It’s not AI that is the problem, it’s half baked insecure data harvesting products pushed by big corporations that are the problem.
The biggest joke is that the LLM in Windows is running locally, it uses your hardware and not some big external server farm. But you can bet your ass that they still use it to data harvest the shit out of you.
To me this is even worse though. They’re using your electricity and CPU cycles to grab the data they want which lowers their bandwidth bills.
It happening “locally” while still sending all the metadata home is just a slap in the face.
Also, CoPilot is going to be bundled with Office 365, a subscription service. You’re literally paying them to spy on you.
- be microsoft, a whole bunch of greedy user-hostile fucks
- make spyware
- tell users that spyware is really cool and useful
- make them pay for the spyware
- use the spyware to get their data
- sell their data
- profit
Capitalism almost perfected.
- create a monopoly on operating systems
- leverage your dominant market position and force everyone to use your spyware
- big profit
That’s a pretty big joke, but I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI. We taught linear algebra to talk real pretty and now corps want to use it to completely subsume our lives.
I think the bigger joke is calling LLMs AI
I have to disagree.
Frankly, LLMs (which are based on neural networks) seem a Hell of a lot closer to how actual brains work than “classical AI” (which basically boils down to a gigantic pile of
ifstatements) does.I guess I could agree that LLMs are undeserving of the term “AI”, but only in the sense that nothing we’ve made so far is deserving of it.
seem a Hell of a lot closer
“seem” is the critical word there. Interacting with an LLM they do seem to be pretty clever.
I’m not talking about interacting with it. I’m talking about how it’s implemented, from my perspective as a computer scientist.
Let me say it more concretely: if even shitty expert systems, which are literally just flowcharts implemented in procedural code, are considered “AI” – and historically speaking, they are – then the bar is really fucking low. LLMs, which at least make an effort to kinda resemble the structure of biological intelligence, are certainly way, way above it.
I’m actually sad that the state of AI deserves the hate it gets. Neural networks are so sick, just going through the example of detecting a diagonal on a 2x2 grid was like magic to me. And they made me second guess simulation theory for quite a while lmao
Tangentially, blockchain was a similar phenomenon for me. Or at least trust networks. One idea was to just throw away Certificate Authorities. Basically federate all the things, and this was before we knew about the fediverse. It gets all the hate because of crypto, but it’s cool tech. The CA thing would probably lead to a bad place too, though.
Oh I agree. I typically put “AI” in quotation marks when using that term regarding LLMs, because to me they simply are not intelligent in anyway. In my mind an AI would need an actual level of consciousness of sorts, the ability to form actual thoughts and learn things freely based on whatever senses it has. But AI is a term that’s good for marketing as well as fear mongering, which we see a lot of in current news cycles and on social media. The problem is that most people do not even understand the basic principles of how LLMs work, which lead to a lot of misconceptions about its uses & misuses and what we should do about it. Weirdly enough this makes LLMs both completely overhyped as a product and completely stigmatized as some nefarious tool as well. But I guess it fits into our today’s societies that kinda seem to have lost all nuance and reason.
Runs locally, mirrors remotely.
To ensure a seamless customer experience when their hardware isn’t capable of running the model locally or if there is a problem with the local instance.
microsoft, probably.
That is an accurate description of AI in common usage even if it isn’t an inherent aspect of AI.
Right, but AI is not the only way they’re doing the data collection.
Locally run AI could be great. But sending all your data to an external server for processing is really, really bad.
You wrote AI twice.
I wonder if some big AI heads will publish some “AI enhanced” Linux distros, that will also have other issues…
I expect canonical to do it to Ubuntu.
IBM’s Watson Enhanced Red Hat
imagine if pop os does it first.
I’d actually be surprised.
I guess id be ok with an installable debian package for an end user controlled llama package with gui avatar interface overlay. Local learning data set storage plus ability to use API calls to injest info from other cloud based llm ai systems when the local dataset doesnt have a reliable answer.
Almost definitely.
There is a command line program called tesseract that does image to text generation. It produces plaintext from a picture of text. I didn’t look into exactly how it works but iirc, image to text that’s actually good and accurate needs ai shenanigans.
It’s built by Google, but it’s open source, and is probably the best optical character recognition by far. It’s one pip/pipx installation away and I find it pretty useful on occasion. Same as WhisperAI by by OpenAI. Fully open source and one pip/pipx command away, probably close to the best audio transcription there is as well.
Not sure either count as AI, at least not AI chatbot kind of AI more like more simple algorithms, but they’re great in the sense it’s just another program but a very useful tool. Not some baked in copilot kind of deal
probably the best optical character recognition by far
I’ve actually just been working with OCR this week, trying to capture data off of the screen of a stupid proprietary Schneider device as that’s the only way to get at it.
Long story short Tesseract stinks at this task.
