I can’t read the article because of a full screen Cookie Choices pop-up that I can’t dismiss. ☠️
Unlock origin has cookie banner filters. I didn’t have this problem, I assume that’s why.
Or you can import the “I don’t care about cookies” list: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
Stallman was always right
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.
I find the nightmare getting a lot more noticeably bad with LLMs, though. That’s not just correlation.
Or you could just opt out. But hey, to each their own.
Yes, Microsoft is such a trustworthy company, they will definitely respect your opt out. 100% sure about that, I mean, they would never spy on their users without telling them. God damn, how foolish do you have to be to believe in this bullshit?
Yes, but can you play modern games on Linux the same as on Windows? Even with anti-cheat software?
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.
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.
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.
IDGAF games
Roblox.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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 should be fine. Just stick some hard drives in it :)
Intel processors are a good choice because their onboard graphics 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 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 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
Until big tech needs 2% more systems to squeeze out 2% more money…
I wonder if some big AI heads will publish some “AI enhanced” Linux distros, that will also have other issues…
Almost definitely.
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.
I expect canonical to do it to Ubuntu.
imagine if pop os does it first.
IBM’s Watson Enhanced Red Hat
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
The algorithm is exactly the same as the chat bot, only the underlying data is different. Yes, they are all deep neural networks
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.
Not happening. People are always afraid of new features. But when they try, see it’s convenient, and forget all about past reservations.
Its going to be the same with this. Ai is here and soon we won’t be able to imagine computers without it.
You say that like a specific technology is inevitable, but it never is. The general march of tech will continue on, but no one thing is ever guaranteed.
e.g. 20 years ago everyone needed custom browser toolbars and now it’s not even possible to add one on major browsers. We eliminated the need for browser features by cramming 99% of what we need into a handful of websites that are constantly refreshed.
e.g. 10 years ago blockchain was surging and today it still doesn’t have a usable application. Turns out spreadsheets don’t really need to be distributed.
Machine learning is just an algorithm nobody understands. If I needed something to give me wrong answers to questions I’ll ask my dog.
I don’t think I need to defend the usefulness of ai and compare it to browser toolbars…
AI is here and pc needs it. People have been dreaming of it since before the were computers. Even for the most basic features of it.
“The year of Linux on the Desktop” is in the article. This again? Been reading this for decades and it’s still not true.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
It has nothing to do with any flaws within Linux itself. The problem is and has always been that it’s nearly impossible to buy a PC with any flavour of Linux pre-installed. Until that changes, Linux (on home user desktops) will never gain mainstream acceptance.
Didn’t HP sell some fancy shmancy laptops that came with Ubuntu or some flavor of it? Think it was for developers but I thought that was the closest we gotten to commercially selling Linux based machines.
P.S. I could be wrong about this but I am sure this happened.
HP sold he DevOne, it had PopOS on it. Dell sells an XPS developer machine that has Ubuntu pre installed. System76, Entroware, and Tuxedo computers have all been selling Linux hardware for a long time. So there are viable commercial options. I wish the DevOne were going to get refreshed, it looks like a nice machine but alas, I don’t think it will.
It’s possible they did. I think Dell briefly discussed it as an option, before using it as leverage to get cheaper Windows licenses from Microsoft. The EEE PC also shipped with its own Linux distro and appropriate hardware drivers.
This was why I said “nearly impossible” :)
I agree. Most people won’t switch to Linux because they have never used it and think they’ll have to relearn computers from scratch.
Maybe we should have like a yearly event for this. Like a holiday. International Linux Year Day.
I think there is some sort of conference. The key would be to convince all the Linux users to stop telling us about it the rest of the time.
Linux uses and vegans have the same “I’m better than you” energy.
AI has people questioning Windows use Car systems ratting drivers out has people questioning car use
Not the way I expected to reach some of my desired ends but I’ll take it. 🤔
The only real medicine for AI nightmare, is having your own local and trained model. Like a 7B or above that. I read a lot about it, go to network chuck youtube channel, he teaches you how to set up and run your own AI based on yourself, that never shares information, it’s open-source and it runs even in a laptop.
There is no year of Linux desktop, it just keeps trucking and growing
It doesn’t really seem to be growing much, to be honest.
It’s dominating the smartphone market via Android, though.
Can we get a hatchback model? I’d much prefer it to a truck. And is there a setting so it doesn’t grow? I want to stay city-friendly.
Imagine the horror of living in a world where all vehicles slowly expand and have to be cut down to manageable size annually until eventually the car is just too big a la American full size SUVs at EOL.
Just love all the ChatGPT ads embedded in the article.
And before all the “jUsT uSe An Ad BlOcKeR” messages, I’m on a phone using the main browser and have nothing set up where I’m at (DNS/etc) to block ads.
It’s amazing how many poorly-written articles are being posted about Linux lately, and on top of it, has ads for the very thing they’re talking about switching to Linux to avoid. Almost as if it wasn’t written by a human.
jUsT uSe fiREfoX MoBilE wITh UbLoCk!!
I’m on a phone using the main browser and have nothing set up where I’m at (DNS/etc) to block ads.
Sounds like a you problem.
Or it sounds like a moron replying to me problem. But good try!
Aren’t you just pleasant.
In addition to Firefox, you can also use Tracker Controller if you want. It blocks everything but essential connections by default and you need to enable others to get things to work, but once you’re set up it’s great. This applies to all applications, not just your browser.
Thanks! If I ever get an Android phone I’ll look into that.
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.
That sounds very cool. I’m totally ignorant of the hardware requirements. What sort of minimum setup would such an install take?
It really depends on what model you want to run and how much training is bundled with it. You can pretty much run any model if you have enough disk space but of course GPU + VRAM is preferred for a ChatGPT like fast response. Otherwise, running on an older CPU and RAM is going to be noticeably slower, especially with complex models with a lot of training data to trawl through.
There are some pretty lite models out there but the responses will be more barebones and probably seem ‘less informed’.
Give GPT4All a try for your first time. It makes install, configuration and usage point-and-click while being fairly straight forward. For the presented/featured models, it presents a small summary and VRAM recommended, though there are many, many other models available from inside the UI.
Will my dell latitude from 2006 work?
