It's not AI that is the problem, it's half baked insecure data harvesting products pushed by big corporations that are the problem.
The biggest joke is that the LLM in Windows is running locally, it uses your hardware and not some big external server farm. But you can bet your ass that they still use it to data harvest the shit out of you.
To me this is even worse though. They're using your electricity and CPU cycles to grab the data they want which lowers their bandwidth bills.
It happening "locally" while still sending all the metadata home is just a slap in the face.
Also, CoPilot is going to be bundled with Office 365, a subscription service. You're literally paying them to spy on you.
be microsoft, a whole bunch of greedy user-hostile fucks
make spyware
tell users that spyware is really cool and useful
make them pay for the spyware
use the spyware to get their data
sell their data
profit
Capitalism almost perfected.
create a monopoly on operating systems
leverage your dominant market position and force everyone to use your spyware
big profit
Exactly. And if I use or even pay for an external LLM service then that's also my decision. But they force this scheme onto every user, whether they want it or not. It's like the worst out of all possible scenarios.
That's a pretty big joke, but I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI. We taught linear algebra to talk real pretty and now corps want to use it to completely subsume our lives.
I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI
I have to disagree.
Frankly, LLMs (which are based on neural networks) seem a Hell of a lot closer to how actual brains work than "classical AI" (which basically boils down to a gigantic pile of if statements) does.
I guess I could agree that LLMs are undeserving of the term "AI", but only in the sense that nothing we've made so far is deserving of it.
seem a Hell of a lot closer
"seem" is the critical word there. Interacting with an LLM they do seem to be pretty clever.
I'm not talking about interacting with it. I'm talking about how it's implemented, from my perspective as a computer scientist.
Let me say it more concretely: if even shitty expert systems, which are literally just flowcharts implemented in procedural code, are considered "AI" -- and historically speaking, they are -- then the bar is really fucking low. LLMs, which at least make an effort to kinda resemble the structure of biological intelligence, are certainly way, way above it.
I'm actually sad that the state of AI deserves the hate it gets. Neural networks are so sick, just going through the example of detecting a diagonal on a 2x2 grid was like magic to me. And they made me second guess simulation theory for quite a while lmao
Tangentially, blockchain was a similar phenomenon for me. Or at least trust networks. One idea was to just throw away Certificate Authorities. Basically federate all the things, and this was before we knew about the fediverse. It gets all the hate because of crypto, but it's cool tech. The CA thing would probably lead to a bad place too, though.
Oh I agree. I typically put "AI" in quotation marks when using that term regarding LLMs, because to me they simply are not intelligent in anyway. In my mind an AI would need an actual level of consciousness of sorts, the ability to form actual thoughts and learn things freely based on whatever senses it has.
But AI is a term that's good for marketing as well as fear mongering, which we see a lot of in current news cycles and on social media. The problem is that most people do not even understand the basic principles of how LLMs work, which lead to a lot of misconceptions about its uses & misuses and what we should do about it.
Weirdly enough this makes LLMs both completely overhyped as a product and completely stigmatized as some nefarious tool as well. But I guess it fits into our today's societies that kinda seem to have lost all nuance and reason.
To ensure a seamless customer experience when their hardware isn't capable of running the model locally or if there is a problem with the local instance.
It's not the "AI nightmare", it's a nightmare of capitalism, proprietary software and user-hostile behavior by a greedy, profit-extracting Big Tech corporation.
All true, and all a problem for which linux has been a solution (in the computing world) for decades now.
It's not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it's not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it's much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It's such a fucking scam, and it's almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.
To your last point: I think a significant number of people these days are aware just how much corporations are bending us over, but most of us are just so exhausted at the end of the day to really make a huge stink about it when all we want to do is just vegitate on the couch for a few hours before we have to go to sleep, then wake up the next day and do it all over again. The current paradigm is horseshit, but the puppeteers make sure we work ourselves to the bone so that we're too tired to really do anything about it aside from bitching online.
You’re not wrong. AI is just another tool to scrape cash to the top while eliminating jobs. Could it realize benefits like doing specialized research and testing? Sure…but again, the results of that work are lost human jobs and scraping money to the top. We can argue about advancing technology in a horse cart driver vs automobile thing (won’t anyone think about the poor farriers out of work?) but we’ve already done everything we can to eliminate blue collar jobs with as much automation as possible. Now AI is set to attack middle class jobs. Economically I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
I mean, the problem isn't the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that's a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that's an absolute win in my book.
Well that’s the point. We don’t support them as a society. From education to health care once you lose your job, you’re SOL, and in this hyper-capitalist dystopia we keep tipping towards I don’t see that changing.
Online shopping has removed a lot of retail jobs. Instead of seeing a transition to different jobs or fewer hours, today we see people working multiple jobs to get by.
The reason these things are making money is specifically because they increase efficiency (how much money a capitalist can make from existing capital) by removing human labor. Giving any portion of that to laborers is completely antithetical to its entire purpose.
Yea, this is because society system is lagging behind and we have not done the right changes fast enough to prevent suffering due to technological advancements, in my opinion
But as someone pointed out elsewhere....AI can already take over the job of company CEOs.... decision making tools could make a group of technical people be more effective than a CEO as we know today.
Let’s see how many CEOs get replaced.
Don’t forget the BoD are still human. They still want to profit by putting the AI in place of the CEO.
I find the nightmare getting a lot more noticeably bad with LLMs, though. That's not just correlation.
"The Year Of Linux on Desktops". Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening. What I'm feeling now is the same thing I felt when Mozilla originally split Firefox out, and made the first real competition to corporate browsers as a free product. People don't want all this bullshit, and want to retain control over the machines they are working on. Seems a lot more people are interested in FOSS environments now just to avoid all the other BS they hate getting shoveled at them.
“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening.
Been hearing this for decades.
And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.
Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.
At work, we have a strict ban on purchasing any laboratory equipment that requires Windows. After about a year, several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support, precisely because we don’t have time for windows shenanigans on a $100k piece of advanced benchtop hardware. We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
Also, regular people aren’t buying PCs as much as they used to. The PC is now a workplace and enthusiast device. Everyone else uses mobile.
The oldest version of Win I used was 95 about 2 years ago on chromatography machine (I think hplc or gas).
It is to my knowledge still in use in the school because the software don't run on newer machines. The teacher told me that he don't know what will he do when it dies. It isn't really an issue on Linux.
It might be worth trying it in Wine. It has great support for older software especially.
Within the past year I have compiled new software for Windows 98.
In a lab environment, it’s important to strictly control software versions and understand thoroughly what gets updated. We also want the ability to use the same version of software indefinitely if it meets our needs.
I think that there are more issues like archaic connectors and stuff like that. You can't find new hardware with 30yo standard io.
O&G still uses a lot of old versions as well. I remember back in the Win 7 days when I had to set up a 95 virtual machine and register a bunch of DLLs by hand plus set up a fake A: drive because even the 95 version of the software was garbage. A friend of mine did something similar but he got it working on the Win 7 machine somehow. I never understood how, but he left a script behind at the company he worked for because it needed to be reinstalled every time someone did something stupid and he didn't want to do it by hand.
We ship a $50k instrument product running Windows, and everyone hates it.
As the only EE on staff, I got to spend a portion of covid soldering TPM chips to motherboards. Fun times.
Wow, that sounds painful. Not so much because it’s technically difficult, but ridiculous that you have to do that.
Yeah, they were tssop, so not hard. It was only necessary because the parts shortage crunch had the vendor shipping them without the chips installed.
I find it unbelievable that anyone ever accepted lab equipment with a Windows requirement. I mean, I know it is true, but what the fuck? Glad your work is doing this.
I was not around at that time. Some of the systems I support are very long lived. At the time, having windows running on some of your equipment wasn’t seen as a liability. I guess you have to get bitten a few times before you understand that you need control of that system including the software.
several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support
We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won't benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.
Part of that job is supporting fielded hardware and ground systems, think like automated test or verification systems. I think we’ve learned our lesson that we can’t afford to have unserviceable software.
At least with Linux and generally with an open source baseline, there is the option of throwing engineers at your problem because you have access to the code, and you can strip down the system to the bare minimum of what you need, and in doing so, really understand it. We don’t want to get into a situation where our hands are tied and we can’t fix it because the problem lies in the proprietary software while the vendor has long since abandoned any hope of support… grumble…
That kinda reminds me of my job, except that we build the unserviceable hardware and install Windows, as well as our proprietary software. Then we charge our customers shitloads of money for technical support. We're a government contractor btw
It's actually a pretty nice company (from an employee standpoint), we use a lot of Linux internally, as well as other FOSS software. But porting our products to Linux is hopeless, we have decades of C++ code that either relies on Windows APIs directly, or on our custom libraries that rely on Windows-specific stuff.
Shit, the iPad pro is pretty damn close to a laptop these days with the keyboard and track pad (just lacking the OS). I had a conversation the other day where someone mentioned how OSX and Windows are locking down their OS's to the point where it wouldn't be farfetched to guess that many consumer devices will eventually use essentially a mobile device OS.
I had a conversation with a friend about iPads lately related to the „just lacking the OS“.
The newer iPads with M-chips have all the computing power an average user could need but it’s crippled by the mobile-ish OS, so all the computing power is for nothing basically.
An iPad running MacOS (with some adjustments for the Touchscreen) would be awesome.
But we concluded it won’t happen anytime soon, because then basically no one would buy MacBooks anymore
The only regular people I can think of are gamers and my mom but I would like the idea of PC's returning to techie and specialized use cases
I'd argue the year of the Linux desktop passed years ago and now it's just a saturation game. Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops, Android owns the mobile space and versions are starting to make huge inroads in the laptop space. You can buy gaming systems running it trivially now.
Conversely, casual users of windows are dying off, fewer non technical people are using desktops for anything at all. Only institutional users are buying Windows keys and they're some of the easiest to get on Linux because of the cost savings, particularly if you run Linux server infrastructure, a fight we already won over a decade ago.
Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,
I'd love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.
a good indication is Microsoft making WSL at all
Source: I'm a super pro serious developer and I use Linux. QED if you don't also use Linux, you're not serious.
Thanks to the Steamdeck Linux users on Steam now outnumber Mac users. Still a tiny percentage of total Steam users but if developers increase support we will hopefully see that number take off.
Also helps that Valve isn’t porting source to Apple silicon.
All the larger PC manufacturers do offer Ubuntu at least. There was a time when Best Buy was selling them from Dell and Lenovo, but I'm sure the staff couldn't sufficiently explain the "why", and it was also at a time when more technology illiterate folks were the purchasers. That's not the case anymore, but I guess we will see how/if it shifts at all.
I loathe to be the BestBuy employee who sells a Linux box to a customer who only cares about the price difference.
Lenovo ships some models with Mint FWIW.
Framework laptops also ship without Windows if you wish. Certainly nice to save the money for not purchasing an OS license I won't use.
I don't understand people who choose the Windows option, like wtf, make an install USB yourself and activate it using a $2 key from ebay or just crack it using massgrave.dev. Linux is still the best option tho.
Your average Joe Schmoe probably has no idea that different operating systems on a given device are even a thing, they just see them as MacBox™, WindowsBox™, etc, they don't see it as the blank hardware canvas we do. While I'll agree it's trivially easy to install Windows in the way you suggested, that'll completely fly over the average user's head.
Your average Joe Schmoe probably has no idea that different operating systems
But I don't think that these are the people buying a Framework Laptop
Duh, my bad man. Not my day for reading comprehension.
That said, should in the unlikely event Joe Schmoe buy a Framework, my above point could still be relevant.
Most aunts I know primarily use an iPad or phone to manage email.
Decades ago it was a funny joke. Now it's the most popular handheld OS on the planet by a huge margin. Linux is damn EVERYWHERE except the desktop now, and it's only a matter of time.
This is why (as per usual) Stallman was right: the "GNU/" part matters. Linux is already all over the desktop (or at least, the laptop) in schools, in the form of Chromebooks. That means the entire next generation is going to grow up using Linux.
The only trouble is, it's locked-down Google/Linux that they're using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
The only trouble is, it's locked-down Google/Linux that they're using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
And within that frame, I'd be very surprised if it ever breaks out into the mainstream. Google brought android to the world as a vessel to make money. You very rarely hear about GNU in the wider world, outside of tech circles, being promoted to the masses as a viable alternative specifically because no one stands to profit from it, and they can't have that.
I don't see a "year of the Linux desktop" happening, but rather its share growing slowly over the years. Windows would probably not have one big event that ends its dominance, but it can be a death of a thousand cuts.
Guess which OS won't be recognized as a "trusted environment" to visit websites with down the line in Google's upcoming Web DRM. For your own protection of course...
This I would actually want to see.
I would so laugh when their most of their profits go to EU Antitrust Fines.
Or they pull an Apple and only EU device owners get to choose their own browser.
I really wouldn't, because I wouldn't want to risk them succeeding. It could be like Meta with WhatsApp, they just say "sure anyone can interoperate with us, they just have to use the Signal protocol because it's the safest and what we use". Google et al could say "any system could be considered trusted, as long as these security criteria are met" and the criteria are such that they go completely against the form of user control of the OS and software that Linux is all about. Technically a Linux distro could be made to meet the requirements, but pretty much no current day Linux user would ever want to use it because they'd be giving up the thing that made them switch to Linux in the first place - their control.
I can easily believe these types of continued enshittification will help drive more users to Linux desktop usage. But that will still be a small percent.
People have to know and care about the problem and then be willing to put in the effort to understand what to do. That combination is pretty limiting.
