Eh, I would have agreed a few years ago. But now default Ubuntu boots up basically looking like MacOS with the browser (firefox by default, not Chrome) right there in your face ready to launch. For someone truly not aware how to use a computer beyond a browser it couldn’t be much easier (except booting directly into the browser). The only thing preventing that from catching on is that those people don’t even know what an operating system is, let alone that it could be changed.
The idea of ChromeOS is simple: it’s just enough Linux to get you online. It turns a PC into something akin to a tablet, with a full-screen icon-based app launcher. The desktop is very simple and vaguely Windows-like: there’s a taskbar at the bottom, a file manager, drivers enough common hardware that most things just work out of the box, including a bunch of common GPUs, networking including Wi-Fi. In terms of apps, there’s a built-in Google Drive client, and of course the Chrome web browser.
This is more or less describing one of the many immutable distros that only run programs with flatpaks. It’s entirely feasible if someone wanted to make a distro with even less functionality, but why?
Man I am the complete opposite. I need my browser to display the Web with tons and tons of tweaks and adjustments and filters in place to make it actually readable for me. Rawdogging the Web in 2025 is wild.
Using recycled parts is the best advice. As you said, it’s almost certainly overkill and the price can’t be beat.
I love the notion that even Twitter users had too much empathy and the platform wasn’t getting Nazified fast enough on it’s own so they had to program a robot to go around and spread propaganda.
Oh yeah absolutely, but I also think the goal of the AI companies is not to actually create a functioning AI that could “do a job 20% as good as a human, but 90% cheaper”, but to sell fancy software, whether it works or not, and leave the smaller companies holding the bag after they lay off their workforce.
Right? It actually makes me feel insane that the topic of “humans working less” is never in the selling points of these products.
Honestly I suspect that rather than some nefarious capitalist plot to enslave humanity, it is just more evidence that the software can’t actually do what the people selling it to big corporations claim it can do.
This bit at the end, wow:
Gartner still expects that by 2028 about 15 percent of daily work decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents, up from 0 percent last year.
Agentic AI is wrong 70% of the time, but even assuming a human employee is barely correct most of the time and wrong 49% of the time, is it really still more efficient to replace them?
For YouTube tutorial videos I have no issue with relying on GPT, but I think it’s important to recognize that the translation of art is art. I don’t feel good about the idea of something without a soul or perspective interpolating a work of art from one culture and language into another that might be wildly different from where it started.
That all said, I think Crunchyroll and anyone else using AI art without disclosing it absolutely should be honest about it.
Not positive but IIRC with Fedora you can change updates to weekly/monthly etc.
We’re simultaneously in a place where there are more options than ever, and yet it’s become increasingly clear there are really only 4-5 options.
yeaaaaah I can’t break it
Fedora Kinoite.
KDE Plasma (very Windows-ey) and it is “immutable” which means you can’t break it.
Someone else said Kubuntu which aesthetically will look the same and is also a good choice but if you want to start with a “just works” I recommend an immutable distro.
Wow, it (1.3mb) can fit on a single 3.5" floppy.
Jellyfin is great, but in defense of Plex, they announced that remote streaming would require one of the two parties to have a Plex pass was coming back in March so I don’t know if it’s fair to say they are holding anything hostage.
Big fan of low tech magazine!
Tinder started as a “hook-up” app, if they went back to that kind of marketing I would not find the company quite so reprehensible.
I agree, I really don’t think the concerns about “not being able to tell what’s real” will be a major issue (at least to those who care about knowing what’s real). Social media has been full of human-made slop for years and if someone is getting their sense of reality from social media posts, then that is the problem and AI isn’t going to dramatically change that.
The LinkedIn-styled writing here is hard for me to get through, but I think the general gist is that for profit platforms are easier to onboard which I agree with. This line stands out:
I have to disagree somewhat, it’s a different experience that is absolutely more difficult in many ways, but for those of us who value privacy, control over our data, and don’t like ads, the trade-off is worth it. Also it goes without saying that the usability of selfhosted apps has exploded in the past few years and it will likely become less and less of an issue.