After the X/XS/XR phones they went to the 11. If the XS was 10 then the X would be 9. It is a bit weird for them to do 8 and 9 at the same time, though.
No, the problem with Windows 9 is that a lot of things compared the version with 9* as a catch all for windows 95 and 98, so they were worried with backwards compatibility.
There wasn’t a Windows 9 because a lot of (poorly) written software will do a system check for Windows version and if the first number is “9”, it won’t work and complain that you need to be using a Windows OS newer than Windows 9x (95/98).
It was just for backwards compatibility more than anything.
The average consumer isn’t going to toss out a good computer they bought if it can’t run Windows 11. They’re certainly not installing Linux. They’ll keep using Windows 10 for as long as they can. I’ve seen way too much of Windows XP still running on people’s computers, if it can still browse the web, access emails and look at Facebook they’re not spending money on a new one
Good point. What about hardware drivers? Do the OEMs use OS support deprecation, as an excuse to bail on shit? Or are driver updates irrelevant to a dead OS bc it’s in stasis?
My though was their preferred stenography keyboard was made by a company that is now defunct, ergo no updates. Possibly could be overcome with techy means, but I’m guessing the stenographer doesn’t have those.
I mean stopping Windows updates is really more a win than a loss half the time. They’ve forcefully installed so much of the shitware in Windows 10 updates that makes Windows 11 awful. It took me an hour to strip all the bullshit off of my partner’s Windows 10 that he left to auto-update.
Auto update has been a pain in the arse. Was doing a presentation for a group assignment with a Windows user and just before we were about to go up the thing just decided on a whim to install an update. Funnily enough he said he wanted to try Linux after that
It’s actually astonishing to me how much better Linux deals with updates compared to macOS and Windows. “Oh, updates are installed, and you just need to restart whatever I updated if it’s currently running.”
Sometimes it does have its moments though, like when it updates some core package and changes its config in such a way that the next boot doesn’t go into a GUI, but I think it’s also fair to point out Windows has had those too. And macOS High Sierra with the performance and security issues it initially had on release won’t go unmentioned by me either.
Agreed. There usually needs to be a big demand for a shift. Kind of like with Android development. Things tend to slow down once they run out of good ideas.
For Microsoft I think the next big move could be for a whole solar system calendar, e.g. symmetry 454, then synchronise that with a local family/group calendars, social events integration etc, throw in something like bing coin, then throwing it all into a big new multi compatible platform available to all of XP, 7, 10 and 11, add some games shit in there to compete with steam deck, then throw in some hardware CPU cooling accessories to prop up the trash software until they spend the next ten years updating like Lenovo bridge, it so that they can let optimizing their software enough to not fuck things up.
As for how the hell they plan on making money from it all, I suspect that the accessories will eventually lead to subscription costs for certain OEM support. This will encourage OEM manufacturers to engage directly with consumers and retailers to invest in the recycling process so that they can jack up prices across the board.
Use this money to add their shit into some NASA computers for extra hype. No big long term plan, just getting their logo and their foot in the door with the next big direction for computing lol
Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about "artificial intelligence large language models (LLM). I typically say artificial intelligence is autocorrect on steroids. Because all a large language model does is it predicts what’s the most likely next word that you’re going to use, and then it extrapolates from there, so not really very intelligent, but obviously, the impact that it has on our lives and the reality we live in is significant.
It’s not simple to come up with coherent statements on such a wide variety of tasks.
It’s not just stringing random words together like predictive text. It understands context in a way that is very complex.
It is more knowledgeable than the average person by a huge amount.
For example I asked it to write songs about squidmas, an imaginary holiday I made up to irritate my children. It was able to rewrite Christmas songs but with a squid theme. That’s way more complex than predictive text.
At least my definition of intelligence is thinking. Otherwise a simple pattern matching algorithm like a regexp is also intelligent, or a sorting algorithm that puts things in the right order.
But I agree it’s very efficient and has more data than any single person ever could. It’s a computer, they are great at storing and processing information.
I’ve heard the argument that we don’t really have a good definition of thinking or intelligence and if it can complete a task or do things…what does it matter if it’s “thinking” or not if the outcome is the same.
Bro the AI neural networks have been shown to be building internal world models to be able to do what they do. How is that not thinking?
I am so sick of this anthrocentrism, as if we are special because we are humans. The computers are now doing the same mathematical processes our brains are doing. The LLMs can be compared to a small subsection of our brains. String enough neural network based AIs together with different tasks and youll get sentience.
Sentience isnt required for “thinking” to happen, thinking is one of the building blocks for sentience.
While I mostly agree, I’d like to point out that GOFAI (good old fashioned AI) exists, and at its core it is basically just pathfinding like a* or something similar. And we still call that AI, because it “intelligently” finds a path quickly.
So my main point is that I agree that it isn’t magic or sapient or anything, but in a sense it is definitely intelligent.
I think the defenders of human intellect are heralding our language and thinking to be a much higher standard than for MOST people they are.
A chess champion might be executing critical thinking beyond normal comprehension but I’d say a lot of my interactions with others, my daily experience is just pattern matching the next thing to say or ask.
I think this type of anthropocentrism extends to chess too actually. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’ve heard that chess AIs are finding success doing unintuitive things like pushing a and h file pawns in openings. If, 10 years ago, some chess grandmaster was doing the same thing and finding success, I imagine they would have been seen as creative, maybe even groundbreaking.
I think the average person under-rates the sophistication of AI. Maybe as a response to the AI hype. Maybe it’s because we’re scared of AI, and it’s comforting to believe that it’s operations are trivial. I see irrationality and anger cropping up in discussions of AI that I think stem from a fundamental fear of its transformative power.
