i’m so uninspired but u kno i don’t wanna drop out of the sidebar. gotter keep tha baloney rollin. i’d write about the openai bot escapes but i don’t feel like doing the research or going thru the effort of comment moderation. i am deeply surprised no one else on ftb has anything to say about it.
short version: this could be a hint of what ai doom would look like, and that is basically just a supervirus making the internet unusable. that would be disastrous for human well-being in the short term, but very broadly? pretty fucking funny. like the fantasy from the end of fight club about terroristing the credit industry out of existence, couldn’t happen, but capitalism pulling its own plug? we could see that.
i could write about my linux notions, see if anyone has anymore useful advice on what to do, for a windows apostate. for a minute it looked like this laptop was giving up the ghost because the charging port is loose, but it still lives. probably better to get a new compy and make it work before i have no choice tho, right? on the other hand, i’ve only had this one a couple of years, and it would feel like a ripoff to not get a lil more use out of it. lemme see…
i got it in may 2023, so three years and change. microsoft sure knows how to make you feel the burn tho. it was about three hundred bucks so at this point if i lost use of it, that would have cost me a hundred a year. i know i had the one before that back when my niece was new, and she’s… eleven? so that means the old walmrat hp pos with “hog” in rhinestone stickies lasted .. no, wait i had it when i went to visit her in kansas when she was a few years old, but bought it when i was working there. so more like nine to ten years old, which means it lasted six to seven years? why am i buying lenovos again?
oh yeah, cuz last time i got an hp at walmrat it was wafer thin and got ruined on the first use because i put it on top of my lap. the lenovos are sturdier. i’ve always assumed if i got a linux machine it would be a desktop. any advice on getting a laptop specifically to run linux? i don’t need windows interface badly enough to run everything out of wine, but i would prefer windows keyboard shortcuts, and i know indie software people just love coming up with cracked-out key bindings. probly that would be easy enough to solo,
are any of you using linux for everyday computing? firefox is available on it and that’s like 99.99% of what i use on the daily. should be a cakewalk, i’d imagine.
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I’ve been using Linux Mint for over a decade now. I felt locked in to MicroSchlock by a couple of factors (a scanner with a 8.5×11 bed, and Quicken).
I cut over to GnuCash, possibly while still using Windows; it has it’s quirks, and exporting data from Quicken into GnuCash was tedious, but by and large it’s solid. The impetus was Quicken’s penchant for trying to squeeze $$ out of users any time they got a new computer; it’s “free”, but if you want to port your data from the previous machine you have to pony up. That made the switch to GnuCash worthwhile, and I will say that it’s served me really well.
When my large scanner died, and M$ got increasingly obnoxious about controlling “their” computer, I cut over to Linux. Again, quirks, but also generally solid. LibreOffice instead of subscribing the M$’ Office. Firefox. Thunderbird. I can generally get things done easily.
Gaming gets tricky, but as I’m a househusband, I haven’t had much time for games. Some of my ancient stuff runs under DOSBox. I’ve not had much luck with Wine (the most popular Windows emulator), but I didn’t put a lot of effort into it. This may change as the last of our kids are off to college in a matter of weeks.
I’ve not used Windows on a regular basis since I had a Windows XP desktop. As I’m the household IT person, I’ve occasionally had to brush up against newer versions of the OS. That generally leaves me in a state of inchoate rage. No I don’t want to register an account with MS. No the computer shouldn’t grind away endlessly to install any given update. And no, I don’t want my system’s performance to noticeably degrade over time as the OS metastasizes.
It’s been very worthwhile for me. So much so that I’ve actually donated money to the various projects whose software I use (which is notable as I grew up poor and have a resulting reluctance to part with money).
I dumped Windows forever in 1993 for popping up 183(?) licensing issue dialog boxes in a row while trying to compile software I wrote, and I haven’t looked back. I’ve used linux since then, and over the last ~30 years, have been using a Mac as my main work laptop for interaction with Linux supercomputing. (Mac does X and ssh almost seamlessly in a company IT-supported system) Just last week I bought a $300 used Thinkpad X13 Yoga Gen 2 because I needed a linux tablet, and installing Ubuntu was easy. I haven’t tested everything on it yet, but I expect it will work just fine.
I switched to Linux after a bad experience with a refurbished Mac back in ~2010 or so. Been pretty happy with it.
Copied a few distros onto USBs, and gave them a try, went with Linux Mint, since that worked right away without any fiddling, and was pretty happy with it. Have since used Pop!OS and now Bazzite.
I think Linux Mint is generally advised as a good intro, but I’d suggest burning a couple USB ISOs with a handful of recomended Distros, and just going with what works out-of-the-box for your setup.. The nice thing about the USB ISOs, is that you can give it a (somewhat slow) test drive, without committing.
I’ve still had to use Windows at work, and if nothing else, the updates are infuriating, since it can take my computer out of operation for a couple of hours.
As to gaminig, I’ve been using GoG.com to get my games, all their stuff is DRM-free, and they have a decent library of linux-native games, and give out some little freebies a couple times a year if you sign up for their mailing list. More recently, with Lutris/etc., I’ve had few problems running Windows native games on Linux, so I don’t even pay attention to the OS anymore. Most recent Windows I’ve run is probably Baldur’s Gate 3, without any issue.
I’m currently using a Framework laptop – got it about 2 years ago. The past few laptops I’ve had became unusuable due to hardware failures (keyboard, trackpad, ports, etc.), long before the electronics/stats became obsolete. I’m hoping that with the Framework, I can simply replace a part when it breaks, instead of having to get an entirely new laptop. I’ll probably have some idea if it’s worth it in a couple years or so… Not the cheapest laptop, but again, I’m hoping it’s cost-effective in the long run. And, if it lasts to the point where the GPU/CPU become obsolete, I can theoretically upgrade those when I need to (assuming both the Framework company/organization, and my self still exist at that point…)
Yes, Linux Mint is generally considered a good distribution for people just starting with Linux. (The distribution I use, Gentoo, is not; it’s a tweaker’s and optimizer’s paradise, but don’t go with it unless you already understand some of what is under the hood.) More recently there have been times when the switch from Windows to Linux was no more jarring than the update from one version of Windows to another.
Heck, a lot of the standard Windows shortcuts even show up in modern Linux window managers. I know on the version of Ubuntu that I loaded onto a recent HP laptop, the Windows-L shortcut still locks the screen.
Also, as others have noted above, a lot of the applications that you get on Linux will run on Windows as well: Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice all have Windows versions, so you can try those out before you dump Windows. That way it won’t be so much of a transition at once.
With regards to games, Valve (through Steam) have actually been major contributors to Wine over the last several years; the Steam Deck runs Linux internally, and so it has been in Valve’s best interest to make sure that as many games as possible will run on Linux even if they don’t have native Linux versions. (And given that engines like Unity work on Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS, multiple consoles, and even within web pages, it’s a lot easier these days to build games that are multi-platform by default.) Valve’s ‘Proton’ setup is essentially a pre-configured and optimized version of Wine that runs a lot of games without making it obvious that it’s even running the emulator in the background.
this is all so sexy, im lovin it