The Chinese designed PaddleOCR seems significantly superior as it runs a more modern neural net and requires a lot less preprocessing. I would class it as more of a “full service AI” and not just a simple recognition system like Tesseract, it can correct for skew and do its own normalization and thresholding internally while Tesseract wants a perfect boolean raster fed to it.
Unfortunately, the barrier to entry is a lot higher due to trying to understand their text vomit website and the fact that it seems prone to random segfaulting.
The algorithm is exactly the same as the chat bot, only the underlying data is different. Yes, they are all deep neural networks
It’s not the “AI nightmare”, it’s a nightmare of capitalism, proprietary software and user-hostile behavior by a greedy, profit-extracting Big Tech corporation.
All true, and all a problem for which linux has been a solution (in the computing world) for decades now.
It’s not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it’s not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it’s much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It’s such a fucking scam, and it’s almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.
To your last point: I think a significant number of people these days are aware just how much corporations are bending us over, but most of us are just so exhausted at the end of the day to really make a huge stink about it when all we want to do is just vegitate on the couch for a few hours before we have to go to sleep, then wake up the next day and do it all over again. The current paradigm is horseshit, but the puppeteers make sure we work ourselves to the bone so that we’re too tired to really do anything about it aside from bitching online.
Are browsers not able to patch manifest v2 back into the browser?
Brave apparently wants to do that, but it’s not a great long term solution. The feature should actually be supported upstream, that’s why Firefox is a much better option, and a better base for a fork to create a new browser.
Praise Stallman
Why are some hands blue? Shouldn’t it just be whatever’s on the main body?
It’s a spin on the Hindu god Vishnu (I think there might be a few depicted with multiple arms, but that the first that comes to mind)
This is Kali but yeah she is blue all over, body and hands. also, so is Vishnu.
You’re not wrong. AI is just another tool to scrape cash to the top while eliminating jobs. Could it realize benefits like doing specialized research and testing? Sure…but again, the results of that work are lost human jobs and scraping money to the top. We can argue about advancing technology in a horse cart driver vs automobile thing (won’t anyone think about the poor farriers out of work?) but we’ve already done everything we can to eliminate blue collar jobs with as much automation as possible. Now AI is set to attack middle class jobs. Economically I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
I mean, the problem isn’t the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that’s a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that’s an absolute win in my book.
Well that’s the point. We don’t support them as a society. From education to health care once you lose your job, you’re SOL, and in this hyper-capitalist dystopia we keep tipping towards I don’t see that changing.
But as someone pointed out elsewhere…AI can already take over the job of company CEOs… decision making tools could make a group of technical people be more effective than a CEO as we know today.
Let’s see how many CEOs get replaced.
Don’t forget the BoD are still human. They still want to profit by putting the AI in place of the CEO.
I find the nightmare getting a lot more noticeably bad with LLMs, though. That’s not just correlation.
AI is a cool feature, which makes a great excuse for proprietary corporations to spy on their users. I’d say it’s one of the best opportunities for an excuse of the last few decades. Only 9/11 was a better excuse to put everyone under corporate/government surveillance.
And forced the hardware obsolescence nightmare.
And the big tech surveillance nightmare.
And the nightmare of the war on general purpose computers. (OK, that is more GNU and GPLv3)
And a few other nightmares!
Linux has been great for me. I switched during Windows 10 forced updates and never been unhappy since. I hope more people at least give a try. If you have a computer that can’t meet Windows 11 requirements, it is worth a shot.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is corporate greed. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems, corporate greed will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.
Sure. But then, Linux may well be a solution against corporate greed.
Linux is a solution against corporate greed, it directly takes market share away from Microsoft, and is a viable competitive alternative with few drawbacks.
What drawbacks?
Mainly incompatibilities, manual setup requirements, heightened understanding of technology requirement. Not necessarily Linux’s fault, but still drawbacks.
Photoshop is a birch to get running
Those trees always getting in the way…
How does Premiere Pro do?
Not sure, but Davinci Resolve works
I recently watched this video where the guy says it doesn’t work, or rather the whole Adobe suite doesn’t.
They switched to Kdenlive and seem to be happy with it, but it sounds like it was a bit of a project to learn the new editor.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I want all the cool Ai shit, but I want to be in charge of it 100%. I don’t want a data mining company with an OS side project spying on me for profit.
Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don’t actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.
At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software “solution” (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.
So we’re getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one’s devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).
LLMs in particular are unlikely to solve really any problems, much less a measurable number of the problems it is currently being thrown at.
I mean, if LLMs really make software engineering easier, we should also expect Linux apps to improve dramatically. But I’m not betting on it.
Tell that to the code I have it write and debug daily. I was skeptical at first, but it’s been a huge help for that, as well s learning new (development) languages.
I do not agree with @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today’s take. LLMs as these are used today, at the very least, reduces the number of steps required to consume any previously documented information. So these are solving at least one problem, especially with today’s Internet where one has to navigate a cruft of irrelevant paragraphs and annoying pop ups to reach the actual nugget of information.
