KDE is my favorite, but I’m excited to try Cosmic once it’s a little farther along.

I also love Cinnamon, not because it looks great, or has a ton of customizablity, but because it is so stable. It’s been the best #JustWorks DE in my experience.

Those are the only two I use regularly. Xfce is nice once you get it customized, but it’s kind of a pain to get configured. I don’t have much use for sophisticated tiling, so tiling window managers are just curiosities to me. I’ve played with i3, Sway, Hyprland, and a few others over the years.

I wish I had a use case for them, but alas, all my day to day needs are handled just fine with basic Window snapping, tmux, kitty tabs, and occasionally using a second virtual desktop.

So FOSS Devs using ChatGPT are taking them…how?

Yeah, you can’t, because it’s not claimable, it’s proprietary software, even the “open” models are restricted in their licensing and usability.

Perhaps local models will make some positive difference in the future, but likely not. I suspect that decades down the line, we will see LLMs in a similar light as asbestos or Teflon. Things that were hailed as “miracle products” that seemed amazing at first, but had incredibly destructive side-effects that we only found out about long after the proliferation.

If something is overall destructive to society, I don’t want to “take” it, I want it gone.

I don’t want worker-owned casinos, or online gambling markets, or cigarette companies, I want those things gone. They don’t make us better off or more free, they harm and enslave us.

Door dashers and Uber eats are the worst in my experience.

Total disregard for any traffic rules, they just straight up park their cars in the middle of a lane outside of the restaurant and leave their cars sitting there while they go inside.

Food delivery gig services are an absolute blight and should be completely illegal imo.

I’ve been using Graphene for several years and I love it. I could never go back now, Google android feels so incredibly bloated and invasive by comparison.

Double check your backups just to be safe, and then go for it. It’s not hard to revert if you hate it. There is a big of a learning curve, mainly just using the alternative app stores like Accresent, F-Droid, etc.

But once you spend a bit of time getting your apps installed and your system set up the way you like, you’ll love it.

First off, the luddites were right back in the day.

Second, just because you can use something effectively doesn’t make it good in general.

There are people who can have multiple credit cards for years and never carry a balance, or walk into a casino with $100, lose it all, and quit right there.

But most people can’t, and being one of the few that can doesn’t make it safe or good overall. Credit cards and casinos are still predatory and a detriment overall to the population.

I puffed a few cigs back in high school and college to see what all the fuss was about, didn’t get it. But I personally know multiple people that did the same thing, got hooked almost immediately, and took years to quit. Cigarettes are bad for you and highly addictive. The fact that they never hooked me doesn’t change that.

Third, I’m not sure how using LLMs is “fighting against big tech.” unless you just mean using their tools to build FOSS more effectively.

But that’s the whole point, it’s not at all clear that LLMs enable that for most people. In fact, there’s already quite a bit of data to indicate the opposite. That using LLMs results in worse code, worse development of skills like critical reasoning and problem solving, worse productivity, worse security, and undeniable environmental harm.

Awesome to hear!

+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.

It’s my #1 “just works” distro

Why not both? 🤓

I am constantly impressed with the level of general idiocy of end users when it comes to stuff like this…

No web ui, just the direct CLI interface.

For my team, I have set up lab accounts on the host machine and configured the SSHD daemon to drop them directly into their designated lab container when they use that account and key combo.

Nothing fancy.

Apparently, you can use Curve Pay, which is a UK-based virtual card manager and wallet which works with NFC tap to pay.

There’s a blog post by a guy last year who posted about it. Idk anything about tap to pay third parties, so look into that at your own risk.

I’m currently in the process of deploying a Linux lab environment at my current workplace actually.

Check out Incus if you haven’t already. Incus Containers

It’s a community supported fully open source fork of LXC. It supports full system Linux containers as opposed to Docker-style single application containers. It also supports full QEMU virtual machines of you need them.

It’s likely going to replace my entire traditional type-1 hypervisor setup in my home lab because of how much lighter weight it is. My most lightweight VMs are typically still 2GB of RAM, things tend to get funky when I go below that. Whereas my clean install of a Debian 13 container on Incus was using around 90MB. In these crazy times, anything that uses RAM 10x-20x more efficiently has my attention.

It can also do all the typical hypervisor back end stuff, HA clustering, automatic container snapshots, userspace isolation, virtual networking, static and dynamic resource limitations, etc.

The daemon runs on all major distros, but you can also build and use their IncusOS, which is an immutable distro-fied Incus deployment that is optimized out of the box. (Although I’ve had great results just running it as a daemon on a basic Debian installation.)

It’s super easy to learn and get going, and it’s working perfectly in the early tests for my team as a Lab environment platform.

Call it in. I got a truck just like this towed within an hour and a half for illegally parking, partially blocking an alley street.

Expensive and very inconvenient for the owner, which is just what we want 😌

What issues are you having with GrapheneOS? I’ve installed it on several different devices and it’s been super easy.

I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.

My current job has expensive enterprise class HP laptops, brand new, Nvme drives, the newest CPUs, 32GB RAM, blah blah.

Nearly every day, my corporate VPN app just shits the bed. The tray window that pops up to connect just goes black and never shows anything. I have to open task manager, end the process, wait 30 seconds for it to autostart to then authenticate.

My WSL instance constantly fails to start and I have to run a Powershell command to fix it. Programs won’t maximize won’t open when I try to switch to them until I do it 4-5 times.

Everything is slow and clunky even when I have almost nothing running.

Meanwhile my 8 year old low end Thinkpad with 8 GB of slow DDR4 RAM and a 2.5inch cheapo SSD runs fine with Linux Mint thrown on it and I frequently go 4-6 months between updates.

I mean, it’s intended to be an insult because the implication is that Reddit sucks.

I personally never understood the “Redditor” insults.

Reddit is just a forum directory with an infinite feed. You can find cringey weirdos but there’s also subreddits for potted plants, chess, home improvement, etc. which are pretty mundane and low drama.

I left Reddit for similar reasons, but I still use it sometimes for troubleshooting and advice in the IT/Programming space.

Haven’t had a Motorola in many years. Hopefully this works out well and we get a really nice piece of hardware that isn’t subject to the whims of Google.

Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.

Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.

Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.

How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?

The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.

This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.

All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.

Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).

But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.

And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.

It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.

Start with Linux Mint. It’s similar in vibe to older Windows, (think Windows 7/10)

You can use the GUI for everything, even major version upgrades, driver installations, and Kernel changes.

It comes with everything you need to get started, and their software portal is easy to use and get stuff from, including gaming staples like Steam, OBS Studio, etc.

One of the reasons Linux Mint is so great, all the awesome things about Ubuntu under the hood without any of the trash 😊