, so weird and it bothered me, but I just looked past it because I liked the rest of the books.

I think you could have the boblins run one bank, but have other banks too. And they're not greedy they're just huge nerds who love counting things or something. Like it's not that they control the banks, they're just in to math and technology. Have them invent a bunch of doodads and gadgets too, sorta blending goblins and gnomes.

I like the idea of the obscured arts. I think of it as like, gun control. The magic isn't special, but you don't really want just anyone studying dangerous war spells. Especially in middle school. But it's not like it's this evil branch of magic, it's just the same stuff but particular applications. Like we don't have missile and gun technology (well we kind of do) but at the end of the day it's still just physics and engineering. Any engineering student could make a gun if they wanted, and any Hogwarts student could just kill someone, if they chose to.

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flabberghaster wrote

The thing is, you're absolutely right. "Finance" does serve a purpose. I don't think there'd be a stock market where rich people gamble on pieces of companies like poker chips, but the finance industry does serve a purpose under capitalism and a similar thing would be needed: the allocation of huge amounts of society's resources. Financial companies are just capitalist central planners, and they optimize to keep themselves rich and keep capitalism running. Such a thing would be needed under socialism too, but with different incentive structures and goals.

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