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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

    That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.




  • I studied CompSci, so a very technical field, and with one exception (Power BI), everything I used ran on Linux just as well. For my Thesis, I used TeXStudio. For normal writing or presentations, I just used LibreOffice. For calculations, I used Python. For collaborative document editing, we used Google Docs.

    Word of caution: LibreOffice supports the various formats of MS Office, but I’ve had issues the other way around, where a presentation I created in LO wouldn’t work in MSO. If you need to collab on files together, I’d recommend Google Docs. If it’s just you, I recommend sending PDF versions along with (or instead of) the original file, just to be sure.




  • AFAIK there is support for EAC in Proton now, as that was required for Elden Ring. But there probably is some work to do still on the devs’ part, and if they’re not willing to invest that time for what so far is still a niche…

    It’s a bit of a self-perpetuating problem, like all cases of platform inertia: People are reluctant to switch, so unless the draw to the alternative becomes strong enough, they’re more likely to stay. But for the alternative to become appealing, more people would need to switch.

    It’s the same reason many people aren’t leaving Twatter: If you want to reach many people, you’ll want to be in the place with many people.



  • Fuck me, I guess - All the fun I’ve had the last two years wasn’t actually real? I only thought I was having a good time? Why didn’t you tell me back then so I could have been appropriately miserable!

    I’ve got an RTX 3060 with a Ryzen 5 5600X, running Nobara as my sole OS and I’m playing plenty of games just fine. I can’t say that I’ve ever had to do any tinkering to get BG3 to run, and when I recently decided to replay AC Odyssey, it ran smoothly out of the box.

    Granted, sound issues can be annoying, but it’s not like there are no guides for setting up 5.1 with pulseaudio or pipewire. Yes, it’s some tinkering, and I agree that it would be nice if it ran out of the box.

    But if plenty of people around you have theirs working fine, calling them all delusional because yours doesn’t is kinda stupid.

    “Could it be that I’m doing something wrong? No, it’s the linux gamers that are wrong!”


  • You haven’t provided any info about your partition scheme for either drive, but I assume you’ve got your bootloader installed in an EFI partition in the newer drive. You will still have an EFI partition on the old drive created by the Ubuntu installer, so just be sure you know which bootloader you’re using.

    Yes, the new drive has a boot partition mounted to /boot/efi, according to the Disks utility.

    It’s not clear what issues you’re worried about, but if you’re nervous about breaking the Ubuntu installation[…]

    Actually, that’s a good point. I’m expecting to get rid of the installation anyway, so I don’t need to worry about breaking anything there.

    It’s not clear to me what the goal of option 3 is

    Same as option 2, avoiding breaking a system I’m getting rid of anyway.

    Thanks for pointing out the errors in my line of thought!


  • I feel like you are overthinking this

    Yes, most certainly, but given my own inexperience I figured I’d rather overthink than fuck up because I didn’t know about some detail.

    Take special attention to the /boot partition. I don’t know which drive the bootloader for your nobora os is installed. It may have been automatically put together with your Ubuntu to your HDD.

    Fairly sure the boot partition is on the new SSD, but I’ll check and leave it untouched if I’m not sure.

    Thanks for your advice!






  • Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s one of those cases where you either add support yourself (provided you have the time, know-how - which most already don’t - and commitment) or wait until hopefully someone else does. Or - like me - you curse and go back to X11 until something gives you enouhh confidence to try Wayland again. I think I read somewhere on this platform that there will be (or was?) some Nvidia driver update that should help with Wayland support, but I haven’t looked into it.

    I don’t have much experience with laptop hardware. I did have one elderly laptop running Ubuntu, though it probably would have been served better with something more lightweight (I just didn’t know much about anything at the time). But that wasn’t doing anything intensive, just some Uni exercises. I think a simple neural network was the most challenging thing it ever had to handle.





  • The first problem, as with many things AI, is nailing down just what you mean with AI.

    The second problem, as with many things Linux, is the question of shipping these things with the Desktop Environment / OS by default, given that not everybody wants or needs that and for those that don’t, it’s just useless bloat.

    The third problem, as with many things FOSS or AI, is transparency, here particularly training. Would I have to train the models myself? If yes: How would I acquire training data that has quantity, quality and transparent control of sources? If no: What control do I have over the source material the pre-trained model I get uses?

    The fourth problem is privacy. The tradeoff for a universal assistant is universal access, which requires universal trust. Even if it can only fetch information (read files, query the web), the automated web searches could expose private data to whatever search engine or websites it uses. Particularly in the wake of Recall, the idea of saying “Oh actually we want to do the same as Microsoft” would harm Linux adoption more than it would help.

    The fifth problem is control. The more control you hand to machines, the more control their developers will have. This isn’t just about trusting the machines at that point, it’s about trusting the developers. To build something the caliber of full AI assistants, you’d need a ridiculous amount of volunteer efforts, particularly due to the splintering that always comes with such projects and the friction that creates. Alternatively, you’d need corporate contributions, and they always come with an expectation of profit. Hence we’re back to trust: Do you trust a corporation big enough to make a difference to contribute to such an endeavour without amy avenue of abuse? I don’t.


    Linux has survived long enough despite not keeping up with every mainstream development. In fact, what drove me to Linux was precisely that it doesn’t do everything Microsoft does. The idea of volunteers (by and large unorganised) trying to match the sheer power of a megacorp (with a strict hierarchy for who calls the shots) in development power to produce such an assistant is ridiculous enough, but the suggestion that DEs should come with it already integrated? Hell no

    One useful applications of “AI” (machine learning) I could see: Evaluating logs to detect recurring errors and cross-referencing them with other logs to see if there are correlations, which might help with troubleshooting.
    That doesn’t need to be an integrated desktop assistant, it can just be a regular app.

    Really, that applies to every possible AI tool. Make it an app, if you care enough. People can install it for themselves if they want. But for the love of the Machine God, don’t let the hype blind you to the issues.