Seconding Fedora.

I wish there were more M.2 cards beyond just SSDs and wireless NICs. The idea of a small form factor PICe interface is underutilized and things like hardware codec accelerators can keep laptops with older processors usable with new standards for longer. It’s sad how PCMCIA had an entire ecosystem of expansion cards yet we somehow decided that the much higher bandwidth M.2 is only for storage and networking. Hell, do what sound cards in the 90s/00s did and have M.2 SSDs specifically designed for upgrading older laptops that also have built in accelerators for the latest media standards. Hardware acceleration is energy efficient and can probably just be bundled into the flash controller like they’re bundled into the processor, and unless you have a top of the line SSD you’re probably not saturating the M.2 interface anyway.

Pre-installed distro needs to support one-click installation (like .app or .exe).

This defeats a lot of what makes Linux secure. The main reason you don’t get malware is because you never run untrusted binaries from the internet and you install everything from trusted sources like your package manager. A non tech savvy person doing this will inevitably hit one of the super rare Linux malware in the wild. Clueless person downloads the wrong installer is the model malware entry case. I also don’t see a benefit of just having an app store, you can even show proprietary software by default as long as they can be turned off (I suspect the main reason for one click installation is for downloading proprietary software).

I’m personally scared of AI (not angry or hateful, actually scared by just how fast it’s advancing) and that definitely clouds my judgement of it and makes nuance difficult.

It’s like a deal with the devil. You see all these amazing benefits but you just know you’re the one being taken advantage of, because, like the devil, AI corporations by definition only think about how you can be of use to them.

The best you’re going to get out of it is it shortens the amount of time wasted on tiny adjustment to the UI or something.

This gets into the question of what, if anything, AI “should” be used for.

I’ve heard responses to this go both ways. Some people argue that saving time on repetitive simple tasks is what AI “should” be used for; but other people say that if you can’t even do something as simple and repetitive as a tiny adjustment to the UI, you shouldn’t be in a development job to begin with; or that you’re stealing the work of other programmers who had their code scraped for training data who are not being paid while you are, and that maybe you should be fired and the people who had their code scraped be hired instead.

IDK what the right answer is, I think this is something I will struggle with for ages while the unscrupulous people use AI for everything and anything.

The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value

I’d say this is mostly because you can immediately test the AI’s results and rule out anything it got wrong, and whatever errors you generate can then be fed back into the AI so it can refine what it’s already written. You never have to just trust the AI (assuming you yourself still know how to code) like you have to when using it for research or for solving problems where you don’t get immediate feedback.

Whether this means programming is actually a viable niche for generative AI or whether this speaks more to the limitations and inherent unreliability of the “knowledge” the AI has, I can’t say.

Also, I don’t know if it’s just me but I’m more scared by how fast AI is advancing rather than looking forward to what it can do for me. That definitely clouds my perception when something is AI generated and makes me a lot more dismissive of any real benefits AI might have brought.

People refer to generative AI when they just say “AI” nowadays.

There are a ton of small, single purpose neural networks that work really well, but the “general purpose” AI paradigm has wiped those out in the public consciousness. Natural language processing and modern natural sounding text to speech are by definition AI as they use neural networks, but they’re not the same as ChatGPT to the point that a lot of people don’t even consider them AI.

Also AI is really good at computing protein shapes. Not in a “ChatGPT is good enough that it’s not worth hiring actual writers to do it better” way, in a “this is both faster and more accurate than any other protein folding algorithm we had” way.

I object to your wording of “just” fucking dumb. They’re not mutually exclusive, he’s definitely evil as well.

Knowing Google, they’re almost certainly collecting the data anyway. Your privacy panel only toggles what data they let you see. Not saying you should turn it back on, but ideally don’t sign in when using Google or don’t use it at all.

AFAIK it’s a bad idea to use dd or another wiping tool that just overwrites the logical partitions on flash based media, and is also not that effective for security. SSDs have wear leveling and what the computer sees does not map 1 to 1 to what’s actually on the flash chips. They also have extra overprovisioned space inaccessible to your computer specifically for shuffling data around when wear leveling. So not only are you wasting write cycles, it’s not guaranteed to actually overwrite all your data on the flash chips themselves.

If you want to wipe an SSD, use secure erase from a tool like nvme-cli which will directly tell the controller to erase all the data. How well the controller implements that is anyone’s guess though.

I’d say if you’re going to the effort of fully encrypting your new install, doing a secure erase will be in that spirit and won’t hurt. There won’t be any performance benefit but it will (probably) ensure that none of your previous unencrypted data is still there, though even if you don’t do this, just writing to the drive in normal use will eventually fill up the free space and make it less and less likely that sensitive information is recoverable, but how long this happens depends on how you use the computer.

Did the Ventoy binary blob thing ever get resolved?