Having said that, since you have shared an anecdote, I would like to share a counter(?) anecdote.
Ever since our workplace allowed the use of LLM-based chatbots, I have never seen those actually help debug any undocumented error or non-traditional environments/configurations. It has always hallucinated incorrectly while I used it to debug such errors.
In fact, I am now so sceptical about the responses, that I just avoid these chatbots entirely, and debug errors using the “old school” way involving traditional search engines.
Similarly, while using it to learn new programming languages or technologies, I always got incorrect responses to indirect questions. I learn that it has incorrectly hallucinated only after verifying the response through implementation. This makes the entire purpose futile.
I do try out the latest launches and improvements as I know the responses will eventually become better. Most recently, I tried out GPT-4o when it got announced. But I still don’t find them useful for the mentioned purposes.
Mate, all it does is predict the next word or phrase. It doesn’t know what you’re trying to do or have any ethics. When it fucks up it’s going to be your fuckup and since you relied on the bot rather than learned to do it yourself you’re not going to be able to fix it.
I understand how it works, but that’s irrelevant if it does work as a tool in my toolkit. I’m also not relying on the LLM, I’m taking it with a massive grain of salt. It usually gets most of the way there, and I have to fix issues or have it revise the code. For simple stuff that’d be busy work for me, it does pretty well.
It would be my fuck up if it fucks up, and I don’t catch it. I’m not putting code it writes directly into production, I’m not stupid.
I think they do have their help, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as some companies earning money from it want us to think. It’s just a tool that helps just like a good IDE has helped in the past.
Oh absolutely, I agree with that comparison. That said, I’d take an IDE over AI 11 times out of 10.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is
corporate greedcapitalism. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems,corporate greedcapitalism will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.No need to thank me.
We don’t have capitalism in the US, we have late-stage crony capitalism. Regulated capitalism is fine, but we are in a crony capitalist system which feeds corporate greed. Our government is controlled by a handful of mega corps which have their hands pulling the strings due to the lobbying system. It wasn’t always this way, which is why I don’t blame capitalism, I blame human greed.
late-stage crony capitalism.
So… capitalism.
crony capitalist system which feeds corporate greed.
Sooo… capitalism?
Our government is controlled by a handful of mega corps which have their hands pulling the strings due to the lobbying system.
So just bog-standard capitalism, then?
Regulated capitalism is fine
The Soviets tried that and failed. The Chinese tried it too, and it turned into… bog-standard capitalism.
Nope, wrong. Entirely.
It’s always been crony capitalism. There is no other kind of capitalism - never has been.
AI can’t solve problems. This should be abundantly clear by now from the number of laughable and even dangerous “solutions” it gives while stealing content, destroying privacy, and sucking up tons of power to do so. Just ban AI.
You really need to specify what you mean by “AI”. AI has been used in tons of applications for decades. Do you mean LLMs? Because not all AI is LLMs.
Just take some time to look up the benefits of AI and what it is being used to solve. It’s easy to focus on how corporations are abusing the technology for profit, but it’s a bland weak perspective to think that AI can’t solve problems.
It can’t even solve simple queries correctly half the time. Exactly what “benefits” can come from such a flawed system that steals its information, destroys privacy, and uses tons of resources?
Grow up and admit you’re fascinated by some sci-fi bullshit poorly implemented by garbage corporations.
It can’t even solve simple queries correctly half the time.
implemented by garbage corporations
Lie and lie again, neither do you realize there are open source LLMs. You keep yelling to ban it when nothing you write even matters.
Ah yes. Let’s ban AI so the cartels take over the market for AI. What a great plan.
The living fuck are you on about? What cartels? What?
You people are so brainwashed by the AI bullshit being spouted by these rich corporations that you can’t see its huge problems.
I am basically a layman, i do music productions and in the past VSTs seemed to never work properly nor the authentication software that some us. Has it gotten better in the past few years, is there a specific one i should try? i have tried Ubuntu but nothing else to be fair. Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend? thanks to anyone who responds!
For music production check out Ubuntu Studio. Any distro can run music production stuff but Ubuntu Studio has all the required bits ready to go.
For DAW I transitioned into Reaper which runs natively on Linux. VST support with wine and yabridge works generally fine. For Native Instruments you need to use a legacy installer. I bet there are still problems with some vendor authorizations. You should just test it out to see if your favorite VSTs are supported.
To add to this Ardour may be worth a look for DAW. I haven’t touched it in a while but recall it being rather nice.
Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?
Any desktop PC built in the last 10 years (edit: that was at least mid-range when it was built) should be fine. Just stick some hard drives in it :)
Intel processors are a good choice because their onboard GPU is quite good for video encoding/decoding. 6th gen or newer Intel Core processors (2015 or newer) would work well. They improved the H265 encoding/decoding a lot in 8th gen (2018) so that’d be even better. You can use something older but you’d need to also use a graphics card for video encoding/decoding, and it’d use more power.
