S410

Android is sending a ton of data, though, even if you’re not doing anything internet related. It, also, kinda reacts to “okay, google”, which wouldn’t really be possible if it wasn’t listening.

Now, it obviously doesn’t keep a continuous, lossless audio stream from the phone to some google server. But, it could be sending text parsed from audio locally, or just snippets of audio when the thing detects speech. Relatively normal stuff to collect for analytics purposes, actually.

Now, data like that could “easily” get “misplaced”, of course, and end up in the ad-shoveling machine… Not necessary at Google’s hands: could be any app, really. Facebook, TickTok, random free to play Candy Crush clone, etc. But if that data gets into the interwoven clusterfuck of advertisement might, it will likely end up having an effect on the ads shown to the user.

I’ve noticed that too. Intentionally veered a conversation into a different topic and, lo and behold, I get “relevant recommendation” short time later. That was, not entirely coincidentally, the same day I unlocked the bootloader and flashed a de-googled ROM.

Dualbooting is possible and easy: just gotta shrink the Windows partition and install Linux next to it. Make sure to not format the whole thing by mistake, though. A lot of Linux installers want to format the disk by default, so you have to pick manual mode and make sure to shrink (not delete and re-create!) the windows partition.

As for its usefulness, however… Switching the OS is incredibly annoying. Every time you want to do that you have to shut down the system completely and boot it back up. That means you have to stop everything you’re doing, save all the progress, and then try to get back to speed 2 minutes later. After a while the constant rebooting gets really old.

Furthermore, Linux a completely different system that shares only some surface level things with Windows. Switching to it basically means re-learning how to use a computer almost from scratch, which is, also, incredibly frustrating.

The two things combined very quickly turn into a temptation to just keep using the more familiar system. (Been there, done that.)

I think I’ll have to agree with people who propose Virtual Machines as a solution.

Running Linux in a VM on Windows would let you play around with it, tinker a little and see what software is and isn’t available on it. From there you’ll be able to decide if you’re even willing to dedicate more time and effort to learning it.

If you decide to continue, you can dual boot Windows and Linux. But not to be able to switch between the two, but to be able to back out of the experiment.

Instead, the roles of the OSes could be reversed: a second copy of Windows could be install in a VM, which, in turn, would run on Linux.

That way, you’d still have a way to run some more picky Windows software (that is, software that refuses to work in Wine) without actually booting into Windows.

This approach would maximize exposure to Linux, while still allowing to back out of the experiment at any moment.

Wayland has it’s fair share of problems that haven’t been solved yet, but most of those points are nonsense.

If that person lived a little over a hundred years ago and wrote a rant about cars vs horses instead, it’d go something like this:

Think twice before abandoning Horses. Cars break everything!
Cars break if you stuff hay in the fuel tank!
Cars are incompatible with horse shoes!
You can’t shove your dick in a car’s mouth!

The rant you’re linking makes about as much sense.

Simply disabling registration of new accounts using Tor/VPN should be sufficient and won’t affect existing users.

Although, requiring verification of accounts made via those would be a better approach. Require captchas to prevent automated posting. Automatically mark posts made from new accounts and/or via Tor or a VPN for moderation review.

There are way to mitigate spam that aren’t as blunt and overreaching as blanket banning entire IP ranges. This approach is the dumbest, least competent way of ensuring any kind of security, and, honestly, awfully close to being needlessly discriminating. Fuck everyone from countries with draconian internet censorship, I guess?

Seems to region locked. There isn’t a word about the game being given away, unless I log out of my account and use a VPN.
What even is the point of region-locking a fucking giveaway?

Edit: well, at least changing the region in the settings works. I guess it defaults to whatever country it thinks the IP the account was registered from belongs to?

Meanwhile Discord misses half the features Matrix has. It’s almost as if they’re different projects with similar, but different goals.

One tries to be a flexible, interoperable, and secure protocol for communication, that’s free for anyone to implement and use…

The other is a for-profit company that cherishes its centralized nature and far reaching control, allowing them to sell you random bells and whistles, collect your data unobstructed, and lure in investors and advertisers.

In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn’t like Gnome 3 can use it instead.

To provide features that Xorg can’t.
If you don’t need features like fractional scaling, VRR, touchscreen gestures, etc. you won’t notice a difference.
People who do use those, will. Because for them, those features would be missing or not complete on Xorg.

You’re linking a post… From 2010. AMD replaced radeon with their open source drivers (AMDgpu) in 2015. That’s what pretty much any AMD GPU that came out in the last 10 years uses now.

Furthermore, the AMDgpu drivers are in-tree drivers, and AMD actively collaborate with the kernel maintainers and developers of other graphics related projects.

As for Nvidia: their kernel modules are better than nothing, but they don’t contain a whole lot in terms of actual implementation. If before we had a solid black box, now, with those modules, we know that this black box has around 900 holes and what comes in and out of those.

Furthermore, if you look at the page you’ve linked, you’ll see that “the GitHub repository will function mostly as a snapshot of each driver release”. While the possibility of contributing is mentioned… Well, it’s Nvidia. It took them several years to finally give up trying to force EGLStreams and implement GBM, which was already adopted as the de-facto standard by literally everybody else.

