If I understand right, the usefulness of basic questions like “Hey ChatGPT, how long do I boil pasta” is offset by the vast resources needed to answer that question. We just see it as simple and convenient as it tries to invest in its “build up interest” phase and runs at a loss. If the effort to sell the product that way fails, it’s going to fund itself by harvesting data.
While I am pessimistic about this Friday, I also try to translate it into meaningful action.
I’ve definitely severely dropped how much “consumerist” spending I go with across the year. This includes lots of different kinds of common luxuries, and instead making use of farmer’s markets and libraries for food and entertainment. From what I have heard on a few anecdotes, the drop in spending around Christmas was significant to retailers, and should hopefully contribute to pessimism towards fascist ideology.
For anyone looking for new alternatives, I’m sure most Lemmy users can suggest more open-source pubfed options, but for anyone trying to generate a bit more presence (not that there’s much) I did find a YouTube video highlighting some “indie social media” sites, mostly focusing on nostalgia of simpler versions of the historically popular ones.
Having the whole world operate off of publically-owned shared systems is probably an ideal, but having them at least in tight competition, with easy destinations to abandon off to, is still quite a bit better.
I guess this isn’t really even “news” to Linux gamers now, but once in a while it’s nice to make an article about what constant progress has happened in a certain sphere. Certainly many people staying on Windows out of inertia blinked and missed it.
My fervent hope is that, someday in the future, people can build a gaming PC and just forego Windows to save $100.
I’m not really qualified to answer, we might need a deep-sublayer geologist.
The one I’m on has a very functional “search and install” app, but I still find myself habitually opening up terminal for installation out of “fastness”. Maybe it’s a poor impulse I should correct.
Probably the biggest thing driving terminal use is opening and configuring system files. You can do that with the file explorer and an elevated text editor, but a lot of guides aiming for conciseness will give you some command to wget a long file online, then insert content into a text file by path in one line.
I kinda get there’s some common meme about Nvidia being Linux’s kryptonite, but everything’s been okay for me on CachyOS. This after some issues earlier in the year on Mint and even Bazzite.
I’m a little half and half on it. A lot of people like myself are fed up with the obsessive way AI is pushed into everything, but I can see it having uses.
For instance, sifting through 20,000 “This user didn’t accept my argument evidence” reports to find some that have merit; that can be worthwhile, even if all it does is alert a human to take a look and make a full judgment. Besides, the bar for quality moderators on sites like Reddit is low.
Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding “This OS will be horrible for everyone now.” but Reddit hasn’t had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.
I recently had a long opinion post I made get downvoted. What upset me wasn’t that someone disagreed with me, it was that they didn’t take the time to explain their own contradicting position, because I wanted to figure out if I had something to learn there.
Could we ever see a “DRM-free cart”, that’s low storage like the key cards, but the key stored allows people to install the game for play anytime, untied to the card?
Indie development on Steam has fully relied on digital distribution, and can’t sustain off of carts anymore. So I’m floundering to find a way to express digital’s usefulness to a Nintendo fanbase that’s currently pissed at a pricing gridlock.
Introducing Microsoft Sepukku.
I’ve been writing a long work, using Office for web editing. Every so often in proofreading, I find spots where it looks like words were just missing. Now I feel like I may have some explanation…
Funny thing is, I’m offhand compiling some Pros/Cons to Windows/Linux, and this has caused the topic of “Support” to completely swing. Used to be, if Windows fucked up, I could complain to Microsoft and they might put someone on a support call intended to fix it. Now, if my OS fucks up, Microsoft will blow me off and send me to a useless AI, while the community for my Linux distro has pros that may genuinely be willing to take some time out to figure out what’s wrong. (Not always a guarantee, but better than nothing)
Yes, but as it exists that distro is very dedicated to the task of supporting Valve hardware, and has done very little to generalize support to other generic hardware.
I imagine it would make a huge bump if Valve were to announce “Wait no longer, SteamOS is here!!”, even if their release is just an overnight reskin-fork of (Bazzite/CachyOS/PopOS).
I say this as someone who tries to tell people, stop waiting on Valve, and try out a few of the options. I’m glad I found a distro that works for me, but I didn’t enjoy the original search. I certainly got pressured into it as Microsoft really put as much effort as they could into making Windows as terrible as possible; and it was not “Everything works 100% out of box!” But the move was worthwhile.
It’s always “one little thing”, and often an OS-local feature that many wouldn’t be aware of.
eg, You go to your grandma’s to help with her computer. She mostly uses her web browser to check on news. BUT, she has one specific home-network file operation she performs regularly, using an old network drive that got set up decades ago by who-knows.
That’s one tiny example, but there’s hundreds of others around, and not from tech nuts. Someone has one specific VPN app they must use, on their personal device, infrequently, for work. Someone runs one app that still mentions Windows 95 compatibility. Someone with learning disabilities is very very used to the pattern of logging in, so much so that they’re confused and ready to call IT when they don’t get a Ctrl+Alt+Delete prompt.
Thankfully, those are often exaggerations, and it’s good that most people’s use cases for niche stuff has migrated to web apps. You’re right that a lot of people really do only rely on their web browser. These days, even Edge is “sorta” available on Linux if someone is that dedicated to their list of bookmarks. Just don’t expect it’s always as simple as people not finding the start-menu-equivalent.
Yup. I’m using my terminal every day, but I program for work and don’t mind a keyboard-friendly interface for a few forms of tinkering and program updates I’m doing. But even I wanted to prefer the GUI for common actions.
The stupidest reason I started going back to my terminal was, my GUI package manager didn’t have a “Select All / Select None” button for package updates, so if I only wanted to update one app at a time, I had to do it from the terminal. That’s not “terminal being awesome”, or “terminal being my preference”, that’s just lazy UI design.
YouTube has done a lot of malicious removal, but I’d be surprised if Windows 11 was one of those intentional targets. YT is run by Google, purveyors of Chromebooks; I’d think they’d generally benefit from a move off of MS/Windows.
It’s sad to say while it was the default choice for a while, it seems like a lot of people are avoiding Ubuntu now.
Gaming is awesome on CachyOS; it’s very possible much of the better capabilities there can be installed on Ubuntu, but I don’t know how hard that is. I imagine most games would perform similarly by default.