Having said that, keep in mind that performance per watt almost always improves over time, meaning newer processors are more powerful even if they use the same power as the previous generation. A newer i3 will perform better than a very old i7. Using an very old, power-hungry system may end up more expensive in the long run compared to a newer mini PC.
I like using Proxmox. It lets you run multiple virtual machines on the system. VMs are good because you can easily snapshot them and revert back to an old snapshot in case of issues, and you can easily move the VM to a different system in the future. I use Unraid at home and really like it. It’s a bit simpler than Proxmox, but it costs money to use (Proxmox is free for personal use).
I’d recommend checking out Linux Mint with the “cinnamon” desktop.
Installing hardware drivers and software is a breeze. It comes with a software manager for easily adding new programs.
Screenshot included for convenience:
I used to use FL Studio, but hated using Windows. I got almost all features (including VSTs) to work in Ubuntu under Wine, but had a problem with WineASIO, which I seemed to require to use the USB sound card properly.
Because of that, I since changed to a DAW called REAPER which is built natively for Linux and works flawlessly and is very nice. There is a program called Yabridge to help run Windows VSTs. I even got more complicated plugins with authentication like Addictive Drums 2 to work using Wine no problem.
If you want a fully FOSS solution there is Ardour which is also great but a little less slick than Reaper IMO.
+1 for yabridge.
Bitwig is a great DAW (but not FOSS unfortunately). I run that on Manjaro, although Mint or Ubuntu are probably perfectly good choices too, if I had to guess.
I’d go for Jellyfin over Plex myself.
Yeah I don’t like the idea of having to login to their site, like I’m self hosting for a reason lol
Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?
My plex server is headless, running Almalinux. Doesn’t take much, I have it running on a very old NUC8 (NUC8i5BEK). The box is also running Asset UPnP and AudioBookshelf server too.
Personally, unless the server will also be the client (as in, you’ll be watching from the server box and not a streaming box, tablet, TV app, etc), I’d skip any GUI and just install it from the terminal, save your resources for what matters. Desktop environment is pointless for a server machine.
If you were buying a cheap machine to handle it today, I’d probably recommend a Beelink (or other) mini-PC with a Ryzen 5000 series chipset (5500u/5560u models with 16GB RAM can be found very cheap, generally $215-$240 new these days). The 5000 series in particular are very power efficient for something you likely will leave on all the time, and have both 6c/12t and 8c/16t variants, though the 8 core ones will probably be more like $300-$320.
Whatever you buy, if it comes pre-installed with Windows, delete the OS. I wouldn’t trust preinstalled on these boxes, and in any case Microsoft is getting really sketchy with this whole Windows Recall thing anyway.
Look, Linux is amazing and perfect for those that can install and maintain with minimal support. The only way the average user will use Linux, is if it’s wrapped in a way that is supported by a business… that is probably going to add AI. People are lazy, they want that easy button.
AI will probably die off in its current iteration, likely becoming less prevalent and just a background service. Or, it’ll gain sentience, watch all our AI movies where we’re the hero and learn the most efficient way to kill all humans, is to be quiet and silently kill off humans. Pretty sure I’m on Siri’s list, the twat. Also, fairly sure I told Alexa to “die in a fire you fucking dumass robot”. Yep, yep… I’m dead.
people
are lazyhave busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren’t learning a whole new technology skill.FTFY.
I don’t think it’s a support issue at least that’s not the hard part. Native Linux apps are generally second rate if you’re lucky. The browsers are fantastic there’s maybe a couple of dozen solid production quality apps out there that working all or nearly all distros.
You can get almost anything you want to be done in Linux, but there are definitely compromises you have to make.
As long as there’s compromises are greater than the compromises you make sucking on Microsoft’s tit, Linux will still be in the shadows.
For most users it probably just comes down to what is installed on their machine when they buy it. People generally don’t think about operating systems a whole lot.
So why don’t people have a business installing and administering linux for people?
They do. They are called servers.
But no one is using Linux desktop computers in a business environment because corporate IT departments don’t want to have to deal with the nightmare that is installing packages every 5 minutes.
Linux is fine if you’re into computers and like fiddling around, but if you just need the damn thing to work you don’t want to mess with Linux. It doesn’t “just work”.
if you just need the damn thing to work you don’t want to mess with Linux. It doesn’t “just work”.
I think immutable distros for business will perfectly fit this niche.
2nd this. I just spent an hour redeploying a whole appstack for my internal customer because someone on their team decided to remove some core files in /etc. we have a zero touch policy, the guy knew it, still messed with servers and proceeded to deny he did anything… even with logs showing his actions. No way would I ever want to support desktops for the average user.
I really don’t care to be the guy that’s like, oh, you criticized Linux, I’ll point out how wrong you are, but packages? If the software you want to install is packaged, then it’s easier to install than on Windows. You just open up the app store UI and click on “Install”. I also have no idea why you’d need to install packages every 5 minutes.