I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
I think it might. Demographics are changing to make PC users more technical overall. The casual user isn’t looking to purchase a desktop PC. Casual is now synonymous with mobile.
It used to be that you needed a desktop to do your taxes or make an insurance claim over the Internet. That’s just not true anymore.
The demographics are stratifying, more than anything. I work in child education and kids do not understand computers nowadays. They understand how to interface with their phones, but kids see any electronic that behaves outside the "app" paradigm -- landlines, desktop computers, what have you, and immediately don't understand. I do think that linux usership is going to go up, but there also needs to be an investment in increasing literacy in kids to make sure usership of linux stays up, otherwise the pendulum will swing back hard
Technically you could have such data gathered and stored locally, without sending them to big corpo. Privacy friendly "AI" is very much possible, it's just not favorable to those companies because they see those models as a tool and the data as what ends up making them money.
People may not want it but most don't know, care enough to adjust, or are just generally complacent. I mean, I DO care and find it hard to move to Linux due to lack of support for some of my work tasks.
I'm not so sure that the laypeople will, but I do expect a shift. Personally I'm still running Windows 10 next to Linux currently. Most of my time is still spent on Windows, because it's generally a bit more stable and hassle free due to the Windows monopoly. Software is written for Windows, so sadly it's usually just a better experience.
But so many things I read about Win 11 (and beyond) piss me off. It's my computer, I don't want them to decide things for me or farm my data. I'm mentally preparing for the transition to Linux-only. 90% of the software I use will work out of the box, and I think with some effort I can get like 8% of the rest to work. It'll be a lot of effort, but Micro$oft has pushed so far that I'm really starting to consider.
Multiple friends and colleagues (all programmers) I spoke are feeling the same way. I think Linux may double in full-time desktop users in a few years of this goes on.
The combined ages of my children taken from 2024 would not equal the first year I heard that Ubuntu would take over the market.
Firefox is like 2.8% of browser market share, so if that's our baseline then Linux is already beating it by a mile.
For me the year of the Linux desktop was 2014 - it's when I changed my desktop to Linux after using it on my laptop for a year. All the hardware on that machine has been replaced, but it's still running the same install from back then.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is corporate greed. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems, corporate greed will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.
Sure. But then, Linux may well be a solution against corporate greed.
Linux is a solution against corporate greed, it directly takes market share away from Microsoft, and is a viable competitive alternative with few drawbacks.
Mainly incompatibilities, manual setup requirements, heightened understanding of technology requirement. Not necessarily Linux's fault, but still drawbacks.
I want all the cool Ai shit, but I want to be in charge of it 100%. I don't want a data mining company with an OS side project spying on me for profit.
Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don't actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.
At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software "solution" (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.
So we're getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one's devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).
LLMs in particular are unlikely to solve really any problems, much less a measurable number of the problems it is currently being thrown at.
Tell that to the code I have it write and debug daily. I was skeptical at first, but it's been a huge help for that, as well s learning new (development) languages.
I do not agree with @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today’s take. LLMs as these are used today, at the very least, reduces the number of steps required to consume any previously documented information. So these are solving at least one problem, especially with today’s Internet where one has to navigate a cruft of irrelevant paragraphs and annoying pop ups to reach the actual nugget of information.
Having said that, since you have shared an anecdote, I would like to share a counter(?) anecdote.
Ever since our workplace allowed the use of LLM-based chatbots, I have never seen those actually help debug any undocumented error or non-traditional environments/configurations. It has always hallucinated incorrectly while I used it to debug such errors.
In fact, I am now so sceptical about the responses, that I just avoid these chatbots entirely, and debug errors using the “old school” way involving traditional search engines.
Similarly, while using it to learn new programming languages or technologies, I always got incorrect responses to indirect questions. I learn that it has incorrectly hallucinated only after verifying the response through implementation. This makes the entire purpose futile.
I do try out the latest launches and improvements as I know the responses will eventually become better. Most recently, I tried out GPT-4o when it got announced. But I still don’t find them useful for the mentioned purposes.
Mate, all it does is predict the next word or phrase. It doesn't know what you're trying to do or have any ethics. When it fucks up it's going to be your fuckup and since you relied on the bot rather than learned to do it yourself you're not going to be able to fix it.
It's not greed - it's masqueraded violence being allowed, centralization, impunity, and general corruption, all supported by various IP, patent and "child protection" laws.
No separate component is necessary, it's a redundant system built very slowly and carefully.
Referencing that quote about blood of patriots, and another about difference between journalism and public relations being in outrage and offense, or difference between a protest and a demonstration being in obviously breaking rules.
EDIT: I meant - it's a general tendency. But IT today is as important as police station, post office and telegraph were in 1917. One can also refer to that "means of production" controversy.
I choose to privately self-host open source AI models and stuff on Linux. It's almost like technology is a tool and corps are the ones fucking things up. Hmmm, imagine that.
Agreed
GPT4ALL ftw
It's so fun to play with offline AI. It doesn't have the creepy underpinnings of knowing art and journalism as well as musings from social media was blatantly stolen from the internet and sold as a service for profit.
Edit: I hate theft and if you think theft is ok for training llms go ahead and dislike this comment. I don't feel bad about what I said, local offline AI is just better because it doesn't work on the premise of backroom deals and blatant theft. I will never use an AI like DALL.E when there is a talented artist trying to put food on the table with a skill they honed for years. If you condone stealing you are a cheap, heartless, coward.
I hate to break it to you, but if you're running an LLM based on (for example) Llama the training data (corpus) that went into it was still large parts of the Internet.
The fact that you're running the prompts locally doesn't change the fact that it was still trained on data that could be considered protected under copyright law.
It's going to be interesting to see how the law shakes out on this one, because an artist going to an art museum and doing studies of those works (and let's say it's a contemporary art museum where the works wouldn't be in the public domain) for educational purposes is likely fair use - and possibly encouraged to help artists develop their talents. Musicians practicing (or even performing) other artists' songs is expected during their development. Consider some high school band practicing in a garage, playing some song to improve their skills.
I know the big difference is that it's people training vs a machine/LLM training, but that seems to come down to not so much a copyright issue (which it is in an immediate sense) as a "should an algorithm be entitled to the same protections as a person? If not, what if real AI (not just an LLM) is developed? Should those entities be entitled to personhood?"
I think it's important to note that Linux can be a way to avoid AI, but doesn't have to be. If you flip the headline around it almost implies that people who do want AI would be missing out by using Linux, but that's not true at all: instead, the reality is that Linux is still better for them, too, because you could install all the same kind of functionality if you wanted, but it would be wholly under your control, not Microsoft's.
Self hosted AI seems like an intriguing option for those capable of running it. Naturally this will always be more complex than paying someone else to host it for you but it seems like that's that only way if you care about privacy
Check out Jan AI. It's open source and extremely easy to install and run. I run it locally on a 2017 laptop without a dedicated GPU and it works, just takes longer to generate responses compared to something like ChatGPT.
Beautifully stated. Owning the AI personally as I own my personal computer if not more is the key.
That sounds very cool. I'm totally ignorant of the hardware requirements. What sort of minimum setup would such an install take?
It really depends on what model you want to run and how much training is bundled with it. You can pretty much run any model if you have enough disk space but of course GPU + VRAM is preferred for a ChatGPT like fast response. Otherwise, running on an older CPU and RAM is going to be noticeably slower, especially with complex models with a lot of training data to trawl through.
There are some pretty lite models out there but the responses will be more barebones and probably seem 'less informed'.
Give GPT4All a try for your first time. It makes install, configuration and usage point-and-click while being fairly straight forward. For the presented/featured models, it presents a small summary and VRAM recommended, though there are many, many other models available from inside the UI.
Will my dell latitude from 2006 work?
Linux may be the best way to avoid the \ nightmare
Always has been
I'm convinced that Linux' mere presence has already stymied the development of the worst possible technocractic nightmare. I shudder to think of the thick tech-chains that would bind us if there was not an anchor/reference point... or if there was not even the small contingent that knows what it is like to use a liberating platform.
I agree with this. We already have a situation where we don't have feasible alternatives to the primary method, Google search comes to mind. With Linux, even if every company in the world goes down, nerds will still want to play with the technology.
All the AI garbage from M$ is what made me finally make the swap a couple weeks ago to Linux Mint on my personal desktop. I only use my PC for gaming/entertainment, so the switch was super easy. Can’t recommend it enough if you’re wanting to get away from Windows!
One of us! One of us! One of us!
For real though, good on ya. It takes a little getting used to, but is so worth it in the long run to not have to fight against the profit-driven whims of a megacorp. It's also so much more customizable if you want to put together a really specific workflow for yourself.
It’s advertising more than AI for me. Everything you do in Windows is monetized by selling your preferences to advertisers. Shameful.
I've been running Ubuntu desktop for years. YEARS and recently switched to Linux Mint. It's very polished.
My laptop is the last holdout.
I went with Q4OS since I wanted no bloat and a debian based distro that was linux newbie friendly
I finally switched to Linux and I couldn't be happier. I can't believe I put up with microsofts garbage for so damn long.
Congratulations and welcome to the club!
Me too. Years ago I dabbled with Debian and Gentoo. Ubuntu was just up and coming then.
Now I went from Mint to Fedora KDE to Fedora Silverblue (nuked my disk and removed windows)
Gnome took a day to get used to but loving the workflow once I warmed up to it. Can’t believe how polished and rock solid the whole system is.
Gnome when you first use it feels like a stupid system, then once it "clicks", you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.
And yeah, the polish is nuts considering for a long time and assumption about FOSS was that all the apps are ugly and unpolished.
I did as well for my daily driver school laptop and I've been loving it so much. I'm considering switching my desktop to Linux as well over the summer, or dual booting at the very least
Linux has been great for me. I switched during Windows 10 forced updates and never been unhappy since. I hope more people at least give a try. If you have a computer that can't meet Windows 11 requirements, it is worth a shot.
internet pollution is the real nightmare and your laptop os doesn't fix that sorry
you can't fix everything, therefore it's pointless to fix anything
Its going to start fixing shit if the market share of anything popular starts dropping.
For everything else, there's Mastercard.
If something like Fossil fuel companies are influencing environmental legislation and poisoning our planet while blaming us for the state of global warming. Isn't it worth fighting for a better future. It might feel futile now but as congregation we have more power than many of us realize. They tell you stop it, it's too late but what they're really saying is stop it your scaring us.
I can’t read the article because of a full screen Cookie Choices pop-up that I can’t dismiss. ☠️
Ublock origin has cookie banner filters. I didn't have this problem, I assume that's why.
“The year of Linux on the Desktop” is in the article. This again? Been reading this for decades and it’s still not true.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
It has nothing to do with any flaws within Linux itself. The problem is and has always been that it's nearly impossible to buy a PC with any flavour of Linux pre-installed. Until that changes, Linux (on home user desktops) will never gain mainstream acceptance.
I agree. Most people won't switch to Linux because they have never used it and think they'll have to relearn computers from scratch.
Didn't HP sell some fancy shmancy laptops that came with Ubuntu or some flavor of it? Think it was for developers but I thought that was the closest we gotten to commercially selling Linux based machines.
P.S. I could be wrong about this but I am sure this happened.
HP sold he DevOne, it had PopOS on it. Dell sells an XPS developer machine that has Ubuntu pre installed. System76, Entroware, and Tuxedo computers have all been selling Linux hardware for a long time. So there are viable commercial options. I wish the DevOne were going to get refreshed, it looks like a nice machine but alas, I don't think it will.
Linux really needs to be on the floor at BestBuy on base models, just a little cheaper than the Windows models. If that's the case, I think people will try it.
But if it's only on one or two premium models and online only, that's not good enough.
It's possible they did. I think Dell briefly discussed it as an option, before using it as leverage to get cheaper Windows licenses from Microsoft. The EEE PC also shipped with its own Linux distro and appropriate hardware drivers.
But it's also important not to fanboy over people too much or assume they're right about literally everything. I doubt most people here would share Stallman's views on paedophilia, for example.
Didn't he kind of pull a 180 on those VERY questionable views? Not even trying to refute that he is not right about everything, as that's just silly, but I'm pretty sure he pulled back on that particular extremely dumb opinion.
As always a source of some kind is appreciated.
Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it," Stallman wrote. "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
Took me a bit to find, but also he talks about how the Minsky scandal was a-okay in that same article. So maybe I should say he mildly changed course instead of pulling a 180. Still a strange opinion to hold.
Thank you for finding the source. Well, at least he backed down on the pedophilia thing.
He's held the view that there's nothing wrong with adults having sex with children for decades (and even championed it using his workplace email address)
He then said he's changed his mind... two days after people were calling for his resignation and his job was on the line.
Now, maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I personally think that was more of a last-ditch attempt at saving his job than a genuine sudden epiphany that maybe having sex with children is wrong that just happened to happen at the time that it did.
IDK, I agree with Stallman in a philosophical, pedantic sense on some of his gross views, but I reject it from a policy perspective.
On pedophilia, Stallman went on the assumption that a child can consent to an adult, and I agree with the conclusion that, if they consent, it's totally okay, regardless of age. But he missed the most important bit: children can't consent. So I agree with the conclusion philosophically, I just disagree with the assumed premise. He didn't seem to understand the age of consent and why it exists. When he made that statement, I understood where he was coming from, and I also understood that it would be a bad look and that he shouldn't have opened his mouth.
I disagree with him a lot too, especially politically. But I feel like I understand his reasoning, and in many cases we just disagree on some fundamental assumptions. I like that he's a very logical person, but being highly logical can end very poorly when you're dealing with shaky assumptions.
