Chemistry in particular is just taught very poorly in USA middle/high school. If anything, it perfectly hinders building that internal understanding.
"Chemical bonds fill the electron shells, which is why we have CO2. But don't worry about why carbon monoxide exists."
"Here's a formula to figure out the angle between atoms in a molecule. But it doesn't apply to H2O, because handwavy reasons. Just memorize this number instead."
Students don't gain an understanding of the subject, because the curriculum doesn't even try to teach it.
This was kind of infuriating about high school chemistry. We were taught so much simply is and that's that. Gold and Mercury differ by one proton, so why is one a dense, yellowish metal and the other one liquid at room temperature? Carbon and Nitrogen sit right next to each other on the periodic table, so why are their chemical properties so different? Why are there so few elements that are ferromagnetic? We dove relatively deep into chemical bonds and isotopes, but glossed over fundamental things like why compounds with similar structures had seemingly random, unrelated properties.
Yep. See e.g. steam cloud saves, which is literally just Dropbox for your video game save files. Bidi sync is a super common pattern if you look for it, I'm surprised at all the hate it's getting here.
I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows.
That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays.
Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows.
certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.
Yeah there are many things coming together on top of W11 fuckups.
Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things:
* informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye
* more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on <generic linux distro> just fine
checking my understanding: this vuln is in the firmware for specific airoha chipsets; e.g. if a bluetooth device is listed as using a qualcomm chipset then it's unaffected by this specific vuln?
... though I wouldn't be surprised if we see a burst of similar disclosures for other manufacturers in the next year or so
"Chemical bonds fill the electron shells, which is why we have CO2. But don't worry about why carbon monoxide exists."
"Here's a formula to figure out the angle between atoms in a molecule. But it doesn't apply to H2O, because handwavy reasons. Just memorize this number instead."
Students don't gain an understanding of the subject, because the curriculum doesn't even try to teach it.