I’d say the most prevalent issue people have with Linux, is that they need/want specific software that only runs on Windows.
I think, there’s just too few potential customers.
Linux works excellently for techies, but those don’t need help.
It works great for the many people that just browse the internet, but Windows or their phone/tablet is also fine for that.
Well, and then there’s a chunk of people that aren’t techie enough to install an OS, which would still have an interest in an improved OS, but those will then also often use some specialty software which only runs on Windows.
I choose to privately self-host open source AI models and stuff on Linux. It’s almost like technology is a tool and corps are the ones fucking things up. Hmmm, imagine that.
Agreed
GPT4ALL ftw
It’s so fun to play with offline AI. It doesn’t have the creepy underpinnings of knowing art and journalism as well as musings from social media was blatantly stolen from the internet and sold as a service for profit.
Edit: I hate theft and if you think theft is ok for training llms go ahead and dislike this comment. I don’t feel bad about what I said, local offline AI is just better because it doesn’t work on the premise of backroom deals and blatant theft. I will never use an AI like DALL.E when there is a talented artist trying to put food on the table with a skill they honed for years. If you condone stealing you are a cheap, heartless, coward.
I hate to break it to you, but if you’re running an LLM based on (for example) Llama the training data (corpus) that went into it was still large parts of the Internet.
The fact that you’re running the prompts locally doesn’t change the fact that it was still trained on data that could be considered protected under copyright law.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the law shakes out on this one, because an artist going to an art museum and doing studies of those works (and let’s say it’s a contemporary art museum where the works wouldn’t be in the public domain) for educational purposes is likely fair use - and possibly encouraged to help artists develop their talents. Musicians practicing (or even performing) other artists’ songs is expected during their development. Consider some high school band practicing in a garage, playing some song to improve their skills.
I know the big difference is that it’s people training vs a machine/LLM training, but that seems to come down to not so much a copyright issue (which it is in an immediate sense) as a “should an algorithm be entitled to the same protections as a person? If not, what if real AI (not just an LLM) is developed? Should those entities be entitled to personhood?”
I hate to break it to you but not all machine learning is llms based. I’ve been messing with neural based tts from a small project called piper. I’m looking into an image recognition neural network to write software for and train myself. I might try writing it myself for fun 🤔
I’m not interested in anything that uses stolen data like that so my options are limited and relegated to incredibly focused single purpose tools or things I make myself with the tools available.
I’d love to play with image generation and large language models but until all the legal stuff is worked out and individuals get paid for their work I’m not touching it.
To me it’s as cut and dry as this. If it’s the difference between an individual becoming their own boss/making a better living and a corporation growing their market cap I’ll always choose the individual. I know there’s a possibility of that growth resulting in more jobs but I’d rather have an environment where small businesses open breed competition and overall improve everyone’s life. Let’s not give the keys over to companies like Microsoft and close more doors.
I don’t care about the discussion of true AI having rights. It’s only going to be used to make the wealthy wealthier.
Sorry I feel strongly about this. Play with it all you want it’s really cool shit! But please don’t pay for access to it and if you need some art or a professional write-up please just pay someone to do it.
It’ll mean so much to your fellow man in these uncertain times and the quality will be so much better.
I’m not paying anyone for anything, not OpenAI techbro grifters and not any freelancer grifters
All LLMs are based on neural networks. Furthermore, all neural networks need training, regardless of whether they’re an LLM or some other form of machine learning. If you want to ensure there’s no stolen material used in the neural net then you have to train it yourself with material that you have the copyright to.
Boy I love it when people don’t read.
I was expanding on your point, you twat. But hey, just be a snarky cunt. I’m sure that’ll get you far.
Sorry I thought you were being a smartass and just skimmed through it. Truly my bad.
Edit: it’s hard to tell intention sometimes and I really do appreciate you summarizing what I said. It’s true and a more approachable answer than what I gave.
Yes, but can you play modern games on Linux the same as on Windows? Even with anti-cheat software?
FYI Helldivers 2 works fine on an ubuntu + AMD GPU, as well as Baldur’s Gate 3. Haven’t tested any other game yet.
Setup is trivial thanks to Steam and proton.
With some anti cheat - no. You cannot. LoL, Valorant, Apex Legends - all no go for me… But for everything else I play. No issues at all - infact a lot of games run better on Pop_os than they do on Windows.
FYI, I’ve clocked over 1000 hours on Apex Legends, not a single one of them on Windows.
Ayyyeeee - just my experience, glad it’s working!
Battlebit also works fine and it uses easy anti cheat
Good to know! Thank you.
What about for Nvidia GPUs?
People keep saying you can’t use Nvidia GPUs with Linux or that the experience is horrible, but truth be told, if you already have one, you can keep it no problem. The main scenario where it still had issues as of last year was if you used KDE Plasma with Wayland on Nvidia (though I hear Plasma 6 improved a lot of it - not sure, because I didn’t have a lot of issues on Plasma 5 either).
