• 8 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • The thing that frustrates me about these studies is that they all continue to come to the same conclusions. AI has already been studied in mental health settings, and it’s always performed horribly (except for very specific uses with professional oversight and intervention).

    I agree that the studies are necessary to inform policy, but at what point are lawmakers going to actually lay down the law and say, “AI clearly doesn’t belong here until you can prove otherwise”? It feels like they’re hemming and hawwing in the vain hope that it will live up to the hype.













  • On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.

    This is where I would agree with you, except to clarify and say, “It depends.” There’s plenty to figure out, and there’s a lot you can learn about when it comes to understanding what layer(s) a piece of software runs in. A driven newbie could find it rewarding to figure out this new paradigm. I once read a post from someone who installed Aurora on a grandparent’s laptop, and the grandparent ran with it and learned how to use everything themselves. It’s good to know who the end user is.

    It also highlights some of the pitfalls and old practices of relying upon sudo without good reason. Lots of software only needs to run in local userspace, for example, and devs should really take into consideration what permissions they actually need, rather than choosing what’s easiest and expedient.

    And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake.

    It’s not so much another layer but dividing the existing cake into very distinct layers. You have an immutable system layer, you have an app layer for apps that you apply with rpm-ostree, and you have the user layer where your Distroboxes and Flatpaks live.

    The benefit of this structure is that you can swap out the system layer at will. In theory, you could swap from a Gnome-based system to a Niri-based one, and rather than keeping all the Gnome apps and settings, you now just have the Niri ones. This ability to swap out the system layer makes it so system updates are much safer and less prone to conflicts, and they’re much more scalable for large deployments.

    But do read more about it. There’s pros and cons to it, and then you can really get into the weeds with bootc

    Do I think a newbie needs to know this stuff from the get go? Probably not. I think that particularly since atomic distros have been around for several years now, the Flatpak ecosystem has grown quite a bit. There’s a lot already there that will work for most people. There’s a possibility they would need to layer something within their first year (I needed Java, for example), but it’s not likely they’d need it often if at all.

    If they can’t help but tinker or theme, though, I would steer them away from atomic distros entirely. As interesting as they are, they’re geared towards duplicability, not bespoke modifications. My daily desktop driver is CachyOS, and I tinker with that, but the laptop with Bazzite is one I need to have maximum uptime.




  • Ideally, you don’t. You can layer packages with rpm-ostree, but that’s typically something you want to do very intentionally and sparingly, not as a first resort for installing packages.

    Instead, everything is typically installed in userspace via Flatpak/AppImage or using the distrobox command to create podman containers (where you can install software using its package manager, depending on what base distro you chose for it).

    When you update, you are replacing the current system image with a new one, so if there’s a problem with the new system, you can just rpm-ostree rollback to the previous one.

    Let me know if you have other questions. I run Bazzite on a laptop daily.