Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can’t be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)

Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.

I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure

I hope this is effort is a miserable failure … because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.

Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they’ll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)

It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they’ll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware…)

Some things on Ubuntu are much more updated than standard Debian, including the kernel.

Okay, but…

Recently, my girlfriend (who I successfully migrated to Kubuntu) was complaining about ads on youtube, so I wanted to install Brave for her, since that works well as a chromium-based browser but still doesn’t show ads. (I’ve had issues trying to play youtube on Firefox with adblocker, probably because Google’s trying to discourage anything other than Chrome.)

Brave was available in the app store, and installed as a Snap. And it was fine. It installed fine, it works fine, no issues. Maybe it’s not the most efficient way to do things, and there certainly are issues with the snap system. But … it’s not the devil, and it’s not the end of the world.

I’m not sure if other people want to read the pedantic truth anyways. I’m glad you filled this void.

Glad my pedantry could be of service, lol!

The instructions for installing on ubuntu only work because of ubuntu’s popularity.

True, but this is still a very real effect with real-world benefits.

(And I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s just Ubuntu’s popularity. More like, due to Debian and Debian derivatives’ popularity, of which Ubuntu is one. Since there are so many popular distros out there that are Debian-based where Debian-style install instructions will work (and quite a few people running Debian itself), it makes sense to give Debian-style install instructions first.)

Also if you can copy-paste commands, you can also just follow build instructions.

In my experience, not so much.

Because even if you follow the instructions exactly, you’ll always run into some problem due to your build environment not being quite identical to the developer’s build environment, some library being half a version number off, and then cmake fails with a cryptic error message. So then you downgrade that library to the older version and try again, and this time it fails with a different cryptic error message that you can’t make any sense of at all this time, or the compiler quits because it says the code is formatted improperly on line 1437 and now you’re left wondering whether it’s an issue with your compiler or whether you should go in and edit the source code yourself to try and fix that supposed formatting error…

I don’t know… I’ve tried this approach a few times – usually as a desperate last resort – and it never seems to actually work. In theory, it should. In practice … good fucking luck.

it is more about arch’s philosy being your system may not boot next update

Yeah … no thanks. I’ll be okay with slightly outdated versions of various packages, as long as they still work.

ubuntu: pacman -S name is not harder than apt install name.

Eh, it’s a teensy bit harder, since you have to remember what -S means, rather than the easy to remember and plain English ‘install’. But, yeah, not much of a difference.

And try to install something on ubuntu if it’s not in the official package repos.

1: Go to that something’s website.

2: look for their download/install instructions page, scroll to Linux instructions if necessary.

3: Install instructions for Debian/Ubuntu are usually the first one listed, and typically just consist of a few commands you can copy and paste over without modifying.

It isn’t particularly difficult in most cases.

At this point, I have to assume they’re doing it on purpose.

Eh, list has its place, and I’ll still use it sometimes.

List shows you more files on one screen, and it can show details of the files like filesize and last modified date without having to click on each file to get that.

As smart as the average PhD … when you ask the PhD something completely outside of their area of expertise and pressure them to make up an answer that sounds plausible, even if they don’t know the actual answer.

Everybody else with these giant folders is fucking crazy.

Hey, man. Sometimes I’m dealing with images a lot, and it helps to have image thumbnails big enough to see clearly.

(And even the mini-thumbnails inside a folder’s thumbnail are visible enough to be helpful, giving me a quick sense of what’s in that folder.)

“we just copied all of your private keys and documents into our cloud and hid them”

And then deleted the originals on your computer so that your only copy is in our cloud.

Oops! Your cloud storage is full! Now pay us $25/mo or you will not be able to access your cloud storage.

How so? I want KDE to remember that certain programs should only open on certain screens

KDE has been able to do this for a long time.

System Settings --> Window Management --> Window Rules

Or, right click on the title bar of the window --> more options --> configure special window settings

From there, you can create a rule that forces a certain program to open its window at a certain location. And you can specify that location to be on the screen you want it to be on. Specifically set a rule for “Position”, enter the screen coordinates where you want it to go, and select “Apply Initially”.

(If the application isn’t behaving under that rule, try adding the “Ignore requested geometry” rule as well.)

But I would hate it with passion if my landlord would place his stuff into my flat.

Well, that depends… How valuable is his stuff?

Gnome is easily the least customizable DE in the entire Linux ecosystem.

And I’m sure their devs are hard at work coming up with ways to make it even less customizable in the future.

Moreover, people who give Linux a trial, they wish for something different.

Says who? I think most people who give Linux a trial, they wish for Windows, but without the all the bullshit.

What I’m afraid of is newbies who get Gnome as the default without knowing any better, without even knowing what a DE is or that there’s more than one. And when they find it weird and difficult to learn, they’re not going to think, “Gnome is weird and difficult to learn, I should try a different DE.” – they’re going to think, “Linux is weird and difficult to learn, I should go back to Windows.”

What would be a better starter DE then?

Literally any other DE. Throw a dart at a bunch of DE logos pasted to the wall, and you’ll hit one that’s better for newbies than Gnome.

(And no, Gnome is not intuitive. You said yourself that using Gnome requires you “just learn to do things differently”. If it was intuitive, you wouldn’t need to learn it, and it wouldn’t feel ‘different’.)

Since all your examples of how intuitive Gnome is involve the same settings menu in the top right corner … is that settings menu in the top right corner labeled at all? Or is intuition the ONLY way to know it’s the settings menu? You know, maybe I’m starting to understand the disconnect here. When I say something is intuitive, I mean it’s where you’d naturally expect it and does what you expect it to do. But when Gnome people call something “intuitive”, I’m starting to suspect they say that because using intuition is the only way to figure out the interface. You just have to guess what that vague icon does…

Just because it has a different workflow that big players implanted in people, Linux needs to match that?

For newbies? Yes. SO MUCH YES.

I don’t care if you want to use Gnome on a distro for people who want weird and different. But for any mainstream distro targeted toward newbies, Gnome should not be the default DE. Precisely because it requires a lot of additional learning to use the DE, in addition to learning to use Linux.

Well, for me, each virtual desktop is dedicated to a different ongoing project. When I want to switch from one project to another, I just switch virtual desktops. Each project can have all kinds of windows open on multiple monitors, and none of them are relevant to the other projects.

It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.

That said, imagine an actual AGI (ASI) AI gets developed and (of course) escapes to the internet because the idiots who built it gave it unrestricted internet access.

If such an AI wanted to take control of the world in order to further whatever goals it has, all this collected information will be an incredible treasure trove for it. Like you said, many people can be manipulated an controlled with threats of blackmail. The few who can’t can then be more directly threatened by those acting under blackmail threats.