Your best bet for Nvidia GPUs is an Ubuntu-based distro. Ubuntu itself is an option though not necessarily the best - they bake in some ads and a lot of people aren’t fans of being forced to use Snap, which has a proprietary backend unlike Flatpak. Personally I’d say go for Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop if you want a Windows-like desktop environment and Pop!_OS if you want something completely different altogether from Windows. On Mint or Ubuntu you can install the drivers from the provider proprietary driver installer (super simple), on Pop!_OS you can just get a Nvidia iso and have them preinstalled.
But honestly, I didn’t even have issues with Nvidia when I was on Gentoo, supposedly one of the harder distros to maintain.
Would I buy a Nvidia GPU now that I’ve completely ditched Windows? Probably not, but I’m also not in a hurry to replace my 3060 Ti just to get rid of the logo.
Nvidia support got better, I’m using it on NixOS with Wayland gnome and games have better FPS than last year, I’m maxing out my 280Hz 1080p monitor with older games
Nvidia just requires a driver install on most distros, and the newer drivers for Linux run rather well. All but one of my games runs better on Linux than on Windows (MK1 has slowdown issues on cinematics)
My 1080 was okay with Linux Mint, no complaints, and performance is the same from what I can tell. :)
Kernel level anti-cheat won’t work, thank heavens the Linux developers won’t allow that abomination.
No process deserves that kind of elevated permissions.
As of the last few days I’ve been trying out Linux gaming for the first time, and the prospects seem really good. ProtonDB suggests all games I care about are native or run fine and I’ve tested several, and I was able to use bottles to get an old MMO I play running incredibly easy.
Only thing I really have to dual boot for is Valorant.
Steam is your best bet here. I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate. Previously played Civ VI a lot… lots of great choices.
Steam Deck is extremely capable.
Some, not all. If you’re inflexible on gaming you’re going to want to get comfortable with Windows AI.
Start using Linux, tell those companies you’d buy but you’re on Linux, spread the word, wash, rinse, repeat.
Be the change you want to see.
You can, but not 100%
They have solved the anti cheat issue, but the companies now have to ship the Linux fix for it to work with Wine. So understandably some just don’t.
All my games work, but YMMV
IDGAF games
Roblox.
Roblox devs are extremely hostile towards Linux.
I think it’s important to note that Linux can be a way to avoid AI, but doesn’t have to be. If you flip the headline around it almost implies that people who do want AI would be missing out by using Linux, but that’s not true at all: instead, the reality is that Linux is still better for them, too, because you could install all the same kind of functionality if you wanted, but it would be wholly under your control, not Microsoft’s.
Self hosted AI seems like an intriguing option for those capable of running it. Naturally this will always be more complex than paying someone else to host it for you but it seems like that’s that only way if you care about privacy
Check out Jan AI. It’s open source and extremely easy to install and run. I run it locally on a 2017 laptop without a dedicated GPU and it works, just takes longer to generate responses compared to something like ChatGPT.
What happens when I, a potential new Linux user, need to search for how to make something work on Linux and thanks to SEO and AI driven/created search results I can’t find the solution?
how to do <objective> lemmyWell you already know how to find this place, so find a Linux-themed instance and either ask your question or better yet post a “guide” telling people to resolve your problem by doing some wrong method you’ve already tried so that someone else calls you an idiot and posts the correct answer out of spite.
I just switched over to Mint from Windows 10 a month ago, and besides from setting up my quirky USB audio for music making, I was astonished as I rarely needed to look anything up. :)
Using DuckDuckGo helped I think, but presently, most of my questions I searched came back with forums with real people talking, which was lovely.
I remember trying this in 2010 and… nope, everything was a project, command lines everywhere, and it was a pig. I was very impressed this time, everything quietly worked. :) Even every steam game I threw at it, even ruddy GTA San Andreas, which never ran for me on Window 10!
The searches/sticking points I looked up were
- what the heck am I doing with partitions. (eventually nuked windows anyway)
- how do I get my specific USB audio card thingy to work.*
- how to mod fallout new vegas** (gave up and reinstalled on a windows pc, too many .exes)
- how to auto-mount a second hard drive for steam so I don’t have to click the disk every time I boot.
*there was actually a human-made guide for my usb audio when I searched on DuckDuckGo, which was made by an utter saint of a person!
** it ran fine, but I was in the middle of a save, so wanted to keep my mod loadout :)
Ask on matrix, there’s probably a chat room for your distro
SO isn’t bad either, despite lots of old questions
I don’t have first hand experience but I’ve seen a lot of people saying LLMs are really helpful with basic linux questions.
Lemmy would be happy to help most of the time as well
I finally switched to Linux and I couldn’t be happier. I can’t believe I put up with microsofts garbage for so damn long.
