If you enjoy a small independent band please consider going to their website and ordering physical media or buying a digital copy from their bandcamp or something. You can still pirate content you will never play to to fill up your storage. Small artists aren’t getting hugely rich from their music and touring costs are out of control. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing with the piracy.

The rich have done everything they can to increase wealth inequality and brainwash the public into acceptance. That will not be reversed. If they allow UBI it will be below poverty levels and highly conditional.

The wealthy want slaves. Its a mental illness with them. Black people. Underage sex trafficking. Working poor. Robots. Last thing they want is a utopia where everyone is healthy, happy and financially independent.

One of the wealthiest countries in the world doesn’t even have proper healthcare system in 2026. No way are those dumb fucks getting a UBI. Its a lie.

I have been using Linux for 30 years. Never recommend anything to anyone. It’s their decision to make. I will answer questions if asked but I try and be conservative. Lots of people don’t need computers and would be better off without them or only need something simple to do their jobs or play games. Also my experience doesn’t translate to normies. Inlaw was asking around for laptop recommendations and I just shut my trap. They can buy a Mac or a box store Windows laptop and it will do the job and I won’t be on the hook for support.

I am not a preacher and Linux is not a religion. It is an effective tool for technically minded people to get shit done. Nothing more. If companies want to turn it into a product and an experience like Valve or Google then it will end up in more or less polished consumer ready products but that is nothing to do with why I use it.

Windows isn’t scary. It’s weird and kind of pathetic. Always has been.

I always used my retired PCs and parts but then my kids all wanted gaming rigs so spare PCs and parts do not exist in my world anymore and they tended to be too big, noisy and inefficient.

I would go for used ex-corporate desktop mini PCs from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo. Perhaps don’t go for the smallest ones if you want to be able to get into them and add stuff. They tend to have reasonably good idle power and noise and its common to find ones supporting two nvme ssds. Intel cpu with quicksync for jellyfin video decode if you aren’t adding discrete gpu - check supported codecs. Codec support varies across generations I think.

I would stay well away from laptops: bad thermals, power limits, limited expandability and SBCs like RPi which have poor io for servers.

I picked up an old HP Elitedesk off ebay a few years ago. I added a few TB of SSD and another stick of DDR4 when that stuff was cheap. It supports two nvme ssds as well as space for sata drives. Apart from media storage I can’t see any compelling reason to want to upgrade it.

I can see the pragmatic appeal. Maintaining a lot of code for an open source project is thankless. Go is designed for idiots like me so it makes sense that an llm should be able to emit code that mostly works. There are classes of errors that are less likely in Go and the compiler and linting will prevent some foot guns and then it would have been tested.

Ethically I hate anything to do with the llm industry and all it represents. I hate the environmental impacts. The social impacts. The disregard for intellectual property. The devaluing of human effort. The scam economics. I won’t use anything touched by it on principle and if that means walking away from a dead Internet so be it. There is enough pre-2020s books, audiobooks, movies, music and code to keep me interested for the rest of my life.

My kids have used Linux from birth. One of them is voting age now. A Chromebook is Linux. They mostly just open steam.

Never liked the look of KDE. It is nothing to do with the tech or features. I think qt is a very solid foundation and my current desktop is built on Qt/QML. KDE just feels Windows-ish somehow and that’s probably part of what makes it great for a lot of people. That is a huge win for Linux adoption. Just not for me.

I always liked Gnome. It was simple and felt fresh even though I hate gtk/gobject etc. And I still keep Gnome as a backup but it think development is being held back by being built on layers of shit.

After a long time going back and forth I think I am all in on Niri now. Regular tilers never worked for me but somehow scrollers do. It is weird how much of a difference it makes for me. It is possible to build a complete desktop now with Quickshell and a bit of a backend for some services which makes the Gnome desktop and Plasma look crazy over engineered and I don’t know why the Cosmic people even bothered. I don’t see how Gnome can keep up as its is such a horrible system to program. DankMaterialShell is reasonably usable for starters but I might even start working on something. It looks like fun.

Football? But it’s still cricket season.

For someone who subbed to self hosted almost as soon as they joined Lemmy I am really conservative about what I host. I have tried to keep all media in jellyfin to keep things sinple. But recently I expanded to audiobookshelf and wow!

Ripped some of my audiobooks and added some podcasts and now we have a family library and everyone has their own progress and settings working across devices. I am still spending a lot of time consuming media but I think it’s a much healthier balance.

Git was designed specifically so people could work independently and not have to rely on a server. GitHub is not git. GitHub is an attempt to control the marketplace for code and exploit the network effects to lock people in and control them. It’s facebook and linkedn for programmers. We never needed that and many of us never wanted that.

You can do distributed development with git without any centralised infrastructure. It’s what it was made for.

We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.

Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.

Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.

We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.

A lot of people seem to feel like this. It’s obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.

And it’s always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.

I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don’t tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.

It is hard to know exactly what we see because our brain processes it so much and then we have to put it into words and we could easily be describing different experiences the same way or same experiences differently.

I would guess any light receptor produces noise whether that is a few stray protons or just thermal chemical/electrical processes. I would think for most people the brain is receiving noise very much like this but how they experience it depends on how it is processed. Unless there is some after image from recently staring at something bright, when my eyes are shut my brain gives me an impression of nothing which is almost certainly not what my retina is detecting.

Agreed. Infantile and basically a slur on people because of their dietary choices. Part of a pattern of language that is basically alt-right bait for young insecure and disaffected men.

Edit: Adding a link to an article I saw on the orange site. The Four Dark Laws of online engagement are a nice little cheat sheet for the patterns you see repeatedly online. Negatively biased language that targets an out group has a virality amongst this audience: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/all-the-sad-young-terminally-online

Chrome was disruptive.

Part of the reason for its disruption is that Chromium is open source (BSD licence), built on Webkit that was open source, which was built on khtml from the KDE project which was open source. That is how we got to Microsoft Edge also running on Chromium.

If it wasn’t for the monoculture aspect and the actions of some of the companies using it, khtml->Chromium would be a great open source success story.

It is an emergency exit not a normal exit.

Non-murican - strongly feel preference should be given to genuine refugees fleeing war, famine etc where they have absolutely no ability to influence their fate other than escape. The US is a failed democracy but the people there have barely begun to challenge their government compared to what we have seen elsewhere in the world. And there is still refuge available in blue states. US citizens need to stand up and fight. Then if they fail, only then do they get to go in the queue with the genuine humanitarian refugees. I don’t like queue jumpers. Sorry but impingement on your civil liberties doesn’t compare with families in war torn parts of the world living in fear fear of having their limbs blown off every night.

Ofcourse business around the world would like to cherry pick talent for in demand jobs. They prefer not to invest in developing local people when they can import experienced talent for less. So people with in demand skills will get in that way, not as refugees.

Not just the kids. The kids who were exposed to this stuff way back now have kids. It’s generational now.

We tried guys, really we did. The vibe coding was working but it was sabotaged by liberals and Canadians. The only option is to end social security and put the poor and elderly into workhouses or send them to the shower blocks.