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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s one of those cases where you either add support yourself (provided you have the time, know-how - which most already don’t - and commitment) or wait until hopefully someone else does. Or - like me - you curse and go back to X11 until something gives you enouhh confidence to try Wayland again. I think I read somewhere on this platform that there will be (or was?) some Nvidia driver update that should help with Wayland support, but I haven’t looked into it.

    I don’t have much experience with laptop hardware. I did have one elderly laptop running Ubuntu, though it probably would have been served better with something more lightweight (I just didn’t know much about anything at the time). But that wasn’t doing anything intensive, just some Uni exercises. I think a simple neural network was the most challenging thing it ever had to handle.





  • The first problem, as with many things AI, is nailing down just what you mean with AI.

    The second problem, as with many things Linux, is the question of shipping these things with the Desktop Environment / OS by default, given that not everybody wants or needs that and for those that don’t, it’s just useless bloat.

    The third problem, as with many things FOSS or AI, is transparency, here particularly training. Would I have to train the models myself? If yes: How would I acquire training data that has quantity, quality and transparent control of sources? If no: What control do I have over the source material the pre-trained model I get uses?

    The fourth problem is privacy. The tradeoff for a universal assistant is universal access, which requires universal trust. Even if it can only fetch information (read files, query the web), the automated web searches could expose private data to whatever search engine or websites it uses. Particularly in the wake of Recall, the idea of saying “Oh actually we want to do the same as Microsoft” would harm Linux adoption more than it would help.

    The fifth problem is control. The more control you hand to machines, the more control their developers will have. This isn’t just about trusting the machines at that point, it’s about trusting the developers. To build something the caliber of full AI assistants, you’d need a ridiculous amount of volunteer efforts, particularly due to the splintering that always comes with such projects and the friction that creates. Alternatively, you’d need corporate contributions, and they always come with an expectation of profit. Hence we’re back to trust: Do you trust a corporation big enough to make a difference to contribute to such an endeavour without amy avenue of abuse? I don’t.


    Linux has survived long enough despite not keeping up with every mainstream development. In fact, what drove me to Linux was precisely that it doesn’t do everything Microsoft does. The idea of volunteers (by and large unorganised) trying to match the sheer power of a megacorp (with a strict hierarchy for who calls the shots) in development power to produce such an assistant is ridiculous enough, but the suggestion that DEs should come with it already integrated? Hell no

    One useful applications of “AI” (machine learning) I could see: Evaluating logs to detect recurring errors and cross-referencing them with other logs to see if there are correlations, which might help with troubleshooting.
    That doesn’t need to be an integrated desktop assistant, it can just be a regular app.

    Really, that applies to every possible AI tool. Make it an app, if you care enough. People can install it for themselves if they want. But for the love of the Machine God, don’t let the hype blind you to the issues.




  • I’ve once had difficulties running some apps on Proton that used .NET features not supported by mono, which has been updated since then and is now working out of the box.

    I’m playing Trackmania on wine, I’ve played Elden Ring and Monster Hunter: World on Proton, so I’m wondering which issue you’re running into.

    Regardless, building precompiled Linux native binaries is a commendable goal. Others have mentioned Flatpak, which imo is a good and user-friendly way to handle that.







  • Do you mean the individual .git repository tracking changes in a given directory? Or the remote repository server that you push your changes to and can pull other’s changes from? The first one is the fundamental requirement of using git at all, the second is where it gets less trivial.

    It’s not that the software isn’t available. Off the top of my mind, Gitlab offers their community version for free to download and host yourself. I think they even have a Docker image. All you need is to figure out how you would like to do that.

    It’s the usual question of self-hosting - where would you host it? A server at home? The cloud? Should others be able to access it? How? What about security?

    Remotes already hosted by others are just a lot more convenient. You don’t worry about the infrastructure, you just push your code. People like me might get more excited about setting up than the actual coding. It’s the bane of half my projects - gotta get that git workflow in place, think long-term, set up the “mandatory PR with tests before merge” and shit until eventually I have everything set up… and the spark of the original script I wanted to do is gone.

    If you want to focus on coding, the benefit of having a ready setup are hard to dismiss.
    On the other hand, setting up and configuring a server can be a one-time job, so if that’s worth it to you, power to you!


  • I asked for a rough description because I didn’t wanna bother anyone to take the time for a full, detailed explanation…

    …then you come along and write a whole article on it that’s most certainly more informative and useful than anything Google would have spat out.

    I love that. Thanks so much for taking the time. I also think I’ll give Bazzite / Fedora Atomic a shot. The idea of simply rebasing onto a different option to try different things is definitely appealing.