The modules are not useless. Nvidia tend to not publish any documentation whatsoever, so it’s probably better than nothing and probably of some use for the nouveau driver developers… But it’s not like Nvidea came out and offered to work on nouveau to make up to par and comparable to their proprietary drivers.

k, so for the least used hardware, linux works fine.

Yeah, basically. Which raises a question: how companies with much smaller market share can justify providing support, but Nvidia, a company that dominates the GPU market, can’t?

The popular distros are what counts.

Debian supports several DEs with only Gnome defaulting to Wayland. Everything else uses X11 by default.

Some other popular distros that ship with Gnome or KDE still default to X11 too. Pop!_OS, for example. Zorin. SteamOS too, technically. EndeavorOS and Manjaro are similar to Debian, since they support several DEs.

Either way, none of those are Wayland exclusive and changing to X11 takes exactly 2 clicks on the login screen. Which isn’t necessary for anyone using AMD or Intel, and wouldn’t be necessary for Nvidia users, if Nvidia actually bothered to support their hardware properly. But I digress.

Worked well enough for me to run into the dozen of other issues that Linux has

Oh, it’s no way perfect. Never claimed it is.

I like most people want a usable environment. Linux doesn’t provide that out of the box.

This both depends on the disto you use and on what you consider a “usable environment”.

If you extensively use Office 365, OneDrive, need ActiveDirectory, have portable storage encrypted with BitLocker, etc. then, sure, you won’t have a good experience with any distro out there. Or even if you don’t, but you grab a geek oriented distro (e.g. Arch or Gentoo) or a barebones one (e.g. Debian) you, again, won’t have the best experience.

A lot of people, however, don’t really do a whole lot on their devices. The most widely used OS in the world, at this point in time, is Android, of all things.

If all you need to do is use the web and, maybe, edit some documents or pictures now and then, Linux is perfectly capable of that.

Real life example: I’ve switched my parents onto Linux. They’re very much not computer savvy and Gnome with it’s minimalistic mobile device-like UI and very visual app-store-like program manager is significantly easier for them to grasp. The number of issues they ask me to deal with has dropped by… A lot. Actually, every single issue this year was the printer failing to connect to the Wifi, so, I don’t suppose that counts as a technical issue with the computer, does it?

wacom tablets

I use Gnome (Wayland) with an AMD GPU. My tablet is plug and play… Unlike on Windows. Go figure.

Both Intel and AMD GPUs work fine on Linux. Both work fine with Wayland.
Wayland has been around for over a decade and has been in a usable state for the last 3 or so years.

Attributing the fact that Nvidia stuff still barely works to the fact that some distros have made Wayland the default is just stupid wrong.

Besides, Nvidia experience isn’t/wasn’t the smoothest even on Xorg. Linux desktop is simply not a priority for Nvidia.

To be honest, most things in Nobra can be installed/done to regular Fedora. And, unlike Nobra, Fedora has more than 1 maintainer: goof for the bus factor.

Focusing on the things I need to actually do.
I swear, if even if I was forced to do something at gunpoint, I’d manage to get distracted anyway.

Almost everything that’s not Gnome can be considered lightweight, to be honest.

1k USD. Should be enough to leave my shithole of a country, if I’m lucky.

I use Arch + Gnome with VRR patches on my main PC.

It find it actually easier to use than e.g. fedora or ubuntu due to better documentation and way more available packages in the repos… With many, many more packages being in AUR!

By installing all the stuff commonly found on other distros (and which many consider bloat), you’ll get basically the same thing as, well, any other distro. I have all the “bloat” like NetworkManager, Gnome, etc. which is known to work together very well and which tries to be smart and auto-configure a lot of stuff. Bloat it may be, but I am lazy~

Personally, I think it’s better to stick to upstream distros whenever possible. For example Nobra, which is being recommended in this thread quite a lot, is maintained by a single person. In reality, it’s not much more than regular Fedora with a couple of tweaks and optimizations. Vast majority of those one could do themselves on the upstream distro and avoid being dependent that one person. It is a single point of failure. after all.

OpenSUSE + KDE is a really solid choice, I’d say.

The most important Linux advice I have is this: Linux isn’t Windows. Don’t expect things to works the same.
Don’t try too hard to re-configure things that don’t match the way things are on Windows. If there isn’t an easy way to get a certain behavior, there’s probably a reason for it.

Orange cats

Not once did I claim that LLMs are sapient, sentient or even have any kind of personality. I didn’t even use the overused term “AI”.

LLMs, for example, are something like… a calculator. But for text.

A calculator for pure numbers is a pretty simple device all the logic of which can be designed by a human directly.

When we want to create a solver for systems that aren’t as easily defined, we have to resort to other methods. E.g. “machine learning”.

Basically, instead of designing all the logic entirely by hand, we create a system which can end up in a number of finite, yet still near infinite states, each of which defines behavior different from the other. By slowly tuning the model using existing data and checking its performance we (ideally) end up with a solver for something a human mind can’t even break up into the building blocks, due to the shear complexity of the given system (such as a natural language).

And like a calculator that can derive that 2 + 3 is 5, despite the fact that number 5 is never mentioned in the input, or that particular formula was not a part of the suit of tests that were used to verify that the calculator works correctly, a machine learning model can figure out that “apple slices + batter = apple pie”, assuming it has been tuned (aka trained) right.