do they just want everything to be crawled
Yes. Web crawling has been a normal and vital part of the web from day 1. We’d have no search engines without crawlers.
The web is user-centric by design. I’m sick of tech companies trying to flip the script and hoard information, most of which is not theirs to begin with (e.g. Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
They actually want to increase what can be done in user mode, to reduce reliance on kernel mode code.
That’s basically what Apple did with macOS 11. They deprecated kernel extensions and replaced them with “system extensions”, and created new APIs so security tools, VPNs and such could function without kernel-level privileges.
Let me put it this way: I audit open source software more than I audit closed source software.
There are two potential show-stoppers.
Field-specific apps that only run on windows. If you really need Adobe Creative Cloud or SolidWorks or something like that you might be out of luck. This is mostly true for apps that require GPU acceleration, which is difficult to rig up in a VM. You wouldn’t want to do that if it was a big part of your workload.
Mandatory spyware and rootkit DRM to prevent cheating with remote tests. Hopefully if they do such a thing they provide loaner hardware too. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time but my experience is outdated, so I don’t know what’s common nowadays.
It ranges from “automatic” to “infuriating”.
If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.
Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.
If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).
Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.
I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.
It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.
No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?
Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.
DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).
DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.
And that’s the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!
Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it’s “fine” but it doesn’t solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.
Honestly, that sounds great.
My biggest problem with Flatpak is that Flathub has all sorts of weird crap, and depending on your UI it’s not always easy to tell what’s official and what’s just from some rando. I don’t want a repo full of “unverified” packages to be a first-class citizen in my distro.
Distros can and should curate packages. That’s half the point of a distro.
And yes, the idea of packaging dependencies in their own isolated container per-app comes with real downsides: I can’t simply patch a library once at the system level.
I’m running a Fedora derivative and I wasn’t even aware of this option. I’m going to look into it now because it sounds better than Flathub.
Kids these days and their “Plasma”. BACK IN MY DAY it was just KDE!
I’m not sure why this feels new to me. Perhaps it’s because I spent a lot of time on other DEs after 2009.
But also, from that link:
We will use “KDE” exclusively in two meanings:
- KDE, the community, which creates free software for end users
- As an umbrella brand for the technology created by the KDE community
So I don’t feel like it’s wrong to just call it KDE, just imprecise.
But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu
If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.
You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.
The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.
This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.
Also works on Twitch with the added benefit of NOT playing ads (you still get breaks, just with a placeholder screen instead of the commercial).
mpv has yt-dlp support built in, so it can just play the streams directly.
vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.
I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.
I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.
My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.
I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.
Laptops are a crapshoot, so I’d recommend sticking with distros that are known to support your specific model.
Desktops should, in general, just work.
That said, I’ve never personally had a seamless experience. There’s always something I need to struggle to configure. Usually it’s because I’m very picky and I like things to work MY way. The alternative on Widows would not be that it works my way; it would be that there’d be no way to do that so I’d just have to deal with it. If you’re willing to just roll with the defaults, then yeah, most basic things should just work.
The biggest gotcha is GPU drivers. Not all distros ship with recent kernel versions with modern drivers. You should be pretty safe with Fedora and derivatives.
Right, not an IDE. The BB stands for “bare bones”, but it has a robust feature set as far as general text editing goes. Autocomplete is minimal so I tend to use an IDE for more complex coding tasks.
Sorry, I misspoke. CUPS itself is not deprecated, only most of its old functionality regarding drivers.
From man cups:
CUPS printer drivers, backends, and PPD files are deprecated and will no longer be supported in a future feature release of CUPS
I don’t. I have installed Firefox manually for many years across several distros now, albeit for different reasons. For example:
Debian only has Firefox ESR in the Bookworm repo. I want the latest mainline version.
Bazzite only offers it via Flatpak, which breaks functionality I need such as native messaging.
I see no problem installing it manually. It keeps itself updated and has caused me zero problems.
Kind of funny how quickly we’ve flipped from “you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger” to “you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output”.
Either way, it’s the right idea. If you can’t understand what you’re doing but you do it anyway, you’re going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.