True. Just this weekend I spent far too much time trying to get a printer to work again on Windows after its IP address got changed. In the end Windows refused to talk to the printer unless I removed and then readded the device from the Settings app, which prompted a reinstallation of the device driver. No, just changing the IP address in the device settings wasn’t enough; Windows insisted on the driver being reinstalled.

Linux didn’t need reconfiguration; it just autodetected that the printer had moved.

I’m not saying that Linux is without issues, not by far. But Windows has never been terribly “it just works” for me either. The closest to “it just works” was (aptly) OS X somewhere around Snow Leopard.

You forgot the degaussing sound for those screens that had that feature. Like turning them on but louder.

*KLONK*

And I wouldn’t know where to start using it. My problems are often of the “integrate two badly documented company-internal APIs” variety. LLMs can’t do shit about that; they weren’t trained for it.

They’re nice for basic rote work but that’s often not what you deal with in a mature codebase.

Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.

Depends. On Linux or older macOS where light mode typically means a comfortable light gray? Light mode is the way to go. On Windows where light mode means an eye-searing onslaught of #FFFFFF? Dark mode is the only sensible choice.

Honestly, it’s still the F310 for me. I have mine since the early 2010s and it’s still working perfectly. Those things are built like tanks and between XInput and DirectInput are compatible with just about any PC game of the last forty years, no extra software required. Also, they’re dirt cheap.

Honorable mention to the F710, the wireless version. While Windows 10’s USB stack unfortunately broke compatibility with it (causing randomly dropped inputs), Linux does not have that problem.

And that’s why copyright infringement is a crime, just not the same crime as theft.

Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.

But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.

NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.

As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.

I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.

I’m not sure about the SSD. Has QLC substantially improved since hitting the market? If not I’d recommend going with something TLC-based.

I just use the Europass CV Builder. Works fine for me, has been for well over a decade now.

Definitely one of the more subtle benefits of the EU: They made a perfectly serviceable resume builder.

(But yeah, a LaTeX template would also just work forever. This stuff is what TeX and its derivatives are great at.)

I gotta agree here. Every game doesn’t feel the same if you don’t constrain yourself to the world of overhyped overmonetized AAA slop.

In my library I have a game about running an alternate-history navy sitting next to one about being a scrapper in space. The next one over is about terraforming a planet with your own labor. Then there’s a pure-bred Igavania next to a quirky game about power washing.

Sure, there are multiplayer titles in there as well but virtually none that even bother with anti-cheat bullshit because coop beats competitive in my opinion.

(For the record, I do own overhyped AAA slop but it’s nowhere near the majority of what I play.)

I gotta be honest, I haven’t used a dedicated sound card since the Vista/7 era when EAX stopped being a thing and onboard sound could handle 5.1 output just fine. The last one I had was a SoundBlaster Audigy.

These days the main uses for dedicated sound interfaces are for when you need something like XLR in/out and then you’ll probably go with something USB.

Port 220.

IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1 was what I used for my SoundBlaster 2.

Later I used IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1, high DMA 5 for my SoundBlaster 16.

Why not go straight for the Ultimate Warrior, get him in a debate with Trump, and make the host cry?

PO: Someone else figure out how to repeat what he did.

Second developer: Sorry, I tried to make sense of his rocket design but I can’t figure out how to make a copy that doesn’t explode before we even put the fuel in.

Besides, LLMs struggle with retaining contextual information for long and they’re pretty dang resource hungry. Expect a game with LLM-driven dialogue to reserve several gigs of VRAM and a fair chunk of GPU processing power solely for that.

And then you still get characters who hallucinate plot points or suddenly speak gibberish.

Mind you, the real winner is of course Android. It has a consistent, easy to learn interface and a wide range of applications that integrate nicely.

And we don’t need to speculate; it has already won and is the true face of Linux for the masses. Plenty of young people don’t even own traditional computers anymore and do everything on their smartphone or tablets.

And that’s why this entire discussion is really just a form of fan wank; we don’t need to find a unified UI for Linux because it has already been found and has a massive market share. You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.

Everything else can be as complicated, janky, or exotic as it wants because it doesn’t matter.

Honestly, if you want one simple DE for everyone it should probably be XFCE. Dead simple to use, feels vaguely familiar to Windows users, not overly complicated.

KDE is heavily customizable, Gnome is very opinionated, and tiling WMs don’t adhere to orthodox UI patterns. Those are all suboptimal if you want something usable by the absolute widest range of users.

Gtk and QT weren’t consistent but there was a Gtk style that used QT as a rendering backend, which allowed you to get some semblance of consistency. Then they came up with Adwaita, which doesn’t really allow that anymore.