Baldur Nil

Encyclopedia Brittanica wasn’t designed to be addicting and offer misinformation for one.

Also AWK is made to be fast, right? I suppose doing something in CPython in a non efficient way might not be noticeable with a bit of text, but would show up with a large enough data stream.

They can’t close the source code as long as they use the Linux kernel, right? Besides, Android is popular among other companies because they can customize part of it as they see fit.

This change isn’t really that drastic, because Android never really followed the open source way of doing things. The article even explains that this won’t change much even for ROM developers, since they’re not creating releases based on “work in progress” branches.

Really the only difference is that Google will spare the work of merging two separate branches often and solving conflicts that might as well be turning into a nightmare as the code base has grown.

This is the best I could find: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

Yeah, just a note, basically these Linux distros are the same at their “core”, but what differs among them is mostly about the software they have and the way they’re managed.

So you have distros that offer only open source software in their repository, some include proprietary drivers. Some distro families will have some differences in the path of certain folders, different families use different formats of their packages (which include the actual binary of the software together with the metadata about how to install them in the system), although a purely Linux binary should be executed in any Linux distro. Some offer more guidance during installation and setup, some offer a more “raw” experience that force you to chose every little detail, and so on.

Another difference is in their philosophy of how the packages and dependencies are made available. Distributions such Arch Linux and its derivatives always offer the latest versions of each package, reason why they’re called “rolling release”. Distributions such as Debian offer a specific version that’s “frozen” and tested thoroughly until a new version of Debian is released with more updated software.

Some say a rolling release distro is better for gamers because you always get the latest features and performance improvements, but they’re naturally less reliable than a stable distro.

So I’d say the important thing is to understand the trade-offs so that you can choose the best thing for you. And also there’s no downside of experimenting different distros in a virtual machine, for example.

Also has an interface that clicks easier with people used to Windows.

Here’s a nice pic that make you feel less “lost” about how some popular distributions relate to each other:

…so might as well say that “agent” is simply the next buzzword, since people aren’t so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more

This is exactly the reason for the emphasis on it.

The reality is that the LLMs are impressive and nice to play with. But investors want to know where the big money will come from, and for companies, LLMs aren’t that useful in their current state, I think one of the biggest use for them is extracting information from documents with lots of text.

So “agents” are supposed to be LLMs executing actions instead of just outputting text (such as calling APIs). Which doesn’t seem like the best idea considering they’re not great at all at making decisions—despite these companies try to paint them as capable of such.

If they actually wanted quality documents for people to use, they would be advocating for Standard Ebooks or something.

Or… you know… have PDFs that aren’t pictures of handwritten text?

Yeah, none of that would be a problem if the car isn’t connected to anything (WiFi, Bluetooth etc.)

This is why technically software is a liability. The less code you need, the better, since every line of code is a potential vulnerability and something to maintain, update, etc.

But is it that different than the podcasts voices Google already generate with NotebookLM since a while ago?

If the distro is rolling release, it can always support the latest software in theory, you’d just need to have the correct package formula, which is exactly what AUR offers.

The problem with AUR is just that the author of the package is likely not the author of the software and not affiliated with the distro, so you should normally check what the script is doing.

I really understand how hard is maintaining something for every single package manager and distributions

But for apps distributed in your system’s package manager, it’s not the devs that are distributing them in every package manager. It’s the distribution itself that goes to each repository, checks and tests the dependencies they need and creates the package for the distribution, along with a compiled binary.

When they aren’t offered in the distro’s package manager (or the version is outdated because the distro isn’t rolling release) things become more complicated indeed, and sometimes you can’t even do it because the dependencies are older than the ones you require.

Also Windows has a button similar to “don’t update this week” or similar.

What you’re saying is right about the possibility, but when you’re assessing some software for yourself, you have to consider things in the bigger perspective.

Some protects are very complex and require multiple teams of developers to maintain. That’s different than a small project that one person can maintain and curate external contributions.

So something like Chromium or Flutter isn’t the type of software that a community will self organize and maintain, they need some sort of organization behind them. This organization will probably need some sort of funding, ex: donations. Otherwise the projects will either fall into chaos and die or they’ll look for other ways to support themselves (ex: Qt with their commercial license and paywalled features).

In practice everything needs resources and without these resources any project simply dies.

Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users

That’s not a universal behavior though. There’s so many utilities and simpler apps made by indie developers or smaller companies that don’t care about this.

You’re right, but that’s not the point. The other poster said it’s a skill issue. Sure, if the person can’t run commands in a terminal or doesn’t know what’s an executable that’s a skill issue.

Getting stuck because the game is having weird glitches that show off once in a while and you need classes on computer graphics to debug isn’t skill issues imo. Otherwise are all gonna establish that Linux isn’t for non programmers then?

Another option is to have enough people in the company interested in using that to justify it.

In my company (a large bank) Linux is now being rolled out to selected people as test because there was enough interest from a lot of the backend crowd.

It’s a good concept, I just have to look it up and understand exactly what it is doing before I start using it.