turboSnail

Can confirm. A tablet can do about 99% of what people usually expect from a computer. Gamers and professionals are an exception to this rule.

Usually people just want to check their email, browse news and watch YouTube. Any tablet these days is good enough for that kind of basic use. However, OP specifically asked about desktops, so I guess we are talking about someone who does have particular requirements after all.

If you grew up with Windows, it’s intuitive and easy to you. That Doesn’t mean it’s intuitive for anyone else. Kids are super confused about Windows these days.

Anyway, I would still recommend Windows because everything is designed to work with it. Normies don’t troubleshoot. They just give up and move on. In this regard, you would want something that requires the least amount of troubleshooting. Every OS sucks in this regard, so I just don’t have a clear winner here. Windows might still be the least infuriating one though.

However, if they did troubleshoot, they would probably enjoy Linux. Those error messages actually tell you what’s wrong and how to fix it. Meanwhile in Windows, the errors are pretty much useless. You’ll end up reading a bunch of forum posts where nobody knows what’s causing the problem, let alone how to fix it. The best you’ll get is a list of 15 things to try. Just hope that at least one of them works. If you have a problem in Linux, you’ll usually find a forum post where someone tells you exactly what’s causing it and how to fix it.

Normies haven’t heard of privacy, and they also watch TV ads. Windows will be fine. They just won’t see any reason to switch to Linux.

Pretty much everything I read about America these days is either tragedy, comedy or both.

Set the volume to 100 when people are talking. Quickly set it to 5 when there’s a anything else. You need to bounce between 5 and 100 all the time to make the movie tolerable.

What’s the deal with this sound design? If I keep the volume at 5, I’ll miss 90% of the dialogue. If I keep it at 100, the movie will shatter my ears, and then I’m permanently done with movies. What exactly are the sound engineers trying to achieve here? Why are movies designed to be so unwatchable?

That would be pretty spicy.

Star Wars sequel trilogy. Hollywood really needs to remake all of them. Interestingly, there are two viable options:

1. Actually make them good this time. Hire the Andor team to get it right.
2. Modernize them even further, so much so that the entire franchise finally dies for good. Make GPT write the script if you want to go all the way. Sink then billion dollars into this train wreck. When you run out of money, sell the Star Wars IP to Netflix or whatever. Then Netflix will bury it for good.

Machine learning in general is pretty awesome. It solves many problems behind the scenes, but even that side is overhyped.

We hoped it would solve hard problems, but it can’t. It solves boring problems. We hoped you could implement it easily, but it isn’t that straightforward either.

Generative AI for text, audio, images, and video is here, but the same problems persist. It doesn’t solve hard problems, no matter how hard we want it to. Also, implementation is harder than expected.

Then there’s the misuse of LLMs. Oh boy what a dumpster fire.

This simply means they’ve finally run out of money. If that doesn’t help, Apple or Microsoft will just end up buying OpenAI for pennies.

Good catch! Fixed it now. I already knew I swipe too fast. Should spend more time reading before posting. 😆

The Internet as a whole isn’t the problem. Specific sites are. Steer clear from those sites, and you’ll be just fine. Take notice of which sites and services result in negative emotions, and find alternatives to those places.

What doesn’t kill you, will probably maim you for life. Although there is a slim chance it will make you stronger, but don’t count on it. Most likely, several internal organs will wither, and you’ll get very familiar with kidney dialysis treatment.

If you need a handful of plugins to make a site tolerable, there’s probably something terribly wrong with that place. We can keep on patching it with an ever growing list of plugins, but is it really worth it.

Long ago, many people said they would move to Canada. I wonder if they did, though.

And pigeons are flying rats.

One option is to use a a dumpster browser for all the corpo trash that requires JavaScript. Just disable JS on all the good browsers and carry on as usual. If a site doesn’t work there, throw it into the dumpster.

It also depends on how do you use that mailbox for. In my case, Gmail doesn’t get to see anything related to my professional life. I have another email provider for more serious conversations like that. For the most part, Gmail gets to see a bunch of mailing list junk I never subscribed to. I also use Gmail to logging into various services I don’t really care that much about. Nothing important, nothing serious. If it involves money in any way, Gmail doesn’t get to read those communications.

However, I am tempted to move all my serious email communications to a more serious paid service. There might be immediate practical benefits too. I could set up a dedicated email address for each creepy company and that way I would find out which one sold my data to spammers.

If you just Google something like “health effects of hibiscus,” you’ll find a mixture of information too. Most people probably can’t tell which claims are well researched and which ones aren’t.

You’ll be left with a mixed bag, but reading all that takes more time than it takes to read an equally flawed summary you get from a gas powered AI. From a convenience perspective, I can understand why some people might prefer an LLM. From a reliability perspective, I can’t favour either option. Regardless, the difference in environmental impact should be clear to everyone.

I already use several Firefox forks for different purposes, and all of them are reasonably resistant to fingerprinting. I also have a special container for all the corpo trash I have to deal with. When I click a random news articles on Lemmy, those sites are opened in a different container and their creepy cookies get deleted as soon as I close the tab.

I’m doing all of this out of of philosophical reasons. It’s also pretty easy to set up, and there are hardly any downsides. Disabling java script is something I have tried too, but it did come with all sorts of severe downsides, so that’s where I had to draw the line.

Regardless, I still find the idea of a privacy respecting email appealing. Philosophical reasons again… Recently, I also made a quick and dirty risk assessment about the potential risks, and I still didn’t see an urgent need to mitigate them. The practical side of it still requires a bit more reading before I can justify an ongoing expense like this. Naturally, the email provider would have to be EU based.

Thanks for the explanation.
I’m only vaguely aware of the concept of an atomic distribution, so there’s a lot to learn. I guess it’s about time I sacrificed my spare laptop to silverblue.

When it comes to recommending a distribution to a newbie, I have mixed feelings about atomic distributions. If the newbie in question just wants to leave the OS alone and focus on gaming, Bazzite sounds like the best option.

On the other hand, if the newbie wants figure out how things work, starting with an atomic distribution doesn’t really sound like the easiest starting point. Is it though? Could be mistaken.

I think it’s pretty simple to understand if the system just pulls packages from the repos and downloads what needs to be updated. If you add flatpaks and appimages to the mix, it just adds another layer of confusion. Totally fine for your second distro though. After all, getting to experience new and interesting ways to do things is the joy of distrohopping.

And then there’s rpm-ostree thing. I really need to read more about that, but that sounds like yet another layer in an already very tall cake. Those newbies who want to know how these things work may find an atomic distro a bit overwhelming.

But do you really need to understand any of that to get started? Do you think it’s enough for most newbies to just install a few flatpaks to get the apps you need? Do you think they would need to involve rpm-ostree within the first year?

No native package manager? How does Bazzite manage packages then?