Linux is a clearing in the woods. You have the freedom to build a cabin yourself from logs with your barehands with LFS, buy building materials and power tools to build a completely custom house yourself with something like Arch or Gentoo, get a kit and put it up yourself with Fedora or Debian, put up a prefab with Ubuntu, or just pull up a trailer for a while and move on with a live ISO.

I used LXDE for a while on old crappy machines when I first started using Linux so just used to it I guess

Gnome on one machine, LXDE on another.

I use Gnome on my main laptop, a Thinkpad P50. I bought it with a dock thinking I’d use it at my desk and on the sofa but it’s a bit of a beast so that stays on my desk and I use an L440 with LXDE on the sofa. Considering trying LCARS on the sofa machine.

Same. Gnome currently but will certainly be trying Cosmic

Maybe. But I have a feeling it’ll be a dumb single mistake that’ll make someone say “ah, shit” just before we’re wiped out.

When the Soviets trained anti-tank dogs in WW2 they did so on tanks that weren’t running to save fuel: “Their deployment revealed some serious problems… In the field, the dogs refused to dive under moving tanks.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog

History is littered with these kinds of mistakes. It would only take one military AI with access to autonomous weapons to have a similar issue in it’s training data to potentially kill us all.

Possible or not I don’t think we’ll get to the point of AGI. I’m pretty sure at some point someone will do something monumentally stupid with AI that will wipe out humanity.

Ah, I didn’t realise that. But I mostly use my Steamdeck docked for gaming on my TV so personally haven’t bothered looking into a screen upgrade.

You can also upgrade the storage and screen if you want.

Where’s the socks?

What?

So it’s just paranoia then…

Yea, not going to lie that is probably the primary motivator here.

I don’t trust Chrome, Zoom or Teams, but sometimes have to use them. I will keep them in a separate VM but will look into Firefox profiles.

Such as?

It’s not that much work. I created a VM which is running the same distro as the host. I removed all of the apps except for the terminal. Then I cloned it for each VM I need.

The Whatsapp/ email client VM and the Librewolf VM start with my OS so it’s like having them in separate windows. The others I only start if needs be.

I’m also based in the UK. I don’t run a business but have occasionally encountered problems trying to use Librewolf on the web, especially with Noscript on.

I tried to use Qubes to separate my activities into VMs but I found it difficult. So I did my own, less extreme, approach using KVM.

I created a virtual machine which only has Chrome on it. This is what I use for accessing my bank, Paypal and doing online shopping.

I have a second machine I use for Whatsapp and email and finally a third with Librewolf for general web browsing.

Each uses the same VPN service but different servers.

I only use Freetube and Retroarch on my main machine.

This is on a very beefy Thinkpad I essentially use as a desktop in my office. I use a smaller machine downstairs with VNC on it as a remote when I’m sat on my sofa.

Exactly. I’m not worried though. There are so many alternatives these days.

True. I can’t understand why anyone would choose having the newest features over stability. But each to their own.

it’s literally Ubuntu (But better) in every way except no snaps.

That would be Debian, friend.

A lot of them these days yea. But this was one of the first. Came out 20 years ago, could run on the original Xbox and had a great set of media creation tools. I don’t think there were any other media creation focused distros back then.

I agree with every single bit of this but felt like I was being attacked the whole time I read it. Maybe it’s PTSD from asking questions in Linux forums as a kid and getting ripped into with long replies. Does anybody else feel that way?