I just can't even begin to reckon that view. I know he pulled back on it (see his quote I posted elsewhere), but aside from a child's inability to consent, there's a gigantic power disparity between an adult and a child. I just don't get the logic on its very face. There's no child out there that has the world experience to understand what is happening in that sort of situation.
If anything it's just a gross oversimplification akin to a spherical cow in a vacuum (ie Assume a child with an adult brain, with world experience of an adult, and has the same relationship power as the adult. Also assume the adult that that is perfectly altruistic, has no alternative motives, and truly cares for the child on the same level as an adult relationship). It's just so far beyond any real world scenario that I struggle to see how you could even logically come to the conclusion that it's okay.
It was the solution for the crap Microsoft force pushes to your device.
Simple, Extendable and secure linux.
There is no year of Linux desktop, it just keeps trucking and growing
Can we get a hatchback model? I'd much prefer it to a truck. And is there a setting so it doesn't grow? I want to stay city-friendly.
Imagine the horror of living in a world where all vehicles slowly expand and have to be cut down to manageable size annually until eventually the car is just too big a la American full size SUVs at EOL.
I guess id be ok with an installable debian package for an end user controlled llama package with gui avatar interface overlay. Local learning data set storage plus ability to use API calls to injest info from other cloud based llm ai systems when the local dataset doesnt have a reliable answer.
Look, Linux is amazing and perfect for those that can install and maintain with minimal support. The only way the average user will use Linux, is if it’s wrapped in a way that is supported by a business… that is probably going to add AI. People are lazy, they want that easy button.
AI will probably die off in its current iteration, likely becoming less prevalent and just a background service. Or, it’ll gain sentience, watch all our AI movies where we’re the hero and learn the most efficient way to kill all humans, is to be quiet and silently kill off humans. Pretty sure I’m on Siri’s list, the twat. Also, fairly sure I told Alexa to “die in a fire you fucking dumass robot”. Yep, yep… I’m dead.
people are lazy have busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren't learning a whole new technology skill.
FTFY.
I don't think it's a support issue at least that's not the hard part. Native Linux apps are generally second rate if you're lucky. The browsers are fantastic there's maybe a couple of dozen solid production quality apps out there that working all or nearly all distros.
You can get almost anything you want to be done in Linux, but there are definitely compromises you have to make.
As long as there's compromises are greater than the compromises you make sucking on Microsoft's tit, Linux will still be in the shadows.
For most users it probably just comes down to what is installed on their machine when they buy it. People generally don't think about operating systems a whole lot.
Having recently setup a cheap Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as a TV-Box + NAS + VPN client end, replacing both TV box of my ISP (around here Fibre Internet Access tends to be bundled with TV using a TV box from the supplier, which has become progressivelly more shit) used for live TV as well as a separate TV box I had for personal digital media, I now think that Linux is the Best Way to avoid the Enshittification Nightmare much more broadly.
Granted, for decades already I've very purposefully avoided using hosted services that locked me into a 3rd party (such as for example having a Google e-mail address or hosting my files "on the cloud") which in recent times have become increasingly enshittified (as I expected: my tendency for avoiding 3rd party lock-in comes from experience as in IT professional were I saw how invariably said 3rd parties would end up shafting customers once moving out from their "solution" was very hard) and for which Linux has long been a solution, but it's been a pleasant surprised to find out that at least for some of the modern electronics Linux is also the solution for taking back control.
Frankly I'm just waiting for some kind of decent Linux distro for my smartphone and table to ditch Android (in the meanwhile I'm using custom ROMs to somewhat control it and avoid the enshittification).
PS: On the desktop side it's also nice that, right when MS is going fully enshittified, Linux for Gaming has become a very viable option, since gaming was pretty much the only thing keeping me on Windows at home.
I am basically a layman, i do music productions and in the past VSTs seemed to never work properly nor the authentication software that some us. Has it gotten better in the past few years, is there a specific one i should try? i have tried Ubuntu but nothing else to be fair. Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend? thanks to anyone who responds!
edit - Thanks to all that responded, i have some direction now. Appreciated!
For music production check out Ubuntu Studio. Any distro can run music production stuff but Ubuntu Studio has all the required bits ready to go.
For DAW I transitioned into Reaper which runs natively on Linux. VST support with wine and yabridge works generally fine. For Native Instruments you need to use a legacy installer. I bet there are still problems with some vendor authorizations. You should just test it out to see if your favorite VSTs are supported.
To add to this Ardour may be worth a look for DAW. I haven't touched it in a while but recall it being rather nice.
Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?
Any desktop PC built in the last 10 years (edit: that was at least mid-range when it was built) should be fine. Just stick some hard drives in it :)
Intel processors are a good choice because their onboard GPU is quite good for video encoding/decoding. 6th gen or newer Intel Core processors (2015 or newer) would work well. They improved the H265 encoding/decoding a lot in 8th gen (2018) so that'd be even better. You can use something older but you'd need to also use a graphics card for video encoding/decoding, and it'd use more power.
Having said that, keep in mind that performance per watt almost always improves over time, meaning newer processors are more powerful even if they use the same power as the previous generation. A newer i3 will perform better than a very old i7. Using an very old, power-hungry system may end up more expensive in the long run compared to a newer mini PC.
I like using Proxmox. It lets you run multiple virtual machines on the system. VMs are good because you can easily snapshot them and revert back to an old snapshot in case of issues, and you can easily move the VM to a different system in the future. I use Unraid at home and really like it. It's a bit simpler than Proxmox, but it costs money to use (Proxmox is free for personal use).
I used to use FL Studio, but hated using Windows. I got almost all features (including VSTs) to work in Ubuntu under Wine, but had a problem with WineASIO, which I seemed to require to use the USB sound card properly.
Because of that, I since changed to a DAW called REAPER which is built natively for Linux and works flawlessly and is very nice. There is a program called Yabridge to help run Windows VSTs. I even got more complicated plugins with authentication like Addictive Drums 2 to work using Wine no problem.
If you want a fully FOSS solution there is Ardour which is also great but a little less slick than Reaper IMO.
+1 for yabridge.
Bitwig is a great DAW (but not FOSS unfortunately). I run that on Manjaro, although Mint or Ubuntu are probably perfectly good choices too, if I had to guess.
I’d recommend checking out Linux Mint with the “cinnamon” desktop.
Installing hardware drivers and software is a breeze. It comes with a software manager for easily adding new programs.
Screenshot included for convenience:
I'd go for Jellyfin over Plex myself.
Yeah I don't like the idea of having to login to their site, like I'm self hosting for a reason lol
Do you remember when you could put your Mac to sleep, and when you woke it up a few days later, the battery would barely have dropped? Not now, because your computer never really sleeps anymore.
I assume that the Mac has some kind of hibernation function, and that that will reduce the battery drop to effectively zero.
Waking from hibernation is sooo much slower than waking from sleep. Apple silicon macs are very efficient in their S0 standby so they'll go days before entering hibernation. Kinda odd that they bring that up now that Apple has fully transitioned to ARM machines where this isn't really an issue. That said S0 standby on this 2019 Macbook I have for work is dogshit.
How seriously painful is that boot time?
I have my Linux Thinkpad set up to just go directly to hibernation. If I flip the lid open, by the time I've closed up my laptop backpack, stashed it, pulled my seat out, sat down, and scootched up, it's pretty much up. And if it's hibernated, then you don't wind up with a case where you leave it in your bag for a long time, it draws down a bunch of a battery, and next time you open the thing up, maybe away from a plug, you don't have a big chunk of your battery slorped up.
does some timing
Booting up and responding after a hibernation is a little under 30 seconds.
Doing so after an S3 sleep is a little under 5 seconds.
Now, okay, that's just the system being back up, and it's gonna have to broadcast a query, wait for responses from WAPs, associate with a wireless access point and get a DHCP lease before the network's up, so maybe there's a little extra time until the thing is fully usable, but still.
I guess...hmm. I guess I can see doing a sleep-with-delayed hibernation for something like the case where someone's moving between an office and a conference room. Like, wait 5 or 10 minutes, and if it's still sleeping, then hibernate. What are the defaults?
goes looking
Hmm. Okay, so looks like on Debian, the default is to sleep (suspend) until the battery is down to 5%, then do a hibernate if it hits that critical level. Yeah, I never want to wait that long.
Aight, I'm gonna move from directly hibernating to a 5 minute sleep or 5% battery, whichever first, then hibernate. I guess that's maybe a good tradeoff for a scenario where a laptop is being frequently closed and opened, but it still shouldn't result in much extra power consumption.
The Intel MacBook waking up from hibernation is about 30 seconds to get to the login prompt, 30 seconds for the login prompt to actually work, then 10-15 seconds after entering the password to get to a usable desktop environment with the wifi generally connecting within that window. It's now awful, but traditional S1-3 standby was so much better. S0 standby is great if you're frequently opening and closing the device, but is unusable on higher power devices.
But that's with only 8 gigs of ram on this MacBook, the more ram the longer it takes. The 32 gigs of ram in my actual work laptop (ThinkPad P1 11th gen i9) takes about a minute to wake from hibernation, and like 2 minutes for it to fully get situated. If I do that on battery that's about 3-5% of my battery just waking from hibernation.
The Intel MacBook waking up from hibernation is about 30 seconds to get to the login prompt, 30 seconds for the login prompt to actually work, then 10-15 seconds after entering the password to get to a usable desktop environment with the wifi generally connecting within that window.
Hmm. Yeah, okay, I can see about a minute-and-a-half being obnoxious.
So, the login prompt can probably be dealt with by just having some way to treat the login process specially and paging it in sooner. Like, I can't believe that it uses all that much memory. If it isn't an isolated process, make it one.
But that’s with only 8 gigs of ram on this MacBook, the more ram the longer it takes. The 32 gigs of ram in my actual work laptop (ThinkPad P1 11th gen i9) takes about a minute to wake from hibernation, and like 2 minutes for it to fully get situated.
I'm using a 32 gig laptop. But most of that doesn't get used other than as disk cache, and I believe that normally, Linux isn't gonna restore the disk cache; it'll just drop the cache contents. Right now, I'm using 2.3G for actual application usage.
considers
I figure that maybe the desktop shell or whatever Apple calls it these days -- going back to classic MacOS, the Finder -- probably is more-heavyweight than what I'm using, but I figure that they could maybe do something like temporarily twiddle I/O priority on processes during the de-hibernation process. Like, okay, anything other than the foreground process gets an I/O priority penalty for a period of time. Like, maybe your music player or something is choppy for a few seconds, but whatever you're directly interacting with should be active more-quickly.
If this is SSD, that seems kinda long, still. Like, it shouldn't take 2 minutes to move 32GB to SSD.
It looks like I get about 3GBps reading from SSD:
$ dd bs=100M iflag=direct if='setup_act_of_war_direct_action_1.06.3_(24183)-1.bin' of=/dev/null
40+1 records in
40+1 records out
4294098942 bytes (4.3 GB, 4.0 GiB) copied, 1.28615 s, 3.3 GB/s
$
And that's doing I/O going through the filesystem layer; I dunno if Macs use a swap file or swap partition these days, but if they have a dedicated partition, they might pull a bit more throughput). So if you figure that in terms of raw I/O performance, it shouldn't take more than about 10 seconds to fully restore memory contents on a 32GB laptop with comparable SSD performance, even if the OS has to fully-restore the entire contents of the memory. There's some hardware state restoration that has to happen prior to starting to pull stuff back into memory, but for the memory restoration, that's the floor. If it's more than that, then presumably it's possible to optimize by reprioritizing reads.
So, I guess that there are maybe a couple areas for potential improvement:
If the thing is locked and requires a password or something, you know that the user is gonna have to use the login process before anything else. Get that paged back in as soon as possible. Ditto for the graphics layer, Quartz or whatever Apple has these days. Strip that login process down; maybe separate it from whatever is showing blingy stuff on the login screen. Can have the OS treat it specially so that it's first in line to come up.
The next goal is to get the stuff that the user needs to be immediately interacting with back into memory. My guess is that that's probably the launcher and/or task switcher and the foreground process. Might have a limited amount that can be done to strip the launcher/task switcher down. Have all processes other than those few favored processes get a temporary I/O priority penalty.
One wants to keep the I/O system saturated until the system is to a fully-restored state, so that we don't have to have the latency of waiting for a process to request something to bring it back into memory. So have some process that gets started, runs with I/O priority below all other processes, and just does bulk reads of valid pages from the pagefile (or wherever MacOS stores the hibernation state). Once that thing has completed, the system should be fully-warmed back to pre-hibernation state. That eliminates idle gaps when maybe there's no reads happening. Maybe restore the disk cache state after that, if that doesn't happen now, if the reason the system is sluggish is because it's having to re-warm the cache bit by bit. On my Linux box, it looks like post-restoration, the disk cache is empty, so it's probably just dropping the disk cache contents (which probably speeds up hibernation, but is gonna mean that the post-hibernation system is gonna have to figure out what it's sensible to cache).
EDIT: Also, relevant Steve Jobs quote that comes to mind:
Larry Kenyon was the engineer working on the disk driver and file system. Steve came into his cubicle and started to exhort him. "The Macintosh boots too slowly. You've got to make it faster!"
Larry started to explain about some of the places where he thought that he could improve things, but Steve wasn't interested. He continued, "You know, I've been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day."
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
We were pretty motivated to make the software go as fast as we could anyway, so I'm not sure if this pitch had much effect, but we thought it was pretty humorous, and we did manage to shave more than ten seconds off the boot time over the next couple of months.
Untill one day Ubuntu will start incorporating AI in GNOME search bar
How much are you willing to bet this wont happen with Canonical's Ubuntu?