You know in a few decades everyone’s going to agree the current Israeli government are no better than Nazis.

I just hope in a few decades everyone still agrees that Nazis are actually the bad guys.

so the web browser will play nicer out-of-the-box with Wayland

I did do that but manually removed the “cross posted to” thing. Guest that undoes whatever process identifies as a cross post.

KDE Plasma. IMO it looks and feels like how Windows should have progressed after 7 with none of the Microsoft bullshit.

Anything really polarizing can end up with a cult following. Just look at Rust.

People would be less mad if you straight up used a stock image with a watermark so I don’t understand why people go out of their way to use AI when they know people will comment on it and it will detract from the point of the article.

Also, using AI in the thumbnail makes people automatically assume you’re using AI in the text as well. And if you’re not doing that, why would you lessen the perceived value of your writing by making it seem like you are?

It just seems pointless and actively harms your actual goals because people will get hung up on the fact that you used AI and ignore your actual valid points. Especially when you’re writing about open source projects when most people interested in open source are vehemently anti-AI, it really just shows you don’t know your target audience.

FreeBSD does not have support for multiple drives

What really? Isn’t Freenas a Freebsd distro? Isn’t ZFS like something you can only do efficiently on BSD?

TBH all the claims you commonly hear about Macs are either outright false or outdated:

• Macs don’t get malware? Yes they do.

• Macs are more private? More than Windows maybe, but that’s like saying you should go to the restaurant that gives you explosive diarrhea instead of the one that gives you botulism. The one that serves normal non-infected food is not an option I guess. Apple being “not as bad” as the worst offender is not praiseworthy and still means they’re in no way private.

• Macs “just work?” Unless Apple decides it shouldn’t. They can prevent you from installing paid apps you already own because the latest version arbitrarily doesn’t support your older device anymore. Want to install an older version? Fuck you, stop being poor and buy a new Mac. Oh you installed a genuine Apple replacement part with the wrong serial number? Fuck you, your device is banned.

• Macs have better support than Windows computers? Yeah maybe when the Apple logo was still rainbow coloured and they had CRTs built in. Now a battery replacement costs nearly as much as a new device and they go out of their way to make sure you can’t do it yourself.

• Macs don’t come with bloatware? Then what do you call that bullshit AI they’re pushing to compete with Copilot? What do you call Safari? What do you call Photo Booth? Has anyone ever opened Photo Booth once the novelty of their first time using a Mac wears off?

• Macs are intuitive? Look, maybe I’m just a tech illiterate idiot, but I had more problems figuring out how to drag and drop on my friend’s Macbook than I had tinkering with the Linux kernel and systemd.

• Macs are good for developers? Yeah they’re so good they’ve recently had to cave and introduce a WSL-like system so you can run Linux containers.

• Macs are innovative? Yeah they’re so innovative they don’t even support snapping windows to half or a quarter of the screen when Linux desktop environments and even Windows have had it for ages. Gotta either leave all the windows floating, or full screen them all and swipe between them, or manually resize the windows to the layout you want. (They have this now.)

• Macs are convenient? Yeah I just love carrying HDMI (some newer Macbooks have HDMI again) and USB A to C adapters forever because they couldn’t be bothered to install those ports on a laptop sized device that can clearly fit them. Also fuck Apple for giving other laptop companies the idea that everyone wants only USB-C on their devices. No, we want ports we can use today, not in 10 years when all the peripherals switch to USB-C and all the computers bought today will already be obsolete regardless of what ports they have. I’ll buy a computer with only USB-C when everything else I own actually uses USB-C.

• Macs are more secure? How do you know? Do you control the disk encryption keys? No, Apple does. Can you encrypt the drive yourself with a key you control like you can on Linux? No, fuck you for even thinking about that.

• Macs are elegant and their design is well thought out? Because gluing the battery to the chassis with double sided tape is the elegant way to do it and not redneck engineering. And with glue so strong that you risk puncturing the battery and burning your house down if you try to remove it yourself. Another great attention to detail is soldering the SSD to the motherboard, thoughtfully ensuring you lose data when the motherboard fails. But hey, I’m sure the Genius bar will be happy to recover your data for you since they made sure you can’t do it yourself, and for only $999.99! Your wedding photos and your PHD thesis are each worth more than that right? So it’s a bargain!

Linux beats Mac in every one of those categories (other than the hardware ones) and you can install Linux on every device. Even ancient ones, and you get to decide if it’s too old to be usable or not, not the company who’s incentivized to obsolete devices as fast as possible so you’re forced to buy a new one. How many years before a brand new Mac stops getting OS updates?

Say the line Bart!

sigh, “Unlike insert socialist country here, the West has freedom of speech and the right to express your opinions without the secret police coming after you.”

YAYYYYYYY!