There’s nothing wrong with a DE, those are great for the people who want an experience that “just works”. But I switched to Linux because I was tired of someone else deciding to install hundreds of packages I’ll never use, and start up dozens or hundreds of services in the background that I never asked for.
Part of the feeling of owning my machine has been looking at the list of packages installed, and the list of processes/services running and knowing why each one is there.
If you want an OS that lets you own the machine you bought, Linux is the most viable option. Conversely, Windows is not an option. I don’t consider an OS where you are the product to be one that works for me at all, much less one that “just works”.
Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun
Like with any OS, those are a subset of users, but not all. The thing is, Linux users spent the last 30y building a set of tools that enable you to use as little effort as possible to do very powerful things with your hardware, and yes, with great power comes great ability to break everything. But in the last 15y, there are distros designed for people who want an OS that “just works”, that don’t require you to know or use the risky tools that could break things, and they’re getting better every day.
Why did you switch
I wanted to use Linux for the last 15y, but gaming was a sticking point. Around 5y ago, thanks to valve, it is no longer a sticking point. I do all my gaming on Linux.
what was your process like?
I first switched to fedora on my laptop about 12y ago. I didn’t do a lot of gaming on my laptop, so this was fine. Eventually I switched to Manjaro. Around 5y ago I put Manjaro on my desktop. Then eventually switched both to endeavor.
I’ll admit, I create problems for myself by refusing fully featured Desktop Environments. But I always learn something more about my machine in the process. As a result, I believe I can now simply do more with less effort on Linux than I could on windows. I have bash scripts on keybinds that open custom UIs for various things. I can seamlessly access multiple servers on my network running various services. I don’t ever have to worry about some update overhauling my UI and sneaking an AI in the background. Any experimentation I do with AI is on my own terms, and none of my data gets shipped off without my consent.
What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?
I used a Mac 20y ago. It was solid. But eventually the cost outweighed the hardware capabilities. And then they deprecated every graphics API but Metal. Now there’s relatively nothing in the way of gaming on Mac. On top of that, it’s just as bad as windows when it comes to doing what some company wants it to do rather than what I want it to do. So I don’t consider it an option that works for me.
I am really having a hard time understanding what OP is describing. Does anyone have a video example of the phenomenon?
Maybe check out:
Ahhh I see. That’s really neat, I’ll have to try that.
Does sway have the feature OP is asking for, or are you just suggesting a different tiling window manager, and they would still be left solving the same problem?
Idk if I follow. I believe the default keybinds in hyprland allow you to switch between windows using super+J/K/L/;, and between workspaces using super+number. Hyprland, like all tiled window managers, are specifically designed to be used exclusively with a keyboard.
Are you asking for something more like alt+tab on windows? Where it shows a little preview of all the windows? I think that’s kind of obviated by the concept of a tiled window manager.
I’m in software. The company gives us access and broadly states they’d like people to find uses for it, but no mandates. People on my team occasionally find uses for it, but we understand what it is, what it can do, and what it would need to be able to do for it to be useful. And usually it’s not.
If I thought anyone sent me an email written with AI, I would ask them politely but firmly to never waste my time like that again. I find using AI for writing email to be highly disrespectful. If I worked at a company making a habit out of that, I would leave.
Then they came for the drag queens, and I stood with them, because I know how the rest of the poem goes.
Hah yeah, I’ve definitely pulled the plug on my router before because I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
I mean, cybersecurity I would consider to be a research field. In practice, yeah, it’s a bunch of people just doing their best.
I tend to keep everything inside my network and only expose what I need visible on non standard ports, one of those being a VPN. It’s not that I couldn’t run these services public facing, it’s that the people taking the time to constantly update, configure, and auditing everything full time to head off red team are being paid. I don’t need to deal with an attack surface any larger than it needs to be, ain’t nobody got time for that.
The ability to generate a bunch of traffic that looks like it’s coming from legit, every-day residential IPs is invaluable to disinformation campaigns. If they can get persistence in your network, they can toss it into a bot net which they’ll sell access to on the dark web.
A sucker opens insecure services to the open internet every day, that’s free real estate to bot farms. Only when the probability of finding them is low enough is it not worth the energy/network costs. I think hosting on non-standard ports is probably correlated with lowering that probability below some threshold where it becomes not worth it…don’t quote me, though.
At the end of the day, the rule is not to depend on security by obscurity, but that doesn’t mean never use it.
The resources required to port scan every port on every IP is generally not worth it. AFAIK they tend to stick to lower ports or popular ports. Unless they’re intentionally targeting a specific IP or IP range, they’re just looking for low hanging fruit.
Are you not actually open to the public internet? Is it running on a nonstandard port? Is it already pwned and something is scrubbing logs?
So, the Republican shift toward the far right was already in full swing by the 2000s. You’d need to go back to at least Reagan to head that off. Trickle down economics, Two Santas, etc. was already decades in the making. My dad had already been fully brainwashed by talk radio in the 90s.
But on the flip side, the Democratic establishment has made it painfully clear even to this day that their only priority has always been to maintain the status quo for the privileged NIMBY class. The Republican party didn’t need to do anything to keep unaffordability rising, they all want to maintain the housing market bubble to protect the wealth of boomers.
Yeah, a focus on altruism, but make investments to be more effective at it. Hey, you could even get ahead of the game and start a crypto exchange!
Idk but an AI will have written it, and 99.9% of its views will be from bots.
Assuming the content is merely controversial and not objectionable (i.e. exploitative), it seems there may be room for an art-centric game store front.
Ironically, I’m betting it’s nowhere near as exploitative as the monetization practices of virtually every AAA release these days.
Fair enough lol, can’t argue with that.
where we didn’t have to assume every single god-damned connection was a hostile entity
But you always did, it was always being abused, regularly. That’s WHY we now use secure connections.
I think I’m just not picking up whether you’re actually trying to pitch a technical solution, or just wishing for a perfect world without crime.
No one 👏👏 is 👏👏 excusing 👏👏 being 👏👏 shitty.
The “cat” does not refer to unethical training of models. Tell me, if we somehow managed to delete every single unethically trained model in existence AND miraculously prevent another one from being ever made (ignoring the part where the AI bubble pops) what would happen? Do you think everyone would go “welp, no more AI I guess.” NO! People would immediately get to work making an “ethically trained” model (according to some regulatory definition of “ethical”), and by “people” I don’t mean just anyone, I mean the people who can afford to gather or license the most exclusive training data: the wealthy.
“Cat’s out of the bag” means the knowledge of what’s possible is out there and everyone knows it. The only thing you could gain by trying to put it “back in the bag” is to help the ultra wealthy capitalize on it.
So, much like with slavery and animal testing and nuclear weapons, what we should do instead is recognize that we live in a reality where the cat is out of the bag, and try to prevent harm caused by it going forward.