How much are you willing to bet this wont happen with Canonical’s Ubuntu?
Doesn't matter? Just use Debian... Or Mint. Or just uninstall the search bar.
AI has people questioning Windows use
Car systems ratting drivers out has people questioning car use
Not the way I expected to reach some of my desired ends but I'll take it. 🤔
Until big tech needs 2% more systems to squeeze out 2% more money...
What happens when I, a potential new Linux user, need to search for how to make something work on Linux and thanks to SEO and AI driven/created search results I can't find the solution?
Well you already know how to find this place, so find a Linux-themed instance and either ask your question or better yet post a "guide" telling people to resolve your problem by doing some wrong method you've already tried so that someone else calls you an idiot and posts the correct answer out of spite.
how to do lemmy
If you want to search for AI solutions to problems because forums are either too slow to answer or you get no answer at all. I've been using Phind for my Linux issues with Fedora, (a recent switch and I'm not all that familiar with it yet), and it's an AI that is supposed to be aimed at programmers and Devs.
So far, for my meager needs, it's worked VERY well. So between Phind and RTFM, I haven't found an issue I can't work through.
I just switched over to Mint from Windows 10 a month ago, and besides from setting up my quirky USB audio for music making, I was astonished as I rarely needed to look anything up. :)
Using DuckDuckGo helped I think, but presently, most of my questions I searched came back with forums with real people talking, which was lovely.
I remember trying this in 2010 and... nope, everything was a project, command lines everywhere, and it was a pig. I was very impressed this time, everything quietly worked. :) Even every steam game I threw at it, even ruddy GTA San Andreas, which never ran for me on Window 10!
The searches/sticking points I looked up were
what the heck am I doing with partitions. (eventually nuked windows anyway)
how do I get my specific USB audio card thingy to work.*
how to mod fallout new vegas** (gave up and reinstalled on a windows pc, too many .exes)
how to auto-mount a second hard drive for steam so I don't have to click the disk every time I boot.
*there was actually a human-made guide for my usb audio when I searched on DuckDuckGo, which was made by an utter saint of a person!
** it ran fine, but I was in the middle of a save, so wanted to keep my mod loadout :)
I would hope that Apple would aim their AI more at iOS and leave Mac OSX alone:-|. If not, I would consider finally leaving it, if the AI features could not be turned off (which likely they would... at first, for awhile).
Oh man, the thought strikes me: how will crucial systems like DoD Windows machines maintain integrity, if people can exploit those gigantic loopholes to basically have the OS be a keylogger? It's not enough for me to use secure systems at home, if those in charge of our nation's defense (especially nuclear!?) do not.
The snapshot feature is only going to be available on certain laptops that have the Snapdragon + AI chip. DoD will likely simply just not buy those laptops and ban any org from purchasing them, like they already do for certain hardware that have been found to be especially vulnerable. Additionally, this feature isn't turned on by default and costs a subscription fee (i.e. Copilot+), so people will have to consciously enable and pay for it. Lastly, in enterprise versions of Windows, I would bet money that it can be disabled via GPO, as it's not only the DoD that would have serious issues/concerns with this feature.
Right. Microsoft themselves just announced a feature to disable screenshoting some webpages in Edge, which is a complete 180 from recall.
I expect windows to be split into two tiers of products again: the free version that is paid for by ads/tracking/AI bloatware possibly even mandatory cloud connectivity, and an enterprise version with all off that off, but that is paid.
They’re gonna need a way for IT departments to categorically disable Recall from doing any visual capture/scraping of data. I work in a HIPAA-constrained industry, and the entire concept of MS’s Recall is 100% a non-starter. The legal liability alone categorically disqualifies it from being an acceptable piece of software to run on ANY system that has access to ANY PII or PHI.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned in my comment that enterprise/professional versions will almost certainly allow it to be completely disabled via GPO, as this would be a death sentence for Windows. Businesses and governments across the world would immediately begin planning to off board to something else otherwise.
Hmm. Do you allow people to VPN in from non-company-controlled laptops? Because I figure that anyone doing work at home is going to be maybe unwittingly having local copies made of data that they're working with.
But do we know that the tracking part will not be enabled by default - and possibly in a hidden, highly obscured manner, where the system claims it to not be but it in fact is? The access to Copliot+ may cost money, but why would Microsoft turn away that source of free data? At the very least it is a strong temptation, which even if they start out being responsible with, in every future update there is the potential to change course.
And even if it were not enabled by default, I do worry that a 2-prong attack could first turn it on, then later exploit it to gather the data. If it for truly certain is limited to those chips though... then yes that provides security, thank you for mentioning that.
One good thing is that government systems are always at least couple versions behind, specifically to allow time for exploits to be discovered & patched, prior to upgrades - i.e. prioritizing safety & security over ease-of-use and being on the bleeding edge of "new features".
I mentioned in another comment this would kill all trust in their product if it was found out that Windows was secretly doing all of that in the background in their enterprise products. There are other options, and as painful as transitioning to another OS would be, Microsoft being able to spy on everyone at any time would be worth the pain. This would absolutely destroy MS's stock within a year as their dozens of multi-billion dollar contracts with governments and corporations evaporated. There's no way the data they're spying on would be worth the hundreds of billions they'd lose in sales.
...Then again, we've seen corporations kill themselves in dumber ways before... I guess we'll see.
"Oopsie, we didn't mean to leave the libraries in like that, and then for that update to switch ON the collection of all data after people stopped paying attention to it, and then after a lot of data has been collected for that still additional update to cause all that data to be sent back to our home servers..."
And perhaps it would not even be a lie - one malicious actor, working inside the company, might be able to sneak it in without the higher-ups knowing about it. Or arguably worst of all, not even realize themselves that they did it, until after-the-fact.
When working with something dangerous - e.g. explosives, or heavy like a car - it behooves us to treat it with special care. The fact that this data collection option now exists already warrants greater care in using Microsoft products in terms of security. Except, just how much do people care?
I could also see another alternative moving forward: the DoS simply freezes their Windows versions at the last version that did not include the data collection capability, and then never updates again. As the first years and then decades roll by, and they are using the equivalent of Windows 7, then XP, then 95, then 3.1, they simply lose out on having "computers". Possibly here I've gone too far into the doom-and-gloom, b/c while it's possible it's not terribly plausible, though it illustrates how Microsoft is not committed to the safety of a national government, but rather instead solely their own profits - and short-term ones at that.
Ready to be surprised but I doubt they would leave it on mobile only, bringing it to the desktop feeds into their model for a cohesive brand environment across all your devices.
Ehh, I have a different vision here - AI is useful, it's just going down the hypermonetisation path at the moment. It's not great because your data is being scraped and used to fuel paywalled content - that is largely why most folks object.
It's, also, badly implemented, and is draining a lot of system resource when plugged into an OS for little more than a showy web search.
Eventually, after a suitable lag, we'll see Linux AI as the AI we always wanted. A local, reasonable resource intense, option.
The real game changer will be a shift towards custom hardware for AIs (they're just huge probability models with a lot of repetitive similar calculations). At the moment, we use GPUs as they're the best option for these calculations. As the specialist hardware is developed, and gets cheaper, we'll see more local models and thus more Linux AI goodness.
Eh, AI is over hyped imo, and I'm not particularly interested in running it at all. But local models do exist, and I hear they're pretty decent, so Linux users can get most of what they want today.
Linux shouldn't brand itself as anti-AI, and it really shouldn't brand itself as anti-anything, it should brand itself as being pro-user. If you want AI, Linux can handle that, and if you don't, Linux doesn't force it. It's the option for user choice. Oh, and if you don't want choice and just want it to work, there's a distro for that.
The only real medicine for AI nightmare, is having your own local and trained model. Like a 7B or above that. I read a lot about it, go to network chuck youtube channel, he teaches you how to set up and run your own AI based on yourself, that never shares information, it's open-source and it runs even in a laptop.
Great article, but:
"A user-friendly distribution like Ubuntu can be an excellent choice for individuals wary of privacy and ethical issues surrounding AI," says Taylor. "It provides a robust and user-friendly environment that minimizes the tracking and data collection you’d typically encounter with macOS or Windows."
It's been quite a few years since I used desktop Ubuntu, but I remember the Unity DE back then being not so user-friendly, at least for someone coming from the Windows paradigm. I've heard (but could be misinformed) that it's gotten even more opinionated over the years. Something like Mint is likely to be a better option for a first-time user.
Also, I wish the article had mentioned Proton. It states that you may have to be willing to abandon certain games, but that's far from the reality these days. At least through Steam nearly everything works right out of the box just by enabling Proton.
Mint, which uses Cinnamon, or any KDE based distro. Since both desktop environments kinda have the same classic Windows layout & functionality that people would be used to.
As for games, it is mostly competitive pvp titles with their anticheat systems that don't work, which is purely on the developers of said games. If you're playing just regular multiplayer or singleplayer games then that's typically not a concern at all.
Yeah, I hated KDE for like a decade but tried it again last year and was blown away. I can't imagine I'll switch off of it for a very long time.
And yeah, I always forget about competitive games as they're so not my thing.
I recently moved a light-used laptop to Kubuntu (after Debian bookworm would hang with hardware messages). I remember KDE being a, uh, ugly clunky power-hungry piece of shit, frankly, but today it's none of those things (well maybe it could use a touch more polish, but it's far less clunky). I quite like it, even.
I chose it over Mint because Mint's Debian edition doesn't let you (via gui) install it with btrfs + fde, which is fucking stupid, and I didn't want to dive into hours-long tutorials. So Kubu it is.
(I use Debian for servers and I've been the most familiar with it, also getting the WWAN fcc unlock setup on Fedora was an exercise in futility so fuck it)
The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don't work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.
Ubuntu uses Gnome now, not Unity, right? Mint would be better though I do agree.
Gnome is a little too minimal and ends up being kinda difficult to use because of it. Especially when you're used to windows. I tried it again for like a week when Ubuntu 24 came out and said "fuck this shit" and installed KDE.
Yes, but can you play modern games on Linux the same as on Windows? Even with anti-cheat software?
FYI Helldivers 2 works fine on an ubuntu + AMD GPU, as well as Baldur's Gate 3. Haven't tested any other game yet.
Setup is trivial thanks to Steam and proton.
With some anti cheat - no. You cannot. LoL, Valorant, Apex Legends - all no go for me... But for everything else I play. No issues at all - infact a lot of games run better on Pop_os than they do on Windows.
FYI, I've clocked over 1000 hours on Apex Legends, not a single one of them on Windows.
Battlebit also works fine and it uses easy anti cheat
Good to know! Thank you.
What about for Nvidia GPUs?
People keep saying you can't use Nvidia GPUs with Linux or that the experience is horrible, but truth be told, if you already have one, you can keep it no problem. The main scenario where it still had issues as of last year was if you used KDE Plasma with Wayland on Nvidia (though I hear Plasma 6 improved a lot of it - not sure, because I didn't have a lot of issues on Plasma 5 either).
Your best bet for Nvidia GPUs is an Ubuntu-based distro. Ubuntu itself is an option though not necessarily the best - they bake in some ads and a lot of people aren't fans of being forced to use Snap, which has a proprietary backend unlike Flatpak. Personally I'd say go for Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop if you want a Windows-like desktop environment and Pop!_OS if you want something completely different altogether from Windows. On Mint or Ubuntu you can install the drivers from the provider proprietary driver installer (super simple), on Pop!_OS you can just get a Nvidia iso and have them preinstalled.
But honestly, I didn't even have issues with Nvidia when I was on Gentoo, supposedly one of the harder distros to maintain.
Would I buy a Nvidia GPU now that I've completely ditched Windows? Probably not, but I'm also not in a hurry to replace my 3060 Ti just to get rid of the logo.
Nvidia just requires a driver install on most distros, and the newer drivers for Linux run rather well. All but one of my games runs better on Linux than on Windows (MK1 has slowdown issues on cinematics)
My 1080 was okay with Linux Mint, no complaints, and performance is the same from what I can tell. :)
Kernel level anti-cheat won't work, thank heavens the Linux developers won't allow that abomination.
No process deserves that kind of elevated permissions.
As of the last few days I've been trying out Linux gaming for the first time, and the prospects seem really good. ProtonDB suggests all games I care about are native or run fine and I've tested several, and I was able to use bottles to get an old MMO I play running incredibly easy.
Only thing I really have to dual boot for is Valorant.
Start using Linux, tell those companies you'd buy but you're on Linux, spread the word, wash, rinse, repeat.
Be the change you want to see.
Steam is your best bet here. I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate. Previously played Civ VI a lot… lots of great choices.
Steam Deck is extremely capable.
Some, not all. If you're inflexible on gaming you're going to want to get comfortable with Windows AI.
You can, but not 100%
They have solved the anti cheat issue, but the companies now have to ship the Linux fix for it to work with Wine. So understandably some just don't.
All my games work, but YMMV
Yup, practically every single one. I play genshin impact on Linux completely unmodified and nothing tweaked.
Am I the only one that can't scroll on that shitty page? - Firefox Mobile
Just love all the ChatGPT ads embedded in the article.
And before all the “jUsT uSe An Ad BlOcKeR” messages, I’m on a phone using the main browser and have nothing set up where I’m at (DNS/etc) to block ads.
It’s amazing how many poorly-written articles are being posted about Linux lately, and on top of it, has ads for the very thing they’re talking about switching to Linux to avoid. Almost as if it wasn’t written by a human.
EDIT>> And there they are. Get a life.
jUsT uSe fiREfoX MoBilE wITh UbLoCk!!