Yes it’s going to transform everything. It’s about the same as the transformation from typewriter to computer for society. But I still don’t think any machine that predicts the next word is intelligent. However, this is only the beginning. We are not going to be able to keep up with AI soon, and it will work around the clock to get better and better.
We will have those high tech societies from the movies where robots are everywhere and people are quite sad.
You say that however we might have stumbled on the groundwork for a GI. Because language is core to our evolutionary advancement. We needed language to build the mental constructs that then enabled logical work.
Imagine if an LLM was able to coordinate the usage of these “logical” AI’s like Deep mind etc.
ChatGPT already enabled Internet search and it’s better than if I asked someone to Google something for me.
It’s that these models have leveraged so much data they’ve been able to map out relationships between words (or images) in way as to be able to generate what seem like new versions of those things.
I grant you that an LLM has more base level knowledge than any one human, but again this is thanks to terrifyingly large dataset and a design that means it can access this data reasonably reliably.
But it is still a prediction model. It just has more context, better design and (most importantly) data to make predictions at a level never before seen.
If you’ve ever had a chance to play with a model at level where you can control some of its basic parameters it offers a glimpse into just how much of a prediction machine it can be.
My favourite game for a while was to give midjourney a wildly vague prompt but crank the chaos up to 100 (literally the chaos flag at the highest level) to see what kind of wild connections exist but are being filtered out during “normal” use.
The same with the GPT-3.5 API in the “early days” - you could return multiple versions of the response and see the sausage being made to a very small degree.
It doesn’t take away from the sense of magic using these tools. It just helps frame what’s going on under the hood.
All 3 billion Android devices in the world. It’s pretty crazy when you think about it. Also 96% of the top 1 million web servers and all of the 500 fastest super computers (excluding quantum) in the world.
Eventually, if things keep progressing, they’ll be able to do certain things like factoring primes faster than conventional computers. But, the clock rate will probably always be abysmal.
Glad that there are govt. level systems who make use of Linux (mostly ubuntu ) systems here. For eg. , in kerala, all govt schools and colleges use linux for computer labs and academic activities, i guess the local body administration too use ubuntu.
Only wish we could convince those private sector schools of the money they’ll save converting those slow windows systems to linux.
Problem with private schools is most likely the training investment required. They can’t as easily replace IT team and/or CS teachers with those who can handle Linux
Your post couldn’t be more true. Decades ago I was sold on MythTV, this PVR software but it only ran on Linux and you had to compile it yourself. So I gave Linux and MythTV a shot. As it turned out, both MythTV and early desktop Linux were a buggy, frustrating mess. X broke all the time. Incomprehensible, ungoogleable compile errors all the time.
I spent so much time troubleshooting MythTV and compilation problems that I ended up learning Linux inside and out and the C programming language to be able understand the compile errors. I went on to lead a major open source project and have had a long career as a programmer, using all the knowledge I gained that started with fighting MythTV.
I don’t want to dox myself so I’d rather not say, but it was some time ago and I’m no longer leading that project. I do still do development in the same field though!
I’m thanking yall for this. And also idk what so different in linux, but I just want apps on here. Like I can find an alternative, but I have to say it, most of the time it’s just worse. Like how do you replace AMD Software or Logitech Ghub or Realtek audio (or whatever is the deafult for win, it’s so seamless).
To add to this, I can install a standalone app for every feature that AMD Software has, but I don’t want to. And Ghub got de-drm-ed for like two mice, but I own a different one. Video recording and Audio settings are basically non-existen. Good luck changing the quality of your audio.
To add even more, I’m more and more used to these alternatives, so idk if I’ll still cry about it in a few years. Re-learning computers is such a pain. I hope I’ll be able to give linux to my kids as a norm (basically to use without terminal mastery).
Most of the time there is no 1:1 replacement, it all depends on which features you use from these apps. Some suggestions:
AMD Software
CoreCtrl can do most of the important stuff from the AMD software like GPU overclocking, custom fan curves and per-game profiles.
Logitech Ghub
Piper has a lot of support for different mice and keyboards, maybe yours are supported there?
Realtek audio
I’m not sure what Realtek audio does nowadays, which features do you need?
Video recording
OBS is available and does pretty much does the same stuff as on Windows. If you need to capture gameplay you will have to install obs-vkcapture which is the Vulkan/OpenGL replacement for DirectX capturing included on the Windows version of OBS.
Audio settings
Which settings do you require? What do you mean with “Audio quality”?
Unfortunately most Pipewire/Wireplumber settings are hidden behind config files and I’m not aware of any applications to manage them. The KDE audio settings are quite decent but limited in scope. However, most of the Pipewire settings have a sensible default and probably shouldn’t be changed unless you’re doing audio production.
qpwgraph is quite powerful when you need to connect multiple devices together or have virtual audio devices.
Okay update: Piper does support my mouse. Which is good, because I can now config the profiles without windows. But also sad, because I’m still having my scroll wheel problem. I’ll say it briefly maybe you know something about it. My mouse send hight res and normal scroll ups and downs inconsistently. When I scroll wirelessly it sends 5 hi res events, which get’s turned into a normal one, so it sends both. the 5 events is inconsistent, so sometimes I don’t even scroll. What apps use is inconsistent, so sometimes i scroll 5 times instead of 1, or even worse when apps wait for the 5 hi res next to each other, meaning it doesn’t even scroll sometimes. But all of this is gone when I plug in. When wired my mouse only sends “normal” scroll events and everything works perfectly. I got the leads: ([1], [2], [3], [4]) (I have to admit, I haven’t read all of these, at one point they just turned into technical gibberish for me)
They say sex is good and all, but I bet they never received a reply like this before. I’m going to respond one by one.
I mostly used AMD Software for instant replay, I miss this loads. Tried replay-sorcery like 3