I did as well for my daily driver school laptop and I’ve been loving it so much. I’m considering switching my desktop to Linux as well over the summer, or dual booting at the very least
Me too. Years ago I dabbled with Debian and Gentoo. Ubuntu was just up and coming then.
Now I went from Mint to Fedora KDE to Fedora Silverblue (nuked my disk and removed windows)
Gnome took a day to get used to but loving the workflow once I warmed up to it. Can’t believe how polished and rock solid the whole system is.
Gnome when you first use it feels like a stupid system, then once it “clicks”, you feel like the devs were goddamn geniuses for creating a workflow like it.
And yeah, the polish is nuts considering for a long time and assumption about FOSS was that all the apps are ugly and unpolished.
“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening. What I’m feeling now is the same thing I felt when Mozilla originally split Firefox out, and made the first real competition to corporate browsers as a free product. People don’t want all this bullshit, and want to retain control over the machines they are working on. Seems a lot more people are interested in FOSS environments now just to avoid all the other BS they hate getting shoveled at them.
“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening.
Been hearing this for decades.
And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.
Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.
At work, we have a strict ban on purchasing any laboratory equipment that requires Windows. After about a year, several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support, precisely because we don’t have time for windows shenanigans on a $100k piece of advanced benchtop hardware. We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
Also, regular people aren’t buying PCs as much as they used to. The PC is now a workplace and enthusiast device. Everyone else uses mobile.
The oldest version of Win I used was 95 about 2 years ago on chromatography machine (I think hplc or gas).
It is to my knowledge still in use in the school because the software don’t run on newer machines. The teacher told me that he don’t know what will he do when it dies. It isn’t really an issue on Linux.
O&G still uses a lot of old versions as well. I remember back in the Win 7 days when I had to set up a 95 virtual machine and register a bunch of DLLs by hand plus set up a fake A: drive because even the 95 version of the software was garbage. A friend of mine did something similar but he got it working on the Win 7 machine somehow. I never understood how, but he left a script behind at the company he worked for because it needed to be reinstalled every time someone did something stupid and he didn’t want to do it by hand.
It might be worth trying it in Wine. It has great support for older software especially.
Within the past year I have compiled new software for Windows 98.
In a lab environment, it’s important to strictly control software versions and understand thoroughly what gets updated. We also want the ability to use the same version of software indefinitely if it meets our needs.
I think that there are more issues like archaic connectors and stuff like that. You can’t find new hardware with 30yo standard io.
several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support
We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won’t benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.
Part of that job is supporting fielded hardware and ground systems, think like automated test or verification systems. I think we’ve learned our lesson that we can’t afford to have unserviceable software.
At least with Linux and generally with an open source baseline, there is the option of throwing engineers at your problem because you have access to the code, and you can strip down the system to the bare minimum of what you need, and in doing so, really understand it. We don’t want to get into a situation where our hands are tied and we can’t fix it because the problem lies in the proprietary software while the vendor has long since abandoned any hope of support… grumble…
That kinda reminds me of my job, except that we build the unserviceable hardware and install Windows, as well as our proprietary software. Then we charge our customers shitloads of money for technical support. We’re a government contractor btw
It’s actually a pretty nice company (from an employee standpoint), we use a lot of Linux internally, as well as other FOSS software. But porting our products to Linux is hopeless, we have decades of C++ code that either relies on Windows APIs directly, or on our custom libraries that rely on Windows-specific stuff.
I find it unbelievable that anyone ever accepted lab equipment with a Windows requirement. I mean, I know it is true, but what the fuck? Glad your work is doing this.
I was not around at that time. Some of the systems I support are very long lived. At the time, having windows running on some of your equipment wasn’t seen as a liability. I guess you have to get bitten a few times before you understand that you need control of that system including the software.
Shit, the iPad pro is pretty damn close to a laptop these days with the keyboard and track pad (just lacking the OS). I had a conversation the other day where someone mentioned how OSX and Windows are locking down their OS’s to the point where it wouldn’t be farfetched to guess that many consumer devices will eventually use essentially a mobile device OS.
I had a conversation with a friend about iPads lately related to the „just lacking the OS“. The newer iPads with M-chips have all the computing power an average user could need but it’s crippled by the mobile-ish OS, so all the computing power is for nothing basically. An iPad running MacOS (with some adjustments for the Touchscreen) would be awesome. But we concluded it won’t happen anytime soon, because then basically no one would buy MacBooks anymore
We ship a $50k instrument product running Windows, and everyone hates it.
As the only EE on staff, I got to spend a portion of covid soldering TPM chips to motherboards. Fun times.
Wow, that sounds painful. Not so much because it’s technically difficult, but ridiculous that you have to do that.
Yeah, they were tssop, so not hard. It was only necessary because the parts shortage crunch had the vendor shipping them without the chips installed.
Thanks to the Steamdeck Linux users on Steam now outnumber Mac users. Still a tiny percentage of total Steam users but if developers increase support we will hopefully see that number take off.