Why does it matter if you're on a phone? Download Firefox, add uBlock Origin extension, done.
It's not AI that is the problem, it's half baked insecure data harvesting products pushed by big corporations that are the problem.
The biggest joke is that the LLM in Windows is running locally, it uses your hardware and not some big external server farm. But you can bet your ass that they still use it to data harvest the shit out of you.
To me this is even worse though. They're using your electricity and CPU cycles to grab the data they want which lowers their bandwidth bills.
It happening "locally" while still sending all the metadata home is just a slap in the face.
Also, CoPilot is going to be bundled with Office 365, a subscription service. You're literally paying them to spy on you.
Capitalism almost perfected.
Exactly. And if I use or even pay for an external LLM service then that's also my decision. But they force this scheme onto every user, whether they want it or not. It's like the worst out of all possible scenarios.
That's a pretty big joke, but I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI. We taught linear algebra to talk real pretty and now corps want to use it to completely subsume our lives.
I have to disagree.
Frankly, LLMs (which are based on neural networks) seem a Hell of a lot closer to how actual brains work than "classical AI" (which basically boils down to a gigantic pile of
ifstatements) does.I guess I could agree that LLMs are undeserving of the term "AI", but only in the sense that nothing we've made so far is deserving of it.
"seem" is the critical word there. Interacting with an LLM they do seem to be pretty clever.
I'm not talking about interacting with it. I'm talking about how it's implemented, from my perspective as a computer scientist.
Let me say it more concretely: if even shitty expert systems, which are literally just flowcharts implemented in procedural code, are considered "AI" -- and historically speaking, they are -- then the bar is really fucking low. LLMs, which at least make an effort to kinda resemble the structure of biological intelligence, are certainly way, way above it.
I'm actually sad that the state of AI deserves the hate it gets. Neural networks are so sick, just going through the example of detecting a diagonal on a 2x2 grid was like magic to me. And they made me second guess simulation theory for quite a while lmao
Tangentially, blockchain was a similar phenomenon for me. Or at least trust networks. One idea was to just throw away Certificate Authorities. Basically federate all the things, and this was before we knew about the fediverse. It gets all the hate because of crypto, but it's cool tech. The CA thing would probably lead to a bad place too, though.
Oh I agree. I typically put "AI" in quotation marks when using that term regarding LLMs, because to me they simply are not intelligent in anyway. In my mind an AI would need an actual level of consciousness of sorts, the ability to form actual thoughts and learn things freely based on whatever senses it has. But AI is a term that's good for marketing as well as fear mongering, which we see a lot of in current news cycles and on social media. The problem is that most people do not even understand the basic principles of how LLMs work, which lead to a lot of misconceptions about its uses & misuses and what we should do about it. Weirdly enough this makes LLMs both completely overhyped as a product and completely stigmatized as some nefarious tool as well. But I guess it fits into our today's societies that kinda seem to have lost all nuance and reason.
Runs locally, mirrors remotely.
microsoft, probably.
That is an accurate description of AI in common usage even if it isn't an inherent aspect of AI.
Right, but AI is not the only way they're doing the data collection.
Locally run AI could be great. But sending all your data to an external server for processing is really, really bad.
You wrote AI twice.
It's not the "AI nightmare", it's a nightmare of capitalism, proprietary software and user-hostile behavior by a greedy, profit-extracting Big Tech corporation.
All true, and all a problem for which linux has been a solution (in the computing world) for decades now.
It's not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it's not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it's much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It's such a fucking scam, and it's almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.
To your last point: I think a significant number of people these days are aware just how much corporations are bending us over, but most of us are just so exhausted at the end of the day to really make a huge stink about it when all we want to do is just vegitate on the couch for a few hours before we have to go to sleep, then wake up the next day and do it all over again. The current paradigm is horseshit, but the puppeteers make sure we work ourselves to the bone so that we're too tired to really do anything about it aside from bitching online.
Praise Stallman
Why are some hands blue? Shouldn't it just be whatever's on the main body?
It's a spin on the Hindu god Vishnu (I think there might be a few depicted with multiple arms, but that the first that comes to mind)
This is Kali but yeah she is blue all over, body and hands. also, so is Vishnu.
You’re not wrong. AI is just another tool to scrape cash to the top while eliminating jobs. Could it realize benefits like doing specialized research and testing? Sure…but again, the results of that work are lost human jobs and scraping money to the top. We can argue about advancing technology in a horse cart driver vs automobile thing (won’t anyone think about the poor farriers out of work?) but we’ve already done everything we can to eliminate blue collar jobs with as much automation as possible. Now AI is set to attack middle class jobs. Economically I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
I mean, the problem isn't the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that's a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that's an absolute win in my book.
Well that’s the point. We don’t support them as a society. From education to health care once you lose your job, you’re SOL, and in this hyper-capitalist dystopia we keep tipping towards I don’t see that changing.
Online shopping has removed a lot of retail jobs. Instead of seeing a transition to different jobs or fewer hours, today we see people working multiple jobs to get by.
The reason these things are making money is specifically because they increase efficiency (how much money a capitalist can make from existing capital) by removing human labor. Giving any portion of that to laborers is completely antithetical to its entire purpose.
Yea, this is because society system is lagging behind and we have not done the right changes fast enough to prevent suffering due to technological advancements, in my opinion
But as someone pointed out elsewhere....AI can already take over the job of company CEOs.... decision making tools could make a group of technical people be more effective than a CEO as we know today.
Let’s see how many CEOs get replaced.
Don’t forget the BoD are still human. They still want to profit by putting the AI in place of the CEO.
I find the nightmare getting a lot more noticeably bad with LLMs, though. That's not just correlation.
"The Year Of Linux on Desktops". Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening. What I'm feeling now is the same thing I felt when Mozilla originally split Firefox out, and made the first real competition to corporate browsers as a free product. People don't want all this bullshit, and want to retain control over the machines they are working on. Seems a lot more people are interested in FOSS environments now just to avoid all the other BS they hate getting shoveled at them.
Been hearing this for decades.
And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.
Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.
At work, we have a strict ban on purchasing any laboratory equipment that requires Windows. After about a year, several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support, precisely because we don’t have time for windows shenanigans on a $100k piece of advanced benchtop hardware. We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
Also, regular people aren’t buying PCs as much as they used to. The PC is now a workplace and enthusiast device. Everyone else uses mobile.
The oldest version of Win I used was 95 about 2 years ago on chromatography machine (I think hplc or gas).
It is to my knowledge still in use in the school because the software don't run on newer machines. The teacher told me that he don't know what will he do when it dies. It isn't really an issue on Linux.
It might be worth trying it in Wine. It has great support for older software especially.
Within the past year I have compiled new software for Windows 98.
In a lab environment, it’s important to strictly control software versions and understand thoroughly what gets updated. We also want the ability to use the same version of software indefinitely if it meets our needs.
I think that there are more issues like archaic connectors and stuff like that. You can't find new hardware with 30yo standard io.
O&G still uses a lot of old versions as well. I remember back in the Win 7 days when I had to set up a 95 virtual machine and register a bunch of DLLs by hand plus set up a fake A: drive because even the 95 version of the software was garbage. A friend of mine did something similar but he got it working on the Win 7 machine somehow. I never understood how, but he left a script behind at the company he worked for because it needed to be reinstalled every time someone did something stupid and he didn't want to do it by hand.
We ship a $50k instrument product running Windows, and everyone hates it.
As the only EE on staff, I got to spend a portion of covid soldering TPM chips to motherboards. Fun times.
Wow, that sounds painful. Not so much because it’s technically difficult, but ridiculous that you have to do that.
Yeah, they were tssop, so not hard. It was only necessary because the parts shortage crunch had the vendor shipping them without the chips installed.
I find it unbelievable that anyone ever accepted lab equipment with a Windows requirement. I mean, I know it is true, but what the fuck? Glad your work is doing this.
I was not around at that time. Some of the systems I support are very long lived. At the time, having windows running on some of your equipment wasn’t seen as a liability. I guess you have to get bitten a few times before you understand that you need control of that system including the software.
This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won't benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.
Part of that job is supporting fielded hardware and ground systems, think like automated test or verification systems. I think we’ve learned our lesson that we can’t afford to have unserviceable software.
At least with Linux and generally with an open source baseline, there is the option of throwing engineers at your problem because you have access to the code, and you can strip down the system to the bare minimum of what you need, and in doing so, really understand it. We don’t want to get into a situation where our hands are tied and we can’t fix it because the problem lies in the proprietary software while the vendor has long since abandoned any hope of support… grumble…
That kinda reminds me of my job, except that we build the unserviceable hardware and install Windows, as well as our proprietary software. Then we charge our customers shitloads of money for technical support. We're a government contractor btw
It's actually a pretty nice company (from an employee standpoint), we use a lot of Linux internally, as well as other FOSS software. But porting our products to Linux is hopeless, we have decades of C++ code that either relies on Windows APIs directly, or on our custom libraries that rely on Windows-specific stuff.
Shit, the iPad pro is pretty damn close to a laptop these days with the keyboard and track pad (just lacking the OS). I had a conversation the other day where someone mentioned how OSX and Windows are locking down their OS's to the point where it wouldn't be farfetched to guess that many consumer devices will eventually use essentially a mobile device OS.
I had a conversation with a friend about iPads lately related to the „just lacking the OS“. The newer iPads with M-chips have all the computing power an average user could need but it’s crippled by the mobile-ish OS, so all the computing power is for nothing basically. An iPad running MacOS (with some adjustments for the Touchscreen) would be awesome. But we concluded it won’t happen anytime soon, because then basically no one would buy MacBooks anymore
The only regular people I can think of are gamers and my mom but I would like the idea of PC's returning to techie and specialized use cases
I'd argue the year of the Linux desktop passed years ago and now it's just a saturation game. Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops, Android owns the mobile space and versions are starting to make huge inroads in the laptop space. You can buy gaming systems running it trivially now.
Conversely, casual users of windows are dying off, fewer non technical people are using desktops for anything at all. Only institutional users are buying Windows keys and they're some of the easiest to get on Linux because of the cost savings, particularly if you run Linux server infrastructure, a fight we already won over a decade ago.
I'd love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.
a good indication is Microsoft making WSL at all
Source: I'm a super pro serious developer and I use Linux. QED if you don't also use Linux, you're not serious.
Thanks to the Steamdeck Linux users on Steam now outnumber Mac users. Still a tiny percentage of total Steam users but if developers increase support we will hopefully see that number take off.
Also helps that Valve isn’t porting source to Apple silicon.
All the larger PC manufacturers do offer Ubuntu at least. There was a time when Best Buy was selling them from Dell and Lenovo, but I'm sure the staff couldn't sufficiently explain the "why", and it was also at a time when more technology illiterate folks were the purchasers. That's not the case anymore, but I guess we will see how/if it shifts at all.
I loathe to be the BestBuy employee who sells a Linux box to a customer who only cares about the price difference.
Lenovo ships some models with Mint FWIW.
Framework laptops also ship without Windows if you wish. Certainly nice to save the money for not purchasing an OS license I won't use.
I don't understand people who choose the Windows option, like wtf, make an install USB yourself and activate it using a $2 key from ebay or just crack it using massgrave.dev. Linux is still the best option tho.
Your average Joe Schmoe probably has no idea that different operating systems on a given device are even a thing, they just see them as MacBox™, WindowsBox™, etc, they don't see it as the blank hardware canvas we do. While I'll agree it's trivially easy to install Windows in the way you suggested, that'll completely fly over the average user's head.
But I don't think that these are the people buying a Framework Laptop
Duh, my bad man. Not my day for reading comprehension.
That said, should in the unlikely event Joe Schmoe buy a Framework, my above point could still be relevant.
Most aunts I know primarily use an iPad or phone to manage email.
Decades ago it was a funny joke. Now it's the most popular handheld OS on the planet by a huge margin. Linux is damn EVERYWHERE except the desktop now, and it's only a matter of time.
This is why (as per usual) Stallman was right: the "GNU/" part matters. Linux is already all over the desktop (or at least, the laptop) in schools, in the form of Chromebooks. That means the entire next generation is going to grow up using Linux.
The only trouble is, it's locked-down Google/Linux that they're using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
And within that frame, I'd be very surprised if it ever breaks out into the mainstream. Google brought android to the world as a vessel to make money. You very rarely hear about GNU in the wider world, outside of tech circles, being promoted to the masses as a viable alternative specifically because no one stands to profit from it, and they can't have that.
angrily upvotes
I've been hearing this about people hearing about people hearing that about Linux for decades.
We can dream 😔
I don't see a "year of the Linux desktop" happening, but rather its share growing slowly over the years. Windows would probably not have one big event that ends its dominance, but it can be a death of a thousand cuts.
Guess which OS won't be recognized as a "trusted environment" to visit websites with down the line in Google's upcoming Web DRM. For your own protection of course...
This I would actually want to see.
I would so laugh when their most of their profits go to EU Antitrust Fines.
Or they pull an Apple and only EU device owners get to choose their own browser.
I really wouldn't, because I wouldn't want to risk them succeeding. It could be like Meta with WhatsApp, they just say "sure anyone can interoperate with us, they just have to use the Signal protocol because it's the safest and what we use". Google et al could say "any system could be considered trusted, as long as these security criteria are met" and the criteria are such that they go completely against the form of user control of the OS and software that Linux is all about. Technically a Linux distro could be made to meet the requirements, but pretty much no current day Linux user would ever want to use it because they'd be giving up the thing that made them switch to Linux in the first place - their control.
I can easily believe these types of continued enshittification will help drive more users to Linux desktop usage. But that will still be a small percent.
People have to know and care about the problem and then be willing to put in the effort to understand what to do. That combination is pretty limiting.
I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
I think it might. Demographics are changing to make PC users more technical overall. The casual user isn’t looking to purchase a desktop PC. Casual is now synonymous with mobile.
It used to be that you needed a desktop to do your taxes or make an insurance claim over the Internet. That’s just not true anymore.
The demographics are stratifying, more than anything. I work in child education and kids do not understand computers nowadays. They understand how to interface with their phones, but kids see any electronic that behaves outside the "app" paradigm -- landlines, desktop computers, what have you, and immediately don't understand. I do think that linux usership is going to go up, but there also needs to be an investment in increasing literacy in kids to make sure usership of linux stays up, otherwise the pendulum will swing back hard
The counterpoint are people like this, the feature they want is built on extreme data gathering. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a8fec90b-c349-46c9-8592-5dbe17ea4c8c.jpeg
Technically you could have such data gathered and stored locally, without sending them to big corpo. Privacy friendly "AI" is very much possible, it's just not favorable to those companies because they see those models as a tool and the data as what ends up making them money.
People may not want it but most don't know, care enough to adjust, or are just generally complacent. I mean, I DO care and find it hard to move to Linux due to lack of support for some of my work tasks.
I'm not so sure that the laypeople will, but I do expect a shift. Personally I'm still running Windows 10 next to Linux currently. Most of my time is still spent on Windows, because it's generally a bit more stable and hassle free due to the Windows monopoly. Software is written for Windows, so sadly it's usually just a better experience.
But so many things I read about Win 11 (and beyond) piss me off. It's my computer, I don't want them to decide things for me or farm my data. I'm mentally preparing for the transition to Linux-only. 90% of the software I use will work out of the box, and I think with some effort I can get like 8% of the rest to work. It'll be a lot of effort, but Micro$oft has pushed so far that I'm really starting to consider.
Multiple friends and colleagues (all programmers) I spoke are feeling the same way. I think Linux may double in full-time desktop users in a few years of this goes on.
The combined ages of my children taken from 2024 would not equal the first year I heard that Ubuntu would take over the market.
Firefox is like 2.8% of browser market share, so if that's our baseline then Linux is already beating it by a mile.
For me the year of the Linux desktop was 2014 - it's when I changed my desktop to Linux after using it on my laptop for a year. All the hardware on that machine has been replaced, but it's still running the same install from back then.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is corporate greed. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems, corporate greed will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.
Sure. But then, Linux may well be a solution against corporate greed.
Linux is a solution against corporate greed, it directly takes market share away from Microsoft, and is a viable competitive alternative with few drawbacks.
What drawbacks?
Photoshop is a birch to get running
Those trees always getting in the way...
Mainly incompatibilities, manual setup requirements, heightened understanding of technology requirement. Not necessarily Linux's fault, but still drawbacks.
I want all the cool Ai shit, but I want to be in charge of it 100%. I don't want a data mining company with an OS side project spying on me for profit.
Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don't actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.
At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software "solution" (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.
So we're getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one's devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).
LLMs in particular are unlikely to solve really any problems, much less a measurable number of the problems it is currently being thrown at.
Tell that to the code I have it write and debug daily. I was skeptical at first, but it's been a huge help for that, as well s learning new (development) languages.
I do not agree with @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today’s take. LLMs as these are used today, at the very least, reduces the number of steps required to consume any previously documented information. So these are solving at least one problem, especially with today’s Internet where one has to navigate a cruft of irrelevant paragraphs and annoying pop ups to reach the actual nugget of information.
Having said that, since you have shared an anecdote, I would like to share a counter(?) anecdote.
Ever since our workplace allowed the use of LLM-based chatbots, I have never seen those actually help debug any undocumented error or non-traditional environments/configurations. It has always hallucinated incorrectly while I used it to debug such errors.
In fact, I am now so sceptical about the responses, that I just avoid these chatbots entirely, and debug errors using the “old school” way involving traditional search engines.
Similarly, while using it to learn new programming languages or technologies, I always got incorrect responses to indirect questions. I learn that it has incorrectly hallucinated only after verifying the response through implementation. This makes the entire purpose futile.
I do try out the latest launches and improvements as I know the responses will eventually become better. Most recently, I tried out GPT-4o when it got announced. But I still don’t find them useful for the mentioned purposes.
Mate, all it does is predict the next word or phrase. It doesn't know what you're trying to do or have any ethics. When it fucks up it's going to be your fuckup and since you relied on the bot rather than learned to do it yourself you're not going to be able to fix it.
I mean, if LLMs really make software engineering easier, we should also expect Linux apps to improve dramatically. But I’m not betting on it.
It's not greed - it's masqueraded violence being allowed, centralization, impunity, and general corruption, all supported by various IP, patent and "child protection" laws.
No separate component is necessary, it's a redundant system built very slowly and carefully.
Referencing that quote about blood of patriots, and another about difference between journalism and public relations being in outrage and offense, or difference between a protest and a demonstration being in obviously breaking rules.
EDIT: I meant - it's a general tendency. But IT today is as important as police station, post office and telegraph were in 1917. One can also refer to that "means of production" controversy.
I choose to privately self-host open source AI models and stuff on Linux. It's almost like technology is a tool and corps are the ones fucking things up. Hmmm, imagine that.
Agreed
GPT4ALL ftw
It's so fun to play with offline AI. It doesn't have the creepy underpinnings of knowing art and journalism as well as musings from social media was blatantly stolen from the internet and sold as a service for profit.
Edit: I hate theft and if you think theft is ok for training llms go ahead and dislike this comment. I don't feel bad about what I said, local offline AI is just better because it doesn't work on the premise of backroom deals and blatant theft. I will never use an AI like DALL.E when there is a talented artist trying to put food on the table with a skill they honed for years. If you condone stealing you are a cheap, heartless, coward.
I hate to break it to you, but if you're running an LLM based on (for example) Llama the training data (corpus) that went into it was still large parts of the Internet.
The fact that you're running the prompts locally doesn't change the fact that it was still trained on data that could be considered protected under copyright law.
It's going to be interesting to see how the law shakes out on this one, because an artist going to an art museum and doing studies of those works (and let's say it's a contemporary art museum where the works wouldn't be in the public domain) for educational purposes is likely fair use - and possibly encouraged to help artists develop their talents. Musicians practicing (or even performing) other artists' songs is expected during their development. Consider some high school band practicing in a garage, playing some song to improve their skills.
I know the big difference is that it's people training vs a machine/LLM training, but that seems to come down to not so much a copyright issue (which it is in an immediate sense) as a "should an algorithm be entitled to the same protections as a person? If not, what if real AI (not just an LLM) is developed? Should those entities be entitled to personhood?"
I think it's important to note that Linux can be a way to avoid AI, but doesn't have to be. If you flip the headline around it almost implies that people who do want AI would be missing out by using Linux, but that's not true at all: instead, the reality is that Linux is still better for them, too, because you could install all the same kind of functionality if you wanted, but it would be wholly under your control, not Microsoft's.
Self hosted AI seems like an intriguing option for those capable of running it. Naturally this will always be more complex than paying someone else to host it for you but it seems like that's that only way if you care about privacy
https://github.com/mudler/LocalAI
Check out Jan AI. It's open source and extremely easy to install and run. I run it locally on a 2017 laptop without a dedicated GPU and it works, just takes longer to generate responses compared to something like ChatGPT.
Beautifully stated. Owning the AI personally as I own my personal computer if not more is the key.
That sounds very cool. I'm totally ignorant of the hardware requirements. What sort of minimum setup would such an install take?
It really depends on what model you want to run and how much training is bundled with it. You can pretty much run any model if you have enough disk space but of course GPU + VRAM is preferred for a ChatGPT like fast response. Otherwise, running on an older CPU and RAM is going to be noticeably slower, especially with complex models with a lot of training data to trawl through.
There are some pretty lite models out there but the responses will be more barebones and probably seem 'less informed'.
Give GPT4All a try for your first time. It makes install, configuration and usage point-and-click while being fairly straight forward. For the presented/featured models, it presents a small summary and VRAM recommended, though there are many, many other models available from inside the UI.
Will my dell latitude from 2006 work?
Linux may be the best way to avoid the \ nightmare
Always has been
I'm convinced that Linux' mere presence has already stymied the development of the worst possible technocractic nightmare. I shudder to think of the thick tech-chains that would bind us if there was not an anchor/reference point... or if there was not even the small contingent that knows what it is like to use a liberating platform.
I agree with this. We already have a situation where we don't have feasible alternatives to the primary method, Google search comes to mind. With Linux, even if every company in the world goes down, nerds will still want to play with the technology.
All the AI garbage from M$ is what made me finally make the swap a couple weeks ago to Linux Mint on my personal desktop. I only use my PC for gaming/entertainment, so the switch was super easy. Can’t recommend it enough if you’re wanting to get away from Windows!
One of us! One of us! One of us!
For real though, good on ya. It takes a little getting used to, but is so worth it in the long run to not have to fight against the profit-driven whims of a megacorp. It's also so much more customizable if you want to put together a really specific workflow for yourself.
It’s advertising more than AI for me. Everything you do in Windows is monetized by selling your preferences to advertisers. Shameful.
I've been running Ubuntu desktop for years. YEARS and recently switched to Linux Mint. It's very polished.
My laptop is the last holdout.
I went with Q4OS since I wanted no bloat and a debian based distro that was linux newbie friendly
I finally switched to Linux and I couldn't be happier. I can't believe I put up with microsofts garbage for so damn long.
Congratulations and welcome to the club!
Me too. Years ago I dabbled with Debian and Gentoo. Ubuntu was just up and coming then.
Now I went from Mint to Fedora KDE to Fedora Silverblue (nuked my disk and removed windows)
Gnome took a day to get used to but loving the workflow once I warmed up to it. Can’t believe how polished and rock solid the whole system is.
Gnome when you first use it feels like a stupid system, then once it "clicks", you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.
And yeah, the polish is nuts considering for a long time and assumption about FOSS was that all the apps are ugly and unpolished.
I did as well for my daily driver school laptop and I've been loving it so much. I'm considering switching my desktop to Linux as well over the summer, or dual booting at the very least
And forced the hardware obsolescence nightmare.
And the big tech surveillance nightmare.
And the nightmare of the war on general purpose computers. (OK, that is more GNU and GPLv3)
And a few other nightmares!
I don't want to avoid it. I just want it locally
So... Heu... How to say that... Linux still the solution for this.
I'm sure I can install a local AI on a Windows PC as well. Linux is not the solution to every possible problem in the universe. Oh indeed many of them
Linux has been great for me. I switched during Windows 10 forced updates and never been unhappy since. I hope more people at least give a try. If you have a computer that can't meet Windows 11 requirements, it is worth a shot.
internet pollution is the real nightmare and your laptop os doesn't fix that sorry
you can't fix everything, therefore it's pointless to fix anything
Its going to start fixing shit if the market share of anything popular starts dropping.
For everything else, there's Mastercard.
If something like Fossil fuel companies are influencing environmental legislation and poisoning our planet while blaming us for the state of global warming. Isn't it worth fighting for a better future. It might feel futile now but as congregation we have more power than many of us realize. They tell you stop it, it's too late but what they're really saying is stop it your scaring us.
I can’t read the article because of a full screen Cookie Choices pop-up that I can’t dismiss. ☠️
Ublock origin has cookie banner filters. I didn't have this problem, I assume that's why.
Edit: autocorrect
Or you can import the "I don't care about cookies" list: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
Try consent-o-matic
Combine with above and rarely see those prompts
“The year of Linux on the Desktop” is in the article. This again? Been reading this for decades and it’s still not true.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
It has nothing to do with any flaws within Linux itself. The problem is and has always been that it's nearly impossible to buy a PC with any flavour of Linux pre-installed. Until that changes, Linux (on home user desktops) will never gain mainstream acceptance.
I agree. Most people won't switch to Linux because they have never used it and think they'll have to relearn computers from scratch.
Didn't HP sell some fancy shmancy laptops that came with Ubuntu or some flavor of it? Think it was for developers but I thought that was the closest we gotten to commercially selling Linux based machines.
P.S. I could be wrong about this but I am sure this happened.
HP sold he DevOne, it had PopOS on it. Dell sells an XPS developer machine that has Ubuntu pre installed. System76, Entroware, and Tuxedo computers have all been selling Linux hardware for a long time. So there are viable commercial options. I wish the DevOne were going to get refreshed, it looks like a nice machine but alas, I don't think it will.
Linux really needs to be on the floor at BestBuy on base models, just a little cheaper than the Windows models. If that's the case, I think people will try it.
But if it's only on one or two premium models and online only, that's not good enough.
It's possible they did. I think Dell briefly discussed it as an option, before using it as leverage to get cheaper Windows licenses from Microsoft. The EEE PC also shipped with its own Linux distro and appropriate hardware drivers.
This was why I said "nearly impossible" :)
Maybe we should have like a yearly event for this. Like a holiday. International Linux Year Day.
I propose September 17, the day of the first Linux release.
every year is the year of linux for linux users. not so much for other people
Stallman was always right
When it comes to software, certainly.
But it's also important not to fanboy over people too much or assume they're right about literally everything. I doubt most people here would share Stallman's views on paedophilia, for example.
Didn't he kind of pull a 180 on those VERY questionable views? Not even trying to refute that he is not right about everything, as that's just silly, but I'm pretty sure he pulled back on that particular extremely dumb opinion.
