- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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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.
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.
jUsT uSe fiREfoX MoBilE wITh UbLoCk!!
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.
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 thick the tech chains 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.
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. 🤔
deleted by creator
When you stop growing you start dying.
Windows 12: “Microsoft finally enters the social realm via force-sharing all your porn browsing with other users within a 5 mile radius! Also determines and shares your kinks with other users, worldwide, indiscriminately!”
@downpunxx: furiously trying to figure out how to write an iso to a USB flash drive
:P
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.
“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.
People may not want it but most don’t know, care enough to adjust, or are just generally complacent. I mean, I DO care and find it hard to move to Linux due to lack of support for some of my work tasks.
Most things MOST people work on these days aren’t heavily tied to Windows as an OS in a way that would prevent it running via emulation. Worst-case, in a VM. Lots of the everyday things people use is in the browser now.
You have an example?
CAD work in Linux blows. I say this after trying multiple options.
I’m not so sure that the laypeople will, but I do expect a shift. Personally I’m still running Windows 10 next to Linux currently. Most of my time is still spent on Windows, because it’s generally a bit more stable and hassle free due to the Windows monopoly. Software is written for Windows, so sadly it’s usually just a better experience.
But so many things I read about Win 11 (and beyond) piss me off. It’s my computer, I don’t want them to decide things for me or farm my data. I’m mentally preparing for the transition to Linux-only. 90% of the software I use will work out of the box, and I think with some effort I can get like 8% of the rest to work. It’ll be a lot of effort, but Micro$oft has pushed so far that I’m really starting to consider.
Multiple friends and colleagues (all programmers) I spoke are feeling the same way. I think Linux may double in full-time desktop users in a few years of this goes on.
The combined ages of my children taken from 2024 would not equal the first year I heard that Ubuntu would take over the market.
I can easily believe these types of continued enshittification will help drive more users to Linux desktop usage. But that will still be a small percent.
People have to know and care about the problem and then be willing to put in the effort to understand what to do. That combination is pretty limiting.
I’d love to be proven wrong, though.
I think it might. Demographics are changing to make PC users more technical overall. The casual user isn’t looking to purchase a desktop PC. Casual is now synonymous with mobile.
It used to be that you needed a desktop to do your taxes or make an insurance claim over the Internet. That’s just not true anymore.
The demographics are stratifying, more than anything. I work in child education and kids do not understand computers nowadays. They understand how to interface with their phones, but kids see any electronic that behaves outside the “app” paradigm – landlines, desktop computers, what have you, and immediately don’t understand. I do think that linux usership is going to go up, but there also needs to be an investment in increasing literacy in kids to make sure usership of linux stays up, otherwise the pendulum will swing back hard
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.
Firefox is like 2.8% of browser market share, so if that’s our baseline then Linux is already beating it by a mile.
It’s not about the total share, it’s about the premise.
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/
I would hope that Apple would aim their AI more at iOS and leave Mac OSX alone:-|. If not, I would consider finally leaving it, if the AI features could not be turned off (which likely they would… at first, for awhile).
Oh man, the thought strikes me: how will crucial systems like DoD Windows machines maintain integrity, if people can exploit those gigantic loopholes to basically have the OS be a keylogger? It’s not enough for me to use secure systems at home, if those in charge of our nation’s defense (especially nuclear!?) do not.
The snapshot feature is only going to be available on certain laptops that have the Snapdragon + AI chip. DoD will likely simply just not buy those laptops and ban any org from purchasing them, like they already do for certain hardware that have been found to be especially vulnerable. Additionally, this feature isn’t turned on by default and costs a subscription fee (i.e. Copilot+), so people will have to consciously enable and pay for it. Lastly, in enterprise versions of Windows, I would bet money that it can be disabled via GPO, as it’s not only the DoD that would have serious issues/concerns with this feature.
But do we know that the tracking part will not be enabled by default - and possibly in a hidden, highly obscured manner, where the system claims it to not be but it in fact is? The access to Copliot+ may cost money, but why would Microsoft turn away that source of free data? At the very least it is a strong temptation, which even if they start out being responsible with, in every future update there is the potential to change course.
And even if it were not enabled by default, I do worry that a 2-prong attack could first turn it on, then later exploit it to gather the data. If it for truly certain is limited to those chips though… then yes that provides security, thank you for mentioning that.
One good thing is that government systems are always at least couple versions behind, specifically to allow time for exploits to be discovered & patched, prior to upgrades - i.e. prioritizing safety & security over ease-of-use and being on the bleeding edge of “new features”.
I mentioned in another comment this would kill all trust in their product if it was found out that Windows was secretly doing all of that in the background in their enterprise products. There are other options, and as painful as transitioning to another OS would be, Microsoft being able to spy on everyone at any time would be worth the pain. This would absolutely destroy MS’s stock within a year as their dozens of multi-billion dollar contracts with governments and corporations evaporated. There’s no way the data they’re spying on would be worth the hundreds of billions they’d lose in sales.
…Then again, we’ve seen corporations kill themselves in dumber ways before… I guess we’ll see.
Right. Microsoft themselves just announced a feature to disable screenshoting some webpages in Edge, which is a complete 180 from recall.
I expect windows to be split into two tiers of products again: the free version that is paid for by ads/tracking/AI bloatware possibly even mandatory cloud connectivity, and an enterprise version with all off that off, but that is paid.
They’re gonna need a way for IT departments to categorically disable Recall from doing any visual capture/scraping of data. I work in a HIPAA-constrained industry, and the entire concept of MS’s Recall is 100% a non-starter. The legal liability alone categorically disqualifies it from being an acceptable piece of software to run on ANY system that has access to ANY PII or PHI.