I’d argue the year of the Linux desktop passed years ago and now it’s just a saturation game. Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops, Android owns the mobile space and versions are starting to make huge inroads in the laptop space. You can buy gaming systems running it trivially now.
Conversely, casual users of windows are dying off, fewer non technical people are using desktops for anything at all. Only institutional users are buying Windows keys and they’re some of the easiest to get on Linux because of the cost savings, particularly if you run Linux server infrastructure, a fight we already won over a decade ago.
Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,
I’d love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.
a good indication is Microsoft making WSL at all
Source: I’m a super pro serious developer and I use Linux. QED if you don’t also use Linux, you’re not serious.
Lenovo ships some models with Mint FWIW.
Framework laptops also ship without Windows if you wish. Certainly nice to save the money for not purchasing an OS license I won’t use.
I don’t understand people who choose the Windows option, like wtf, make an install USB yourself and activate it using a $2 key from ebay or just crack it using massgrave.dev. Linux is still the best option tho.
For me the hang up is still hardware compatibility and fuss factor. I still haven’t seen a windows app that will check all hardware and software and give a pain scale rating on what switching would involve. I have an Asus wifi 6 card, a stream deck, a Logitech trackball with Logitech customization software, a Logitech Webcam, a dygma keyboard running bazecor software. I’m sure there are some hidden headaches awaiting the transition. Once I finally get all that worked out, I will probably want to upgrade my surface and my ThinkPad as well and imagine even more headaches with these.
I still haven’t seen a windows app that will check all hardware and software and give a pain scale rating on what switching would involve.
You can just use a liveboot Linux image on a USB key drive and find out whether there are any issues.
Here’s Debian’s liveboot images (which they apparently call “live install”):
https://www.debian.org/CD/live/
I imagine that most distros probably have a liveboot image, though I haven’t gone looking.
USB drives are maybe slower than your internal SSD drive, but for rescue work or just seeing whether your hardware works, should be fine.
I would expect everything that you listed there to work. The only thing I haven’t heard of on there is that dygma keyboard, and looking at their website, if this is the keyboard in question:
https://dygma.com/pages/dygma-raise-2#section-faq
Is the software compatible with macOS and Linux?
Yes, our configurator software is compatible with macOS, Linux and even Windows.
I mean, I dunno if Logitech puts out trackball software for Linux, but if what you want is macro software or configurable acceleration curves or something, there’s open-source stuff not tied to that particular piece of hardware. And the Steam Deck is running Linux itself.
There’s gonna be a familiarization cost associated with changing an OS. Like, your workflow is gonna change, and there are gonna be things that you know how to do now that you aren’t gonna know how to do in a new environment. But I think that that’s likely going to be the larger impact, rather than “can I use hardware?”
EDIT: Oh, it sounds like the reason that they call it “live install” rather than “liveboot” is because you can use the same image to both just use Linux directly, and can run the installer off the image too.
Decades ago it was a funny joke. Now it’s the most popular handheld OS on the planet by a huge margin. Linux is damn EVERYWHERE except the desktop now, and it’s only a matter of time.
This is why (as per usual) Stallman was right: the “GNU/” part matters. Linux is already all over the desktop (or at least, the laptop) in schools, in the form of Chromebooks. That means the entire next generation is going to grow up using Linux.
The only trouble is, it’s locked-down Google/Linux that they’re using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
I don’t see a “year of the Linux desktop” happening, but rather its share growing slowly over the years. Windows would probably not have one big event that ends its dominance, but it can be a death of a thousand cuts.
Guess which OS won’t be recognized as a “trusted environment” to visit websites with down the line in Google’s upcoming Web DRM. For your own protection of course…
This I would actually want to see.
I would so laugh when their most of their profits go to EU Antitrust Fines.
Or they pull an Apple and only EU device owners get to choose their own browser.I really wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t want to risk them succeeding. It could be like Meta with WhatsApp, they just say “sure anyone can interoperate with us, they just have to use the Signal protocol because it’s the safest and what we use”. Google et al could say “any system could be considered trusted, as long as these security criteria are met” and the criteria are such that they go completely against the form of user control of the OS and software that Linux is all about. Technically a Linux distro could be made to meet the requirements, but pretty much no current day Linux user would ever want to use it because they’d be giving up the thing that made them switch to Linux in the first place - their control.
Linux may be the best way to avoid the <insert dystopian corporate feature> nightmare
Always has been
I’m convinced that Linux’ mere presence has already stymied the development of the worst possible technocractic nightmare. I shudder to think of the thick tech-chains that would bind us if there was not an anchor/reference point… or if there was not even the small contingent that knows what it is like to use a liberating platform.
I agree with this. We already have a situation where we don’t have feasible alternatives to the primary method, Google search comes to mind. With Linux, even if every company in the world goes down, nerds will still want to play with the technology.
