Tangentially , I was a heavy used of wsl and moved to linux a few months ago and LLMs made most of the downsides of using linux as a desktop go away for me. I chatted with claude about the migration to find the best distro, decided on Fedora. After the install I asked everything I wanted to configured and got straight answers. In 3 or 4 hours I had an even more comfortable experience than I had on windows. AI made the annoying parts of trying to figure out how to edit all the config files to have linux behave the way you want very easy. I also had claude code write a bunch of scripts that I could have done but would probably never bring myself to actually do it . WHen you have a coding agent readily available , having an open source desktop environment makes a lot more sense. I encourage everyone to try it.
I also did this as well as learned pfSense then OPNSense when pfSense went bad. Also made a pretty complicated XCP-ng setup. Learned all this with the ancient ChatGPT 3.5-4.0 models.
I can hear a subset of people cringe saying "but LLMs are BS machines and you aren't learning anything!" I heartily disagree on both fronts. The main thing holding users like me back from linux was always the snarky RTFM community and the fact that everything has 25 different answers (depending on distro, window manager, and many other factors). LLMs take care of all this friction for you very nicely.
This. It is hard to exaggerate how easy Claude Code (or, I'm sure, any number of other harnesses of choice) makes it to migrate to a new operating system.
It is truly a Star Trek-level experience. Nobody who doesn't want to run Windows (and who isn't forced to run it) needs to run Windows anymore.
On the other side, I am a lifelong Linux user, and even with advanced LLMs, trying to get Microsoft Windows to behave sanely takes hours every month for years on end (thanks, day job). Things Linux figured out in 2003 are still magic or completely undoable on Windows.
Not my experience. I installed the IoT version of Windows 11 and have changed exactly one setting (put the start menu back on the left where it rightfully belongs). Nothing else has required any changes at all to get sanity, which is more than you can say for Mac (which requires half a dozen extra apps to make it same - SteerMouse, Karabina, Spectacle, etc.), or Linux, where the UI is mostly sane - if you're using KDE anyway - but you're beset by bugs and jank.
And don't say "it works for me". We know some people get very lucky with Linux and stuff just works. In my experience the typical experience is that stuff works much better on Windows than Linux.
E.g. something Windows figured out in 2000 - what happens when your system is low on ram or overloaded? Simple! Press ctrl-alt-del, it will pause other apps and allow you to open the task manager and choose one to kill.
On Linux? There's no task manager in the ctrl-alt-del menu (on KDE anyway), and even if there was it isn't a specially privileged UI so it wouldn't respond. Running low on RAM? No problem we'll just kill a random process and if that doesn't work (it usually doesn't), completely freeze and then hard-reboot. Yeay.
The Task Manager that many times also stopped responding or was permanently stuck behind a frozen full screen game?
On Linux, KDE has the plasma System Monitor, and if you can't use it for some reason you can switch your entire session to a TTY with CTRL+ALT+F2 and kill any process you want.
> you can switch your entire session to a TTY with CTRL+ALT+F2 and kill any process you want.
How intuitive. That's often disabled, and I've definitely had machines that were so frozen even that didn't work. I guess sysrq keys might have worked but if you're seriously going to suggest that you haven't understood the problem.
> The Task Manager that many times also stopped responding or was permanently stuck behind a frozen full screen game?
Hasn't happened once for me for as long as I can remember.
In fairness Linux has been pretty solid for me too after upgrading to 128GB of RAM and 64GB of swap. But I never needed to do that on Windows.
Linux has a lot of inherent advantages here, like much deeper terminal support that let an agent make changes to practically any system setting on your behalf. Most importantly, if all else fails, the LLM agent can always check the source code to debug what's going on at the root, if you're using Linux. They don't have the option in Windows or MacOS.
This could mean that at some point, ironically Linux becomes the most user-friendly operating system for regular people as their AIs can diagnose and fix system issues and problems for them more easily than they can with proprietary operating systems.
