Much appreciated! Yeah… going through some stuff that I’d rather not type about at the moment. But it’s nice to feel the community. <3

I do physical synths / drum machine as well, in fact I basically use a daw as a mixer with effects :) The latency is good, and I don’t have the newest machine or anything. On Linux it’s super easy to combine interfaces too, like I have my tr-8 (drums) as a multitrack USB interface, and an 8i6 for my synths, and it combines them way easier than I could do in windows! Take with a grain of salt as I’m an amateur, but for my purposes it’s been great so far.

I ended up switching to Linux recently for same reasons, but my kids are older and i had time to nerd out and go full Archwiki. Ableton was one of the last holdouts that was keeping me from switching… and I spent a good month dicking around with wine trying to get it to work. And I couldn’t! I ended up selling my Ableton license and buying Bitwig, which is natively supported in Linux, and actually pretty amazing… (I don’t expect you to switch, just telling my story. It has really fun modular synth-like interface, with all the other VST support and quite good out-of-the-box plugins etc.)

I also couldn’t get Affinity Photo working in wine… and gimp doesn’t quite do it for me. So I’m not sure what to do there, so my photo editing hobby is on hold til I figure that out.

That said, some of my other windows stuff works magically in wine (sierrachart, games, etc.).

So with all that in mind, I’d say if you don’t have time to figure it out, and still want ableton to work, it might not be worth the mental load until you have more time on your hands. Unless you have an old laptop lying around, it wouldn’t hurt to just try it and see what you can get working.

This is what I use! I like that it’s privacy-focused, and syncs across my devices. I paid for premium for the extra little bits, but the free version is quite good too.

haha yeah, I knew it at the “let’s break it down:”
I was like… I know this voice…

me three

Ah the wanking shed that Gizmo eventually moves into :D

I do similar but take out the outer corner ones first because they’re the most likely to get knocked in the fridge :P

I use Arch on my main machine, but I just got a new (old!) laptop that I’m going to set up probably with Debian. Someone mentioned I might try Devuan… and learn about all the init stuff… but I’m thinking I’ll keep it simpler for this one and go straight Debian first.

Wow… define loser? That’s awesome!

Ah, dang, I haven’t run into this yet. But I see what you mean. I actually just set this up in Linux, but back in Windows I didn’t run into this problem (maybe I was lucky enough to hit the same port, or maybe I didn’t have it set up entirely correctly, lol).

Yes, this is what I do, with Private Internet Access (VPN). You can bind qbittorrent to PIA’s interface, and also to its forwarding port.

Yes! I’ve been using Copilot (same thing?) mostly for tech help… Like, I’m moving my computer from windows to Linux (my current new special interest), and it can get pretty hairy. Being able to just ask it questions beats the heck out of the old way (googling). But… Asking it social stuff? That’s a great idea that I should try.

I’m a very recent linux convert, coming from windows where I was using Vivaldi and I quite like it. But… are there reasons to switch to something else?

nice!!

This is nice to stare at… thank you…

I like that, good idea.

…in bed. (sorry… someone was going to say it.)

^^_^ thank you

Yes! One easy/good one to use is https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ It lets you pick two colors, and you can even use the eyedropper tool in their Color Picker box to select a color right off your screen. Then it’ll tell you the Contrast Ratio of the two selected colors. Higher is better. It will give you a pass/fail for WCAG AA and AAA (two levels of web accessibility standards). I just now checked the red and green from the linked map and it had a ratio of 1.3:1 which is a fail for both AA and AAA.

Some websites (like Trello) give accessibility options to skip colors altogether, and use patterns (cross-hatch, polka-dot, etc.). But in general, going for a high enough contrast ratio should be good enough. I’m a web dev as well and we just run everything through one of those WCAG tools (I believe we’ve been using the WAVE browser plugin) and fix it until it passes. :) But, being the colorblind one on the team, I can often just be like “uhmm, that one ain’t gonna work.” lol.

btw sorry I got so spicy in my initial comment. I really wanted to see the map. :P

Edit: Another reply to my comment had a link to a more colorblind-friendly version of the map, with red and blue instead of red and green. Much clearer to my eyes. I eyedropped those two colors into that webaim checker, and I was surprised to see it also failed quite badly on the color contrast! For example you wouldn’t want red text on a blue background (unless it was a bright red and dark blue, or vice versa). But for map colors, well… I guess that goes to show that for colorblind checking you have to use a little common sense and know what the most common no-no combos are (red/green seems to be the most common). I checked the accessibility docs at my work just now and we sometimes use this site to check what a site looks like under various types of colorblindness: https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter