Personally I'm not looking an OS that is "not so bad", the initial impression should be "this is great" :)

Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world

That's also the thing, I switched to Linux because I hated using Windows, and I don't like how Microsoft operates. The last think I want is a distribution which tries to be Windows made by a company which tries to be Microsoft. It's of course an exaggeration, and Ubuntu doesn't do EEE and patent trolling as far as I know, but at least for me it feels like they're going in the wrong direction when they keep reinventing the wheel, forcing solutions that users don't want, and generally trying to create a "one size fits all" desktop. I'm not against it, Ubuntu is probably a good choice for some users, it just doesn't fit me. I used Xubuntu for many years, and I also tried both Gnome and Unity at different points, but currently I use Fedora KDE.

Not entirely clear but perhaps OP is talking about blocking unwanted outgoing reqjests? E.g. anti-features and such since they mention traffic from their apps.

This is the first time I'm hearing about this, but this is how they describe it on their product page:

The AI-Powered Future of Windows Devices

Build, explore, and immerse yourself on select laptops with Ryzen™ AI built in. With dedicated AI accelerator hardware seamlessly integrated on-chip and software that intelligently optimizes tasks and workloads, CPU and GPU resources are freed up to enable optimal performance.

But based on the examples they have on github, it sounds like it might be useful to run generic AI compute stuff. I haven't seen any details about what memory it uses, since especially LLMs require large amounts of fast memory. If it can use all the system RAM it might provide medium-fast inference of decent models, similar to M1/M2 Macs. If it has dedicated RAM it'll probably be even faster but possibly extremely limited in what you can do with it.

The only certification I have is from the Kansas City Barbeque Society, allowing me to act as a judge in BBQ competitions.

Things are probably different nowadays, but at least 15-25 years ago you could just apply for IT jobs and if someone lied about their skills it would hopefully show during the technical interviews. I don't know if that counts as getting in very early.

It sucks when this happens, but the article also says:

Update 20/11/23 14:33 UTC — Crytek responded to note: "This is a known issue and we are working on it to fix it and apply the fix for the resolution as soon as possible."

So not ideal but at least the devs want to support Linux.

Maybe it's changing now with Windows 10/11, but I think historically Windows has had just as difficult learning curve as Linux. People who have complained about Linux being more difficult than Windows just thought so because they had already spent years learning how to deal with Windows, while if they switched to Linux they would have to learn new things. If someone who has used MacOS 100% of their life were to begin using either Windows or Linux then I don't think there would be much difference in difficulty.

I've come across plenty of bugs and usability issues in Windows, and despite having 10+ years experience with the OS I sometimes found them very difficult to solve, often requiring copy-pasting cryptic texts into the command prompt and/or regedit. I also think troubleshooting on Windows is made worse thanks to them writing witty things like "oops, something went wrong!" instead of actually giving you a useful error message, some many issues are of course unfixable due to its proprietary nature. At best you get an error code which you can look up online, but the OS is not made to be debugged by the user.

In the past Microsoft had really good support which you chat with, but the last time Windows refused to authenticate after an upgrade all the human support appears to have been replaced by automated troubleshooters. It got stuck in an endless loop of "run local troubleshooter" -> "you should try rebooting" -> "run online troubleshooter" -> "you should try rebooting" -> "back to the local troubleshooter again". At work I still have a help-desk I can call with people who have taken countless hours of Microsoft trainings to get certifications.

just so I wasn’t choosing between 100% and 200% scaling. That’s just beyond the average computer user.

So if I understood you right, Fedora lets you choose either 100% or 200% scaling but you wanted more options than that? I.e. you wanted to overcome a limitation of the OS, rather than having to fix something which was broken? I don't think the average computer user could do something similar in Windows. For example when I got my work computer with Windows 11, AFAIK there was no option to only show the task bar on one monitor, so it was always visible and taking space on all monitors. IIRC Microsoft added this feature last year, but I think it would've been extremely difficult for the average user to find a way to find a way to do it before that.

Guesstimating 99% of the Windows users I know would just accept that kind of thing like "it's annoying, but this is how computers are". I have friends, family members and coworkers who use Windows, and I've found them all to be extremely forgiving towards computer issues.

Not just talk about implementing it, but also making it opt-out (i.e. enabled by default). If I understood it right, the author of the proposal even writes that that opt-in is useless, because nobody is going to enable it, which kinda makes it sound like they know that they're trying to push something on users that they don't want.

I have a stupid one, but far from funny.. I've been using and building computers for a very long time so I'm far from a noob, but I'm still quite cautious, bordering on paranoid, so I like to unplug all other drives when re/installing an OS just to avoid stupid mistakes. I go through the installer on the livecd, there's only one drive to choose from so I don't think much about it, select that it should erase everything, I set up the new partition structure, and start the process. After about a minute I begin wondering "why is it taking so long?", and "what is that ticking noise? SSDs shouldn't be making any sounds when written to", when I realize that I had unplugged the wrong drives and that I was currently overwriting my main storage drive. Of course I had backups of the most important things like photos and code, though not really synced for a couple of months so I lost some stuff permanently.

For LLMs it entirely depends on what size models you want to use and how fast you want it to run. Since there's diminishing returns to increasing model sizes, i.e. a 14B model isn't twice as good as a 7B model, the best bang for the buck will be achieved with the smallest model you think has acceptable quality. And if you think generation speeds of around 1 token/second are acceptable, you'll probably get more value for money using partial offloading.

If your answer is "I don't know what models I want to run" then a second-hand RTX3090 is probably your best bet. If you want to run larger models, building a rig with multiple (used) RTX3090 is probably still the cheapest way to do it.

Less than a year after that mail Swedish laws were rewritten to make copying music and movies illegal.

Because USA told us to.

What kind of business? The only place I worked that ran exclusively Linux, i.e. not in a VM on top of Windows, was Opera Software. Everybody got to install and manage their own computer, which might not be ideal from a security standpoint.

Most places I've worked use Linux VM:s on top of Windows, I'm guessing probably because management and/or the IT department only knows Windows and can't imagine life without it :/ Subsequently the vast majority of issues have been either directly related to Windows/Office/Teams, or accessing Windows shared drives etc. from Linux.

Vagrant seemed pretty convenient when deploying identical development environments, if that could be of any help to you.

but if you just click Next like most users will do, it’ll be enabled

That's the definition of opt-out, so they're telling the truth :) Opt-out is the worse alternative when it comes to unwanted features, opt-in would have been better.

Have they stated that they're going to support Linux or at least Proton/Wine? I did a quick search on the game's Steam forum and it sounded like it doesn't work currently.

Did you try running xev and pressing the key to see if it shows up as something?

It ought to be mandatory to write this out whenever talking about Linux. I've seen more than one person bash Linux in a public forum "because it has digital rights management built into the kernel" after they've misinterpreted some news headline.

snap/flatpak >500mb

And to make it worse, snap keeps copies of previous versions of all programs. Which can be good if you need to roll something back, but at least last time I used Ubuntu it didn't provide any easy way to configure retention or clean up old snaps.

Cyberpunk feels like it so much missed potential it almost made me sad playing it.. The game is gorgeous and in many ways it really nails the cyberpunk feeling, which I've been very fond of since I was a kid so I would just love to be able to immerse myself in a game like this.

However it keeps slapping me in the face with stupid things that break the immersion.. Primarily the low effort CRPG item system, where each weapon and piece of clothing has random stats. So you find 10 identical looking guns but they all do different amount of damage and add some random elemental damage, which would've made more sense if they were magical weapons in a fantasy game.. When I last played it I found an oversized dildo that does 4 times as much damage as my katana.. And of course a tiny bikini can have better armour value than actual armour..

Which browser are you using? Perhaps it has some built in blocking

If you're using btrfs then you might need to rebalance it. I had the same problem, i.e. "no free space" while tools like df reporting that there should be available disk space, and it confused the hell out of me until I found the solution.

See manual: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Balance.html

This are the commands I run every now and then, especially if my drive has been close to full and I delete a bunch of files to make more space:

sudo btrfs balance start -dusage=10 /
sudo btrfs balance start -dusage=20 /
sudo btrfs balance start -dusage=30 /

The / at the end is the path, since it's my root mount which uses btrfs. The example in the manual does 40 and 50 too, but higher numbers take longer time, even on an nvme ssd.

I have a folder named "Subtitles - Project Threepio" for the first movie, plus .srt files for the other two despecialized editions. If noone else does it first I could upload them somewhere. Any good sites for sharing a few small files without having to register?

Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.

To be fair this is more of an issue with Discord than snap.. Would be understandable if it was an urgent security fix but they do it every time, and then it breaks for everybody who is using anything else than the deb or tar.gz they provide.

Workaround for Fedora: Edit /usr/lib64/discord/resources/build_info.json and increase the version number to whatever Discord tells you is the new version. And hope that the update wasn't a fix for some remote code execution vulnerability :)

Unclear if you're referring to the meme or if serious, so I'm gonna leave this here just in case: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet

I work for a large IT company so we've had numerous such training courses, but then they use third party services for time reporting, manager evaluation, cloud services, personal finance advice, etc. so I regularly get emails with links to domains that I've never heard about that I'm supposed to trust..

I think it's the "…Yes sorry, I will show myself out." that makes it sound like you were trying to make a joke

Personally I don't like companies tracking what I do constantly. If I had the possibility, I wouldn't allow my credit card issuer to profile me based on my purchases. I'm using "deGoogled" Android to limit Google's ability to monitor what I do on my phone, and I use both ad block and privacy badger in my web browser. I'm not saying what Fedora/Red Hat is considering is the same as what Google, Facebook, etc are doing, but in general, I'm against being tracked and monitored.

Now one might argue that software telemetry is much more benign, that they're only collecting data about their software and not about me. The thing is that I don't trust businesses to actually care about me, the end user, and I assume they're going to fuck me over the second it becomes the more profitable option for them. I could spend time and energy to read up on what data they collect from my computer, but that sounds kinda tedious and boring so it's not like I want to. And even if they completely anonymize the data now, I'm not confident that I would notice if they changed their ToS to allow them to collect more data and sell it to third parties at some point in the future. It's just so much more convenient for me if there is no telemetry to begin with.

But I can definitely see why company collecting data would prefer opt-out.

My wife and I gave a Linux computer to a friend's kid. I think I used something called Grapejuice to install Roblox, which ran perfectly for about a year. Then it broke because they wrote a new game client or something, but the kid just said "it's ok, I'll play other games instead." Best Linux gamer attitude :)

I put all the subs in a zip file, in case anyone finds that easier than hunting them down individually on opensubtitles: https://www.swisstransfer.com/d/2ab10863-e9f9-442b-9d2c-44f0711f8280

Max validity was 30 days, so if someone has the possibility host them more permanently others might appreciate it in the future.

The only info I have about the actual video files is that Star Wars is supposedly Despecilized Edition v2.5, while ESB and RotJ only come with a text file crediting Harmy. Perhaps the latter two are also v2.5 but I have no note of it.

I think it's some kind of modern UX design philosophy; Remove everything except the most basic features to make it less confusing for computer illiterate users. Then label the rest of the features as "advanced" and either hide them behind some menus or in a separate program. Obviously that doesn't mean that everybody who likes Gnome and similarly designed software is computer illiterate, but it's difficult to make one glove that fits all. Kind of like those failed experiments to make a unified OS for desktops, tablets and phones..

When Gnome 3 was announced I thought it was cool that they tried something new, and I really wanted to like it. I've given it a couple of more chances over the years, to see if it has changed more to my liking, but after a few weeks of use I always replace it with something else.. The way the UX is designed just reminds me too much of what I dislike about Windows. Having to use dconf editor to change settings feels just like being forced to use regedit.

Firefox also tried to go down this road IMO, but have reverted some of the worst changes and can be made almost to my liking with the help of extensions. Personally I like Vivaldi better but I think it's important to keep Firefox alive so that Chromium/Blink doesn't get complete monopoly.

Small disclaimer: I'm not claiming all these issues can be said to be 100% Ubuntu's fault, but if recommending a distro to someone who wants to try Linux for the first time they probably won't care about anything other than the compound experience. I used Xubuntu for many years and remembered it as very stable and the vast majority of things being easy and working out of the box, which is why I was so surprised that I had to spend hours troubleshooting various things that I never had problems with previously.

Some issues and annoyances I remember off the top of my head:

Unable to wake computer after monitor turning off due to inactivity. Happened to all 3 computers which have very different hardware, which seemed a little strange to me. Did some troubleshooting on my wife's desktop PC and IIRC it appeared to be the program which would ask for your password crashed, causing the computer to turn off the monitor signal again. Uninstalled the xfce4-screensaver package and disabled password on resume on her PC which fixed it there, but her netbook needs to have password and I think it still sometimes has this issue (she doesn't use it very often). On the htpc I both uninstalled xfce4-screensaver and disabled all monitor power saving, but recently it has started turning off the monitor signal after inactivity anyway. At least it always wakes up from this state.

However, the htpc sometimes fails to wake up the monitor/tv after hibernate. The computer wakes up but the monitor doesn't, and the only solution I know is the following procedure: Wake the computer up, press ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to a different vtty, press the keyboard shortcut to hibernate the computer, wake it up again, press ctrl-alt-f6 to switch back to the graphical desktop. For some reason that works..

Every time the htpc wakes up from hibernate there's a notification saying something about the computer being reconnected to the network. There's a button on the popup for "don't notify me about this again" but it makes no difference, the popups keep coming. Can ofc. be disabled entirely from some other settings, but it's not working as expected.

Watching movies in Kodi doesn't work. It starts playing it without sound, then it begins to stutter after about 10 seconds and it gets worse until Kodi freezes entirely. Haven't had time to properly debug it, but it worked just fine on Arch (which I wouldn't recommend to a beginner for other reasons :)) which the previous htpc had. Instead we use VLC for the time being.

We watch various series on youtube and dropout.tv so we have a browser tab permanently open for each, often with longer episodes paused in the middle. About once per month there's a popup telling us that we must close the web browser so that snap can update it. The popups don't time out, and need to be clicked to go away. If you click to ignore it too many times it will forcibly close eventually. Occasionally this causes the web sites to forget what we were watching, and it can take a bit of time to find out where you were in a 3 hour D&D actual play. Probably snaps working as intended but both of us find it annoying.

Over all our Brother laser jet + scanner is great with Linux, but I had to spend a few hours to get all features working on my wife's PC while it was pretty much plug-n-play on my current install of Fedora KDE.

Wife's PC had issues with monitors losing their relative position and orientation. It might've been triggered when one of the cables glitched a bit, and it doesn't happen now that they're screwed in properly, but I think the OS ought to remember the configuration better. It also moved the monitors so they weren't adjacent, which made the mouse pointer behave very weirdly when moved between then until she rearranged them in the settings.

There were some other things that I'm not able to recall right now too, nothing too serious for someone with Linux experience. My wife used Ubuntu at university so she's not computer illiterate, but I don't think she would've had the time and energy to spend hours troubleshooting issues, searching online and digging around in config files, so she probably would've switched back to Windows since it mostly worked for her.

Maybe they're afraid of accidentally writing rm -rf folder/.git /* or something

Because other languages available at that time lacked certain programming conveniences found in bash :) Despite its shortcomings, it's still a very convenient language for running other programs, working with files, and piping output from one program to another, or to a file. Bash was first released in 1989, and I don't know exactly when it passed the threshold for widespread adoption, but I can't think of anything that would've been a better alternative.

I think OP is also asking "why aren't people switching to something else now" which is a completely different question.

My 4 last employers have used desktop Linux to some extent:

• Ericsson (Swedish telecoms), default was to have a Windows laptop with X server (Citrix?) but a few of us were lucky enough to get a Linux laptop.
• Vector (German automotive), Linux dev. environment in a VM on Windows laptops.
• Opera Software (Norwegian web browser), first day I was given a stack of components and told to assemble my PC and then install my Linux distribution of choice.
• And a smaller company, which shall remain unnamed, also used Windows laptops with Linux dev. env. in VM.

Sure most of it was on top of Windows, but if you fullscreen it you can barely tell the difference :)

In the defence of client side AC; if the entire game runs on the server, then network delay makes FPS:es awful to play. Being able to trust clients and let them do hit detection is quite important in making online FPS:es responsive. In addition, cheats that remove walls/grass, highlight players or even autoaim are near impossible to detect server side. One could try to use heuristics and statistics but it would be difficult to tell the difference between cheaters and players who are just good at aiming and map awareness.

Check https://www.protondb.com/ for the games you play. If some doesn't work, ask yourself if you can live without them.

I've been full time Linux for quite a few years now, but I do have a dual boot mainly for VR. Other than that there haven't been many games that I want to play that don't work with Linux.

Local LLMs are getting better at a very rapid pace. Still a bit too resource hungry to have running in the background all the time, but for example Mistral-7b is quite competent for its size.

A few days ago I wrote down a couple of links to interesting TTS projects that I was going to look into whenever I have time, along with some brief notes.

https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS TTS + XTTS, GPU inference? 3GB model.

https://github.com/rhasspy/piper Low resource, CPU inference. 50MB model.

https://github.com/p0p4k/vits2_pytorch GPU inference? 500MB model. https://github.com/p0p4k/vits2_pytorch/discussions/27 Someone's models for vits2

I also use KDE because I like customizing my DE, but I'm not sure I agree that it's hard to break. When I just switched from Xfce to KDE I downloaded several global themes using the built-it theme browser, and a few of those definitely messed things up. It's also happened more than once that I boot my computer and end up with only the desktop background (i.e. no panels or context menu) because KDE thought there was some wrong with the theme, which can be difficult to recover from for someone who doesn't know how to ctrl-alt-F3 and edit settings manually. Though it's ofc. more stable when not testing global themes, and only changing other appearance settings.

The first game was named Battlefield 1942, so technically there hasn't been a "1" in the series before this :) It came out in 2016 so it's not really new, but I bought it last year and played it on Linux for a few hours with friends, and it still has an active player base.

Yep, and I think the best thing one can do is to not reuse passwords. Just wanted to point it out so previous poster doesn't think they're guaranteed to be unaffected by the hack because their account is supposedly deleted.

Difficult to know if actually deleted, or just marked as inactive in the user database.