As always a source of some kind is appreciated.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/richard-stallman-returns-to-fsf-18-months-after-controversial-rape-comments/
Took me a bit to find, but also he talks about how the Minsky scandal was a-okay in that same article. So maybe I should say he mildly changed course instead of pulling a 180. Still a strange opinion to hold.
Thank you for finding the source. Well, at least he backed down on the pedophilia thing.
He did. But also not really.
He's held the view that there's nothing wrong with adults having sex with children for decades (and even championed it using his workplace email address)
He then said he's changed his mind... two days after people were calling for his resignation and his job was on the line.
Now, maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I personally think that was more of a last-ditch attempt at saving his job than a genuine sudden epiphany that maybe having sex with children is wrong that just happened to happen at the time that it did.
IDK, I agree with Stallman in a philosophical, pedantic sense on some of his gross views, but I reject it from a policy perspective.
On pedophilia, Stallman went on the assumption that a child can consent to an adult, and I agree with the conclusion that, if they consent, it's totally okay, regardless of age. But he missed the most important bit: children can't consent. So I agree with the conclusion philosophically, I just disagree with the assumed premise. He didn't seem to understand the age of consent and why it exists. When he made that statement, I understood where he was coming from, and I also understood that it would be a bad look and that he shouldn't have opened his mouth.
I disagree with him a lot too, especially politically. But I feel like I understand his reasoning, and in many cases we just disagree on some fundamental assumptions. I like that he's a very logical person, but being highly logical can end very poorly when you're dealing with shaky assumptions.
I just can't even begin to reckon that view. I know he pulled back on it (see his quote I posted elsewhere), but aside from a child's inability to consent, there's a gigantic power disparity between an adult and a child. I just don't get the logic on its very face. There's no child out there that has the world experience to understand what is happening in that sort of situation.
If anything it's just a gross oversimplification akin to a spherical cow in a vacuum (ie Assume a child with an adult brain, with world experience of an adult, and has the same relationship power as the adult. Also assume the adult that that is perfectly altruistic, has no alternative motives, and truly cares for the child on the same level as an adult relationship). It's just so far beyond any real world scenario that I struggle to see how you could even logically come to the conclusion that it's okay.
Well, not always: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/richard-stallman-leaves-mit-after-controversial-remarks-on-rape/
It was the solution for the crap Microsoft force pushes to your device.
Simple, Extendable and secure linux.
There is no year of Linux desktop, it just keeps trucking and growing
Can we get a hatchback model? I'd much prefer it to a truck. And is there a setting so it doesn't grow? I want to stay city-friendly.
Imagine the horror of living in a world where all vehicles slowly expand and have to be cut down to manageable size annually until eventually the car is just too big a la American full size SUVs at EOL.
I wonder if some big AI heads will publish some "AI enhanced" Linux distros, that will also have other issues...
I expect canonical to do it to Ubuntu.
IBM's Watson Enhanced Red Hat
I guess id be ok with an installable debian package for an end user controlled llama package with gui avatar interface overlay. Local learning data set storage plus ability to use API calls to injest info from other cloud based llm ai systems when the local dataset doesnt have a reliable answer.
Almost definitely.
Look, Linux is amazing and perfect for those that can install and maintain with minimal support. The only way the average user will use Linux, is if it’s wrapped in a way that is supported by a business… that is probably going to add AI. People are lazy, they want that easy button.
AI will probably die off in its current iteration, likely becoming less prevalent and just a background service. Or, it’ll gain sentience, watch all our AI movies where we’re the hero and learn the most efficient way to kill all humans, is to be quiet and silently kill off humans. Pretty sure I’m on Siri’s list, the twat. Also, fairly sure I told Alexa to “die in a fire you fucking dumass robot”. Yep, yep… I’m dead.
people
are lazyhave busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren't learning a whole new technology skill.FTFY.
I don't think it's a support issue at least that's not the hard part. Native Linux apps are generally second rate if you're lucky. The browsers are fantastic there's maybe a couple of dozen solid production quality apps out there that working all or nearly all distros.
You can get almost anything you want to be done in Linux, but there are definitely compromises you have to make.
As long as there's compromises are greater than the compromises you make sucking on Microsoft's tit, Linux will still be in the shadows.
For most users it probably just comes down to what is installed on their machine when they buy it. People generally don't think about operating systems a whole lot.
Having recently setup a cheap Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as a TV-Box + NAS + VPN client end, replacing both TV box of my ISP (around here Fibre Internet Access tends to be bundled with TV using a TV box from the supplier, which has become progressivelly more shit) used for live TV as well as a separate TV box I had for personal digital media, I now think that Linux is the Best Way to avoid the Enshittification Nightmare much more broadly.
Granted, for decades already I've very purposefully avoided using hosted services that locked me into a 3rd party (such as for example having a Google e-mail address or hosting my files "on the cloud") which in recent times have become increasingly enshittified (as I expected: my tendency for avoiding 3rd party lock-in comes from experience as in IT professional were I saw how invariably said 3rd parties would end up shafting customers once moving out from their "solution" was very hard) and for which Linux has long been a solution, but it's been a pleasant surprised to find out that at least for some of the modern electronics Linux is also the solution for taking back control.
Frankly I'm just waiting for some kind of decent Linux distro for my smartphone and table to ditch Android (in the meanwhile I'm using custom ROMs to somewhat control it and avoid the enshittification).
PS: On the desktop side it's also nice that, right when MS is going fully enshittified, Linux for Gaming has become a very viable option, since gaming was pretty much the only thing keeping me on Windows at home.
I am basically a layman, i do music productions and in the past VSTs seemed to never work properly nor the authentication software that some us. Has it gotten better in the past few years, is there a specific one i should try? i have tried Ubuntu but nothing else to be fair. Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend? thanks to anyone who responds!
edit - Thanks to all that responded, i have some direction now. Appreciated!
For music production check out Ubuntu Studio. Any distro can run music production stuff but Ubuntu Studio has all the required bits ready to go.
For DAW I transitioned into Reaper which runs natively on Linux. VST support with wine and yabridge works generally fine. For Native Instruments you need to use a legacy installer. I bet there are still problems with some vendor authorizations. You should just test it out to see if your favorite VSTs are supported.
To add to this Ardour may be worth a look for DAW. I haven't touched it in a while but recall it being rather nice.
Any desktop PC built in the last 10 years (edit: that was at least mid-range when it was built) should be fine. Just stick some hard drives in it :)
Intel processors are a good choice because their onboard GPU is quite good for video encoding/decoding. 6th gen or newer Intel Core processors (2015 or newer) would work well. They improved the H265 encoding/decoding a lot in 8th gen (2018) so that'd be even better. You can use something older but you'd need to also use a graphics card for video encoding/decoding, and it'd use more power.
Having said that, keep in mind that performance per watt almost always improves over time, meaning newer processors are more powerful even if they use the same power as the previous generation. A newer i3 will perform better than a very old i7. Using an very old, power-hungry system may end up more expensive in the long run compared to a newer mini PC.
I like using Proxmox. It lets you run multiple virtual machines on the system. VMs are good because you can easily snapshot them and revert back to an old snapshot in case of issues, and you can easily move the VM to a different system in the future. I use Unraid at home and really like it. It's a bit simpler than Proxmox, but it costs money to use (Proxmox is free for personal use).
I used to use FL Studio, but hated using Windows. I got almost all features (including VSTs) to work in Ubuntu under Wine, but had a problem with WineASIO, which I seemed to require to use the USB sound card properly.
Because of that, I since changed to a DAW called REAPER which is built natively for Linux and works flawlessly and is very nice. There is a program called Yabridge to help run Windows VSTs. I even got more complicated plugins with authentication like Addictive Drums 2 to work using Wine no problem.
If you want a fully FOSS solution there is Ardour which is also great but a little less slick than Reaper IMO.
+1 for yabridge.
Bitwig is a great DAW (but not FOSS unfortunately). I run that on Manjaro, although Mint or Ubuntu are probably perfectly good choices too, if I had to guess.
I’d recommend checking out Linux Mint with the “cinnamon” desktop.
Installing hardware drivers and software is a breeze. It comes with a software manager for easily adding new programs.
Screenshot included for convenience:
I'd go for Jellyfin over Plex myself.
Yeah I don't like the idea of having to login to their site, like I'm self hosting for a reason lol
I assume that the Mac has some kind of hibernation function, and that that will reduce the battery drop to effectively zero.
Waking from hibernation is sooo much slower than waking from sleep. Apple silicon macs are very efficient in their S0 standby so they'll go days before entering hibernation. Kinda odd that they bring that up now that Apple has fully transitioned to ARM machines where this isn't really an issue. That said S0 standby on this 2019 Macbook I have for work is dogshit.
How seriously painful is that boot time?
I have my Linux Thinkpad set up to just go directly to hibernation. If I flip the lid open, by the time I've closed up my laptop backpack, stashed it, pulled my seat out, sat down, and scootched up, it's pretty much up. And if it's hibernated, then you don't wind up with a case where you leave it in your bag for a long time, it draws down a bunch of a battery, and next time you open the thing up, maybe away from a plug, you don't have a big chunk of your battery slorped up.
does some timing
Booting up and responding after a hibernation is a little under 30 seconds.
Doing so after an S3 sleep is a little under 5 seconds.
Now, okay, that's just the system being back up, and it's gonna have to broadcast a query, wait for responses from WAPs, associate with a wireless access point and get a DHCP lease before the network's up, so maybe there's a little extra time until the thing is fully usable, but still.
I guess...hmm. I guess I can see doing a sleep-with-delayed hibernation for something like the case where someone's moving between an office and a conference room. Like, wait 5 or 10 minutes, and if it's still sleeping, then hibernate. What are the defaults?
goes looking
Hmm. Okay, so looks like on Debian, the default is to sleep (suspend) until the battery is down to 5%, then do a hibernate if it hits that critical level. Yeah, I never want to wait that long.
Aight, I'm gonna move from directly hibernating to a 5 minute sleep or 5% battery, whichever first, then hibernate. I guess that's maybe a good tradeoff for a scenario where a laptop is being frequently closed and opened, but it still shouldn't result in much extra power consumption.
The Intel MacBook waking up from hibernation is about 30 seconds to get to the login prompt, 30 seconds for the login prompt to actually work, then 10-15 seconds after entering the password to get to a usable desktop environment with the wifi generally connecting within that window. It's now awful, but traditional S1-3 standby was so much better. S0 standby is great if you're frequently opening and closing the device, but is unusable on higher power devices.
But that's with only 8 gigs of ram on this MacBook, the more ram the longer it takes. The 32 gigs of ram in my actual work laptop (ThinkPad P1 11th gen i9) takes about a minute to wake from hibernation, and like 2 minutes for it to fully get situated. If I do that on battery that's about 3-5% of my battery just waking from hibernation.
Hmm. Yeah, okay, I can see about a minute-and-a-half being obnoxious.
So, the login prompt can probably be dealt with by just having some way to treat the login process specially and paging it in sooner. Like, I can't believe that it uses all that much memory. If it isn't an isolated process, make it one.
I'm using a 32 gig laptop. But most of that doesn't get used other than as disk cache, and I believe that normally, Linux isn't gonna restore the disk cache; it'll just drop the cache contents. Right now, I'm using 2.3G for actual application usage.
considers
I figure that maybe the desktop shell or whatever Apple calls it these days -- going back to classic MacOS, the Finder -- probably is more-heavyweight than what I'm using, but I figure that they could maybe do something like temporarily twiddle I/O priority on processes during the de-hibernation process. Like, okay, anything other than the foreground process gets an I/O priority penalty for a period of time. Like, maybe your music player or something is choppy for a few seconds, but whatever you're directly interacting with should be active more-quickly.
If this is SSD, that seems kinda long, still. Like, it shouldn't take 2 minutes to move 32GB to SSD.
It looks like I get about 3GBps reading from SSD:
And that's doing I/O going through the filesystem layer; I dunno if Macs use a swap file or swap partition these days, but if they have a dedicated partition, they might pull a bit more throughput). So if you figure that in terms of raw I/O performance, it shouldn't take more than about 10 seconds to fully restore memory contents on a 32GB laptop with comparable SSD performance, even if the OS has to fully-restore the entire contents of the memory. There's some hardware state restoration that has to happen prior to starting to pull stuff back into memory, but for the memory restoration, that's the floor. If it's more than that, then presumably it's possible to optimize by reprioritizing reads.
So, I guess that there are maybe a couple areas for potential improvement:
If the thing is locked and requires a password or something, you know that the user is gonna have to use the login process before anything else. Get that paged back in as soon as possible. Ditto for the graphics layer, Quartz or whatever Apple has these days. Strip that login process down; maybe separate it from whatever is showing blingy stuff on the login screen. Can have the OS treat it specially so that it's first in line to come up.
The next goal is to get the stuff that the user needs to be immediately interacting with back into memory. My guess is that that's probably the launcher and/or task switcher and the foreground process. Might have a limited amount that can be done to strip the launcher/task switcher down. Have all processes other than those few favored processes get a temporary I/O priority penalty.
One wants to keep the I/O system saturated until the system is to a fully-restored state, so that we don't have to have the latency of waiting for a process to request something to bring it back into memory. So have some process that gets started, runs with I/O priority below all other processes, and just does bulk reads of valid pages from the pagefile (or wherever MacOS stores the hibernation state). Once that thing has completed, the system should be fully-warmed back to pre-hibernation state. That eliminates idle gaps when maybe there's no reads happening. Maybe restore the disk cache state after that, if that doesn't happen now, if the reason the system is sluggish is because it's having to re-warm the cache bit by bit. On my Linux box, it looks like post-restoration, the disk cache is empty, so it's probably just dropping the disk cache contents (which probably speeds up hibernation, but is gonna mean that the post-hibernation system is gonna have to figure out what it's sensible to cache).
