I bought a fancy desktop PC recently so I’m not in the market. Otherwise I would consider it, but only if the desktop environment was usable for general computing. I believe it is, but I’m not sure if its version of Linux would be best for like software development.

Gop is like a clock where only the minute hand is stopped and the hour hand is flapping all over. Sometimes it’s kind of correct, but not for the bigger picture.

I think a lot about the guy I worked with that said he was going to Palantir. We were like “but what if they have you doing awful things?” He was like, big shrug. He was always friendly to people in the office, but I guess that’s as far as it went.

Have you talked to a lot of tech workers? I feel like there’s a set of left wing ones, a larger set of libertarian types, and an even larger set of people who are shockingly ignorant of politics and history.

I think it would be pretty funny if jesus did return and cast all these rich assholes into the lake of fire. Because they fucking deserve it.

may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.

I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.

Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.

Sometimes I feel like everyone who would care already knows , and everyone who doesn’t care won’t care no matter what the facts say.

You could prove definitively that LLMs summon demons that eat live babies, and they’d shrug and dismiss it.

I’m pretty sure the browser has more sandboxing than a desktop app running as me. The desktop app could do anything. Firefox tries to prevent webpages from doing nefarious stuff.

When I have to use discord, I use it in the browser. I don’t trust the app not to get up to no good.

Pop!_os worked fine for me out of the box. The UI is a little mac-like (dock on bottom, spotlight like search when you hit the super key) by default.

Steam just works. Heroic launcher just works. It’s simple.

I’ve also used mint, but had slightly less luck with its install working out of the box. All issues fixed eventually but there was some head scratching.

Linux nerds tend to have opinions and it’s easy to lose sight of what it’s like as a beginner.

But ultimately it’s pretty easy to switch distributions. They’re all free.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

If right wing people were smart they wouldn’t be right wing. Of course they’re going to believe and share AI slop video. They’re emotional driven fools.

I don’t think Microsoft makes great decisions. They’re not as bad as Google, but it doesn’t seem like they deliver what users want.

They’ll probably spend billions on AI when users would rather just have a cheaper longer lasting device. But they gotta make maximum money, I guess.

My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.

It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.

I only buy drm free music and then back it up somewhere myself. Bandcamp at least is drm free, but who knows if they’ll turn to shit after being bought and sold.

Buying music on Bandcamp and similar has been good for me. When I got laid off I kept all the music I owned and didn’t have to pay anymore. All these subscription services suck.

I keep forgetting borderlands 4 even came out. I guess I block most ads, but none of my friends have even talked about it.

One of the guys at my old job submitted a PR with tests that basically just mocked everything, tested nothing. Like,

with patch("something.whatever", return_value=True):
  assert whatever(0) is True
  assert whatever(1) is True

Except for a few dozen lines, with names that made it look like they were doing useful.

He used AI to generate them, of course. Pretty useless.