I did this too, made switching my desktop to Linux so much smoother. I have a Windows laptop for my Windows needs and most of my gaming is fine on the Steam Deck, so I realized I didn't need to always boot into Windows only to use WSL.
I am finding that 42% of California water is agriculture and 8% of that is for almonds. 3% of state water usage on a luxury nut might not be moving the needle that much, but it does feel wasteful for a state that is perpetually hovering on drought conditions.
It's even more wasteful when you realize that the USG is trying to force governments around the world to buy Californian almonds, even in places where almonds are traditionally grown and harvested.
And then there's the matter of Saudis coaxing farmers to grow alfalfa which is then exported to Saudi Arabia to feed cows there (!).
Precisely my point. The US grows an unsustainable amount and then pushes it to places it was grown in traditionally like the Mediterranean, Western Asia and the Middle East.
The USA produces the lion's share thanks to USG subsidies, then the USG comes over to the old world countries and the commerce reps start faulting the countries for a.) blocking American agricultural imports or b.) subsidizing their own local agriculture.
Since the American almonds are also produced at a much larger scale, they can also underprice the locally produced almonds ridiculously, which further disincentivizes local farmers from growing almonds and forces them to grow something else.
I don't know how old OP is but I did a lot of dumb stuff on the internet 25+ years ago when I was a teenager. Including writing viruses and stealing credit card information. I'm glad things were a lot different back then.
I was old enough to know better, but I knew a couple of younger people who were doing it because "it was easy" and policing of such things hadn't caught up to the internet yet, so for someone at their age they would have just considered it to be "dumb stuff on the internet".
It doesn't translate to today's Internet.
(This would have been ~25 years ago, maybe a bit more)
Probably depends on how they acquired them (breaking into an online store's payment transaction database / trading for the CCs on IRC / lifting them using a physical skimmer / etc.)
Yeah, I never actually used or shared/sold any of it since it was mostly a game for me. But nowadays I understand it is a very bad idea even just to store this kind of stuff.
Frankly I think it's a lost cause and sadly doesn't make sense to waste energy on it anymore. I eventually abandoned my de-googled phone exactly because I couldn't use my bank with it.
Some banks require an app for pretty much everything other than retrieving cash from an ATM, because they don't have a web app anymore:
1. Transfer money to another account. The alternative is to waste half a PTO to go to the actual bank (because they only open at working hours) to make that transfer.
2. Make an online payment. Most new cards no longer have a CVV (3 digit code) and instead require you to use the app to get a dynamic number. Many banks do not offer that option in their web app.
3. Forced 2fa for in-person payments with your card.
Today it's still possible to workaround many of these issues but they're closing these workarounds little by little.
Same. I have a very old iPhone stuck on an old version of iOS that's incompatible with most apps these days. In the rare case I need to deposit a check there are banks like Ally that don't have physical branch locations but still let you deposit checks via their website.
I really don't understand why every time a big project is forked People are so upset. IMO, one of the great things about open source software is that a fork is possible. Maybe it will go nowhere, maybe some good ideas will be fed back to Django, maybe it will become the new standard. Most of the time , we will end up with better software overall.
100% agree. The article does not seem to be written by someonene who is particularly interested in this subject. The fact that it starts talking about what is IMO the most overrated scene ever, Berlin, says a lot.
The overrated clubs in Berlin are overrated, but there are also all the other clubs that no NY Times ever writes about. There are (still) many of them and they are good.
The Berlin scene is partly very touristy, what is also good for the city (and sad to let the clubs go), but please also don't underrate it - there are still so many clubs, you just need to find your more undergroundy experience ;) As a tourist, of course, you are also part of the problem, but also well welcome. Every "hype" is not true and show quickly symptoms, and everything was always better back in time, but there is still a lot of reason for Berlin ;)
Not really, they say Leipzig is the new Berlin but it's basically just a few years behind (which is positive in the context of rising rents and dying subculture) and has about three clubs.
