It's also really good for making sure that whoever wins the most acres of land gets a huge electoral boost. Because that's important.

Your employer is likely paying another $600/mo for you as well, and singles/couples working for the company are actually subsiding your threesome.

The insurer-first system a stupid scheme that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Gentoo. Not an Arch fork, and uses OpenRC by default. I use it and love it. Portage is the best package manager out there, imo.

You can still get binaries of the really annoying things to compile, like Firefox. Otherwise, it's all source-based.

I'd advise installing it in a VM or on a spare computer first to get your hands around what it is.

In your case, you'll want to specify the following flags in you makefile:

OpenRC, -systemd

You'll add a bunch of others in there too depending on architecture and personal priorities.

Follow the handbook. https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/

There's also Calculate Linux, which is basically Gentoo with a graphical front end, but I think it's Intel only. CLI is more fun anyway.

I work in music and audio post, and everyone I work with would love to be able to use Reaper (or Logic, or Nuendo) instead of Pro Tools, if Pro Tools didn't have the post industry completely captured in the US.

Reaper is a world-class product, and the team could easily charge 10x as much for the pro licenses, and get it. Stick with Reaper.

There are alternative drum triggers for Linux, I'm sure. Even SPL makes a drum exchanger. There's got to be one out there.

VMR shouldn't be a problem to run, I just don't know what the install process would look like.

I'm pretty sure Airwindows plugs are Linux compatible, probably Audio Obsession too.

In any case, Reaper's stock plugins are awesome. My only real complaint about them is the EQ cramping in the hi-end, which is typical for stock plugins.

I'm of two minds about people not adblocking.

On one hand: Ads are gross noise pollution, and people are increasingly unaware of all the noise around them (or the noise they're generating) largely because they've been passively trained to "tune out" ads. Also consumerism.

On the other hand: As long as there are a significant amount of people oblivious to the possibility of adblock, corporate ad mobsters and the other worst people in the world out there will largely leave those of us blocking their ads alone. If everyone ran adblockers, we'd definitely live in a world of WEI... and probably worse. So, maybe all those people are watching ads so that I don't have to, as the YouTube thumbnails say.

One begins to think they're just belligerent shitheads

Gentoo is more about the fun of building a Linux distro that is perfectly tailored to your hardware and personal preferences. Sometimes you'll see a performance increase of 0.01%, sometimes 25%+. Just depends on a lot of different things.

The build times are really only a consideration on first or second install of the OS. And even with your first install, you'll probably want to start with the pre-built options, and then gradually move away from that to compiling more and more of your own system.

There are a couple apps like Firefox that also have pre-compiled binaries available for Gentoo, so no waiting there. Of course, there's also Flatpak for desktop-based apps.

Otherwise, you just compile what you want, when you want. And you can tell Portage how much in terms of cores/threads/resources it gets to use when compiling, so that it can just run in the background while you're doing your normal thing (or scheduled for when You're not using your machine).

Portage is also a phenomenal package manager, and can track and satisfy all dependencies for you as-needed. You can also specify what elements of your system to keep on stable, vs testing, etc. It's not like Slackware.

Gentoo is what was used to build ChromeOS, along with many other distros. It's as complex/simple, secure/insecure, private/un-private, latest-and-greatest/LTS as you tell it to be. You can choose to update things continuously in the background, or just once a week overnight, or on any other schedule that you want.

You'll probably learn some new things in the course of installing it, but follow the handbook to the letter, avail yourself of the community, and be patient to start with. It works for me, and I like it, but there are plenty of excellent pre-cooked distros that are also great. I'm just a tinkerer by nature, and enjoy getting increasingly more out of my machines over time.

We didn't get involved in WW2 because of the Holocaust. There were plenty of newspaper articles about it all over the country well before Pearl Harbor, and nothing was done until we were attacked directly.

Your parents suck.

The question of jurisdiction was more complicated than where the crime had been committed.

So... The US did it.

Even if he loses, he will suffer no significant consequences, nor will the lawless movement that supports him.

He could lose all of these cases tomorrow, and it still wouldn't mean a thing. He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and there still would be no significant consequences.

The GOP are a lawless terrorist movement, but everyone else wants to "take the high road."

Putting Zimmer anywhere near the same league as Williams is grotesque.

Zimmer writes a medley, then has an army of underpaid and under-credited orchestrators write 95% of the film. He couldn't orchestrate his way out of a paper bag.

His primary skill is pushing the "every instrument on every note" button on his Project Sam VI and then adding an additional 6 french horns, 6 trombones, and probably a pipe organ.

Can you recall a single melody from Oppenheimer? It's all just environmental boom and brass shit, with strings that might as well be synth. Can you recall a melody from Inception? Nope, just BWAAAAH.

There's a reason all of his legitimately musical scores in the last 25 years are co-written with another composer. Batman films, The Rock, Gladiator, etc. He musically peaked as a solo composer with Backdraft, imo.

Williams, on the other hand, employees orchestrators solely because he is required by union rules to have an orchestrator. His short-scores (the blueprints that orchestrators work from) are UNBELIEVABLY detailed.

Williams went to Juilliard. Zimmer took two weeks of piano lessons and was in a band.

And no one, NO ONE, has written the number of iconic melodies and scores that Williams has. Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without that score... Mark Hammil has said that John Williams is more responsible for the success of Start Wars than anyone other than George Lucas.

Jurassic Park wouldn't be JP without his score.

ET. Superman. Indiana Jones. Harry Potter. You can hear the music to these films in your head right now.

Or, you can listen to Hans Zimmer in your head now too: BWAAAAH.

I'll leave you with one thought: A few months ago, my Uber driver was a former orchestrator for Zimmer at RC. He hated it and quit. Re-read those two sentences.