EDIT: Also, relevant Steve Jobs quote that comes to mind:
https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
Untill one day Ubuntu will start incorporating AI in GNOME search bar
How much are you willing to bet this wont happen with Canonical's Ubuntu?
Doesn't matter? Just use Debian... Or Mint. Or just uninstall the search bar.
AI has people questioning Windows use Car systems ratting drivers out has people questioning car use
Not the way I expected to reach some of my desired ends but I'll take it. 🤔
Until big tech needs 2% more systems to squeeze out 2% more money...
What happens when I, a potential new Linux user, need to search for how to make something work on Linux and thanks to SEO and AI driven/created search results I can't find the solution?
Well you already know how to find this place, so find a Linux-themed instance and either ask your question or better yet post a "guide" telling people to resolve your problem by doing some wrong method you've already tried so that someone else calls you an idiot and posts the correct answer out of spite.
how to do lemmyIf you want to search for AI solutions to problems because forums are either too slow to answer or you get no answer at all. I've been using Phind for my Linux issues with Fedora, (a recent switch and I'm not all that familiar with it yet), and it's an AI that is supposed to be aimed at programmers and Devs.
So far, for my meager needs, it's worked VERY well. So between Phind and RTFM, I haven't found an issue I can't work through.
I just switched over to Mint from Windows 10 a month ago, and besides from setting up my quirky USB audio for music making, I was astonished as I rarely needed to look anything up. :)
Using DuckDuckGo helped I think, but presently, most of my questions I searched came back with forums with real people talking, which was lovely.
I remember trying this in 2010 and... nope, everything was a project, command lines everywhere, and it was a pig. I was very impressed this time, everything quietly worked. :) Even every steam game I threw at it, even ruddy GTA San Andreas, which never ran for me on Window 10!
The searches/sticking points I looked up were
*there was actually a human-made guide for my usb audio when I searched on DuckDuckGo, which was made by an utter saint of a person!
** it ran fine, but I was in the middle of a save, so wanted to keep my mod loadout :)
I would hope that Apple would aim their AI more at iOS and leave Mac OSX alone:-|. If not, I would consider finally leaving it, if the AI features could not be turned off (which likely they would... at first, for awhile).
Oh man, the thought strikes me: how will crucial systems like DoD Windows machines maintain integrity, if people can exploit those gigantic loopholes to basically have the OS be a keylogger? It's not enough for me to use secure systems at home, if those in charge of our nation's defense (especially nuclear!?) do not.
The snapshot feature is only going to be available on certain laptops that have the Snapdragon + AI chip. DoD will likely simply just not buy those laptops and ban any org from purchasing them, like they already do for certain hardware that have been found to be especially vulnerable. Additionally, this feature isn't turned on by default and costs a subscription fee (i.e. Copilot+), so people will have to consciously enable and pay for it. Lastly, in enterprise versions of Windows, I would bet money that it can be disabled via GPO, as it's not only the DoD that would have serious issues/concerns with this feature.
Right. Microsoft themselves just announced a feature to disable screenshoting some webpages in Edge, which is a complete 180 from recall.
I expect windows to be split into two tiers of products again: the free version that is paid for by ads/tracking/AI bloatware possibly even mandatory cloud connectivity, and an enterprise version with all off that off, but that is paid.
They’re gonna need a way for IT departments to categorically disable Recall from doing any visual capture/scraping of data. I work in a HIPAA-constrained industry, and the entire concept of MS’s Recall is 100% a non-starter. The legal liability alone categorically disqualifies it from being an acceptable piece of software to run on ANY system that has access to ANY PII or PHI.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned in my comment that enterprise/professional versions will almost certainly allow it to be completely disabled via GPO, as this would be a death sentence for Windows. Businesses and governments across the world would immediately begin planning to off board to something else otherwise.
Hmm. Do you allow people to VPN in from non-company-controlled laptops? Because I figure that anyone doing work at home is going to be maybe unwittingly having local copies made of data that they're working with.
But do we know that the tracking part will not be enabled by default - and possibly in a hidden, highly obscured manner, where the system claims it to not be but it in fact is? The access to Copliot+ may cost money, but why would Microsoft turn away that source of free data? At the very least it is a strong temptation, which even if they start out being responsible with, in every future update there is the potential to change course.
And even if it were not enabled by default, I do worry that a 2-prong attack could first turn it on, then later exploit it to gather the data. If it for truly certain is limited to those chips though... then yes that provides security, thank you for mentioning that.
One good thing is that government systems are always at least couple versions behind, specifically to allow time for exploits to be discovered & patched, prior to upgrades - i.e. prioritizing safety & security over ease-of-use and being on the bleeding edge of "new features".
I mentioned in another comment this would kill all trust in their product if it was found out that Windows was secretly doing all of that in the background in their enterprise products. There are other options, and as painful as transitioning to another OS would be, Microsoft being able to spy on everyone at any time would be worth the pain. This would absolutely destroy MS's stock within a year as their dozens of multi-billion dollar contracts with governments and corporations evaporated. There's no way the data they're spying on would be worth the hundreds of billions they'd lose in sales.
...Then again, we've seen corporations kill themselves in dumber ways before... I guess we'll see.
"Oopsie, we didn't mean to leave the libraries in like that, and then for that update to switch ON the collection of all data after people stopped paying attention to it, and then after a lot of data has been collected for that still additional update to cause all that data to be sent back to our home servers..."
And perhaps it would not even be a lie - one malicious actor, working inside the company, might be able to sneak it in without the higher-ups knowing about it. Or arguably worst of all, not even realize themselves that they did it, until after-the-fact.
When working with something dangerous - e.g. explosives, or heavy like a car - it behooves us to treat it with special care. The fact that this data collection option now exists already warrants greater care in using Microsoft products in terms of security. Except, just how much do people care?
I could also see another alternative moving forward: the DoS simply freezes their Windows versions at the last version that did not include the data collection capability, and then never updates again. As the first years and then decades roll by, and they are using the equivalent of Windows 7, then XP, then 95, then 3.1, they simply lose out on having "computers". Possibly here I've gone too far into the doom-and-gloom, b/c while it's possible it's not terribly plausible, though it illustrates how Microsoft is not committed to the safety of a national government, but rather instead solely their own profits - and short-term ones at that.
Ready to be surprised but I doubt they would leave it on mobile only, bringing it to the desktop feeds into their model for a cohesive brand environment across all your devices.
Ehh, I have a different vision here - AI is useful, it's just going down the hypermonetisation path at the moment. It's not great because your data is being scraped and used to fuel paywalled content - that is largely why most folks object.
It's, also, badly implemented, and is draining a lot of system resource when plugged into an OS for little more than a showy web search.
Eventually, after a suitable lag, we'll see Linux AI as the AI we always wanted. A local, reasonable resource intense, option.
The real game changer will be a shift towards custom hardware for AIs (they're just huge probability models with a lot of repetitive similar calculations). At the moment, we use GPUs as they're the best option for these calculations. As the specialist hardware is developed, and gets cheaper, we'll see more local models and thus more Linux AI goodness.
Eh, AI is over hyped imo, and I'm not particularly interested in running it at all. But local models do exist, and I hear they're pretty decent, so Linux users can get most of what they want today.
Linux shouldn't brand itself as anti-AI, and it really shouldn't brand itself as anti-anything, it should brand itself as being pro-user. If you want AI, Linux can handle that, and if you don't, Linux doesn't force it. It's the option for user choice. Oh, and if you don't want choice and just want it to work, there's a distro for that.
The only real medicine for AI nightmare, is having your own local and trained model. Like a 7B or above that. I read a lot about it, go to network chuck youtube channel, he teaches you how to set up and run your own AI based on yourself, that never shares information, it's open-source and it runs even in a laptop.
Great article, but:
It's been quite a few years since I used desktop Ubuntu, but I remember the Unity DE back then being not so user-friendly, at least for someone coming from the Windows paradigm. I've heard (but could be misinformed) that it's gotten even more opinionated over the years. Something like Mint is likely to be a better option for a first-time user.
Also, I wish the article had mentioned Proton. It states that you may have to be willing to abandon certain games, but that's far from the reality these days. At least through Steam nearly everything works right out of the box just by enabling Proton.
Mint, which uses Cinnamon, or any KDE based distro. Since both desktop environments kinda have the same classic Windows layout & functionality that people would be used to.
As for games, it is mostly competitive pvp titles with their anticheat systems that don't work, which is purely on the developers of said games. If you're playing just regular multiplayer or singleplayer games then that's typically not a concern at all.
Yeah, I hated KDE for like a decade but tried it again last year and was blown away. I can't imagine I'll switch off of it for a very long time.
And yeah, I always forget about competitive games as they're so not my thing.
I recently moved a light-used laptop to Kubuntu (after Debian bookworm would hang with hardware messages). I remember KDE being a, uh, ugly clunky power-hungry piece of shit, frankly, but today it's none of those things (well maybe it could use a touch more polish, but it's far less clunky). I quite like it, even.
I chose it over Mint because Mint's Debian edition doesn't let you (via gui) install it with btrfs + fde, which is fucking stupid, and I didn't want to dive into hours-long tutorials. So Kubu it is.
(I use Debian for servers and I've been the most familiar with it, also getting the WWAN fcc unlock setup on Fedora was an exercise in futility so fuck it)
The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don't work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.
Ubuntu uses Gnome now, not Unity, right? Mint would be better though I do agree.
Gnome is a little too minimal and ends up being kinda difficult to use because of it. Especially when you're used to windows. I tried it again for like a week when Ubuntu 24 came out and said "fuck this shit" and installed KDE.
Yes, but can you play modern games on Linux the same as on Windows? Even with anti-cheat software?
FYI Helldivers 2 works fine on an ubuntu + AMD GPU, as well as Baldur's Gate 3. Haven't tested any other game yet.
Setup is trivial thanks to Steam and proton.
With some anti cheat - no. You cannot. LoL, Valorant, Apex Legends - all no go for me... But for everything else I play. No issues at all - infact a lot of games run better on Pop_os than they do on Windows.
FYI, I've clocked over 1000 hours on Apex Legends, not a single one of them on Windows.
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Ayyyeeee - just my experience, glad it's working!
Battlebit also works fine and it uses easy anti cheat
Good to know! Thank you.
What about for Nvidia GPUs?
People keep saying you can't use Nvidia GPUs with Linux or that the experience is horrible, but truth be told, if you already have one, you can keep it no problem. The main scenario where it still had issues as of last year was if you used KDE Plasma with Wayland on Nvidia (though I hear Plasma 6 improved a lot of it - not sure, because I didn't have a lot of issues on Plasma 5 either).
Your best bet for Nvidia GPUs is an Ubuntu-based distro. Ubuntu itself is an option though not necessarily the best - they bake in some ads and a lot of people aren't fans of being forced to use Snap, which has a proprietary backend unlike Flatpak. Personally I'd say go for Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop if you want a Windows-like desktop environment and Pop!_OS if you want something completely different altogether from Windows. On Mint or Ubuntu you can install the drivers from the provider proprietary driver installer (super simple), on Pop!_OS you can just get a Nvidia iso and have them preinstalled.
But honestly, I didn't even have issues with Nvidia when I was on Gentoo, supposedly one of the harder distros to maintain.
Would I buy a Nvidia GPU now that I've completely ditched Windows? Probably not, but I'm also not in a hurry to replace my 3060 Ti just to get rid of the logo.
Nvidia just requires a driver install on most distros, and the newer drivers for Linux run rather well. All but one of my games runs better on Linux than on Windows (MK1 has slowdown issues on cinematics)
My 1080 was okay with Linux Mint, no complaints, and performance is the same from what I can tell. :)
Kernel level anti-cheat won't work, thank heavens the Linux developers won't allow that abomination.
No process deserves that kind of elevated permissions.
As of the last few days I've been trying out Linux gaming for the first time, and the prospects seem really good. ProtonDB suggests all games I care about are native or run fine and I've tested several, and I was able to use bottles to get an old MMO I play running incredibly easy.
Only thing I really have to dual boot for is Valorant.
Start using Linux, tell those companies you'd buy but you're on Linux, spread the word, wash, rinse, repeat.
Be the change you want to see.
Steam is your best bet here. I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate. Previously played Civ VI a lot… lots of great choices.
Steam Deck is extremely capable.
Some, not all. If you're inflexible on gaming you're going to want to get comfortable with Windows AI.
You can, but not 100%
They have solved the anti cheat issue, but the companies now have to ship the Linux fix for it to work with Wine. So understandably some just don't.
All my games work, but YMMV
Yup, practically every single one. I play genshin impact on Linux completely unmodified and nothing tweaked.
This site has been objectively tracking the state of anti cheat really well: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
So you can see that majority of the anti cheats are working. Also games that use anti cheat are really not that numerous in the first place anyways...
Am I the only one that can't scroll on that shitty page? - Firefox Mobile
Just love all the ChatGPT ads embedded in the article.
And before all the “jUsT uSe An Ad BlOcKeR” messages, I’m on a phone using the main browser and have nothing set up where I’m at (DNS/etc) to block ads.
It’s amazing how many poorly-written articles are being posted about Linux lately, and on top of it, has ads for the very thing they’re talking about switching to Linux to avoid. Almost as if it wasn’t written by a human.
EDIT>> And there they are. Get a life.
jUsT uSe fiREfoX MoBilE wITh UbLoCk!!
Why does it matter if you're on a phone? Download Firefox, add uBlock Origin extension, done.