Hmm. Do you allow people to VPN in from non-company-controlled laptops? Because I figure that anyone doing work at home is going to be maybe unwittingly having local copies made of data that they’re working with.
No, we do not. Our corporate network connectivity is pretty tightly controlled, and non-issue devices are not permitted on sensitive networks - either VPN or on-premises. I haven’t bothered asking, but I would assume they’re doing system-wide MAC filters as one of the security layers.
I mean yeah it’s possible to exfil data, but it definitely takes some effort, and doing so would be a willful violation of some pretty significant security policies (up to and including “you’re fired, security will escort you out”, depending on the data and the circumstances”), and, you know, it’s nice having a job. Not to mention, I think HIPAA and GDPR privacy stuff, while often tedious in terms of implementation, are absolutely good and worthwhile things for consumers and users, and should not be ignored for expediency or profit.
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned in my comment that enterprise/professional versions will almost certainly allow it to be completely disabled via GPO, as this would be a death sentence for Windows. Businesses and governments across the world would immediately begin planning to off board to something else otherwise.
All the AI garbage from M$ is what made me finally make the swap a couple weeks ago to Linux Mint on my personal desktop. I only use my PC for gaming/entertainment, so the switch was super easy. Can’t recommend it enough if you’re wanting to get away from Windows!
I went with Q4OS since I wanted no bloat and a debian based distro that was linux newbie friendly
One of us! One of us! One of us!
For real though, good on ya. It takes a little getting used to, but is so worth it in the long run to not have to fight against the profit-driven whims of a megacorp. It’s also so much more customizable if you want to put together a really specific workflow for yourself.
I’ve been running Ubuntu desktop for years. YEARS and recently switched to Linux Mint. It’s very polished.
My laptop is the last holdout.
Ehh, I have a different vision here - AI is useful, it’s just going down the hypermonetisation path at the moment. It’s not great because your data is being scraped and used to fuel paywalled content - that is largely why most folks object.
It’s, also, badly implemented, and is draining a lot of system resource when plugged into an OS for little more than a showy web search.
Eventually, after a suitable lag, we’ll see Linux AI as the AI we always wanted. A local, reasonable resource intense, option.
The real game changer will be a shift towards custom hardware for AIs (they’re just huge probability models with a lot of repetitive similar calculations). At the moment, we use GPUs as they’re the best option for these calculations. As the specialist hardware is developed, and gets cheaper, we’ll see more local models and thus more Linux AI goodness.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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” :)
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.
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.
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”.
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.
LLMs have a high coolness-to-code ratio; very cool and not a lot of code. This is the type of thing open source developers are more interested in, so I hope Linux will have some good AI built-in and running locally.
Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.
What would an ai achieve? The only thing I can think of is a documentation summariser, but that can already be made with current applications independent of linux
Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.
You are going to allow an LLM to run commands on your system?
Maybe.
Like, if I could type “extract the audio of this video and re-encode it as a medium quality MP3, break up the audio into 30 consecutive tracks” in a shell, and the next line was populated with the appropriate ffmpeg command, but not yet executed, I could quickly look over the command, nothing looks fishy, so I go ahead and run the command.
And it will be optimized for nothing looking fishy, right.
You could have a command that recommends commands and then you select them on a drop-down list.
Alternatively if the dataset is verified you wouldn’t need to worry about it running dangerous commands, since it doesn’t know any. Or you could have a list of verified commands that run automatically and any command not on that list requires confirmation.
But this is missing the point that most of the time I know exactly what command I want to run so adding a LLM Is quite useless. The reason so much of linux is still relying on commands is because for a lot of people (myself included) commands are quick and efficient.
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!
Alternate title: “Linux lags on implementing AI features.”
Linux gives you the choice to use AI. Microsoft shove it down your throat so hard that even none techy people got scared.
Also, running local llms is easy and someone even remade Microsoft nightmarish recall future :
From the link:
THIS IS A PROOF OF CONCEPT, EXPECT A LOT OF PROBLEMS.
This repository was created a week ago and has had no updates since. This doesn’t exactly counter the notion that Linux is lagging on implementing AI features.
THIS IS A PROOF OF CONCEPT, EXPECT A LOT OF PROBLEMS
Welcome to all AIs right now. Just this week Google’s AI was telling you to eat glue.
bud, they explicitly said that’s a linux implementation of microsoft’s recall, which is itself only like a week old. it’s not at all representative of all ai on linux, you’re being purposely obtuse.
I’m commenting on what was presented to me.
Good.
…Linux is open source, if you wanted/didn’t want AI you could just install a distribution that has/ doesn’t have it.
And the AI features on Windows can be disabled in settings, if you don’t want AI there.
Does Linux actually have equivalents to the various Copilot features yet, though? I’ve been following a lot of open-source AI projects and they’re all pretty much in their “just stood-up and kinda functional” state, far from something that’s easily integrated into a desktop.
There is also nothing stopping you from creating your own distribution that has whatever features you want. Linux provides it’s users with infite choices while on Windows a lot of those choices are made for you. Because linux is developed by users it often lags behind in some features, I predict we will see more AI integrated distributions pop up. There is a general distrust of Microsoft with this rollout, how many Microsoft programs do you close out of only to find it still running in the background? I haven’t tried recal or windows 11 yet but I’d be concerned with my job (announced the switch to 11 starting next month) suddenly using it as a way to start monitoring employees because now the feature is “built in”.
There is also nothing stopping you from creating your own distribution that has whatever features you want.
The non-existence of those features stops me.
…yes, you’d have to make those features yourself. There’s nothing stopping you… except a lack of knowledge.
You can make those features on Windows too, there’s nothing unique about Linux in that regard.
bad troll is bad
Don’t bother. That troll has the dumbest takes on other topics too.
