Damn, I went to read the linked post I Want to Love Linux, it Doesn’t Love Me Back and it is, indeed, a banger.

Yeah, but in many kinds of applications you simply can’t easily build a file that seamlessly combines documentation and content.

When it’s possible, it’s truly the most awesome way to implement a tutorial.

The Inkscape tutorials are included in Inkscape’s standard help menu and particularly cool… Because they’re actually all Inkscape documents.

So when the tutorial can just tell you to click and rotate the rectangle just below and you can just do that.

That’s pretty neat, and it’s a pity that it just isn’t possible or as easy in other kinds of programs.

As another poor maladjusted soul who still often calla LibreOffice “OpenOffice”, you have my complete sympathy.

Not sure what you’re talking about.

I was just saying that rounding is a normal thing to do and not lying.

Also Jesus was born in like 4 BC.

But more importantly, who cares?

I lived in my previous city for 9years 9m. I usually tell people I lived there 10 years, I don’t expect they’ll fell very betrayed when they learn the truth.

Last time I had a PC with an optical drive, I used the built-in features of Dolphin, and using a different software for metadata. If you use KDE, it’s hard to find a good reason to do otherwise. It will usually get metadata from CDDB, but on the other hand for metadata It’s really hard to beat Picard or Beets.

Beets will also scrape the lyrics and add them to the metadata, beside acousticbrainz goodness, multiple genres from Last.fm, and more. Picard will do most of this as well.

OK, now I get it. Yes, my experiences with Linux have been ridiculously good for a long time, but that is indeed also due to being careful with what I buy.

Nowadays it’s generally gotten pretty easy compared to a few years back, but there are still rough edges there.

I also expect this is more of an issue with cheaper solutions? Because nothing I touched in the last 10+ gave me any real problem. With maybe the exception of getting NVidia Optimus to work?

For a company it wouldn’t be so unreasonable to say “we’ll transition to Linux over this period of time” and replace incompatible hardware as you progress. The hardware replacement will be a small fraction of your switching costs.

The company I work at has decided to be Linux centric a long time ago, and basically all laptops are years old refurbished Thinkpads that run just fine with no intervention and no hacking.

But the university where I worked at before had a framework deal with Dell, and while I was one of the few people using Linux, I never had trouble with hardware compatibility on those Optiplex and Latitude. To the point that when I was getting a new machine, I would clone the old partition and just boot into a perfectly working system.

I use Arch, BTW.

investment in stabilizing Linux enough to make it a feasible alternative

Do you care to elaborate? If I had to write a list of reasons why Linux might not be ready for your average cubicle… Stability wouldn’t be one of them.

And for some reason, to this day, I still end up accidentally calling it OpenOffice two out of three times.

It’s a sign of how bad the situation is that we talk about car repairs in terms of hacking.

Documentation should be mandatory, and DRM on this stuff mostly forbidden.

For the FP4, I think I’m going to go for e/OS, because of the official Android Auto support. I want to degoogle, not root, and most other OSs require quite a bit of mess to get AA to work.

That may be ok for an Arduino, but for a car I’d really like to be able to get support, which may be tough with a smaller provider, unless they really use generic components and document their stuff decently, which I’d really have to be convinced about. And let’s not even get into the software support.

And I write this from my 2yo old Fairphone 4, which I plan to degoogle during the holidays, while I sit in front of my 7yo Thinkpad.

I use Arch BTW.

Edit: And my chinese vacuum cleaner runs Valetudo.

The Chinese ones tend to be less enshittified? Having just recently about how Xiaomi cars disable software updates if you change the headlights, allow me to doubt that.

a couple KDE tweaks even made PiP work fantastic

Tell me more

That wouldn’t be so bad per se… Many improvements in human conditions have been achieved by automating stuff and kicking people out. Think of the green revolution.

The problem is that the use case here is to massify the production of literal shit, like clickbaity articles on social media content, or ever larger volumes of advertisement. Those jobs don’t need to be replaced, they just need to go away for good.

Are we really going to use an AI to write motivation letters from a list of bullet points, to send it to an HR that will condense it into a list of bullet points using AI? Seriously?

Personally, I find myself in a bizarre situation.

I have some open source ““Ai”” solutions that I find really really nice and helpful e.g. the image search in Immich, or LanguageTool which bills itself as an AI spellchecker.

At the same time I am horrified at the stupidity underlying 99% of big tech AI stuff that gets wall street hot.

But… Isn’t that kind of the point? Slashing computational cost so that we can deploy that stuff wherever it’s needed without a tenfold increase in the world’s energy bill?

Whether we should do that at all is a very different question.

My current laptop is 7 years old, and I Love It!

I still even play games with it. Not the newest stuff, but I have such a huge backlog of indies and not-so-new games that I could play for 15 years…

If someone told me this will be garbage in 3 years… I would hit them with the laptop. It’s a T470p, their skull is the part that would break.

I kinda disagree. If you need something to connect to the internet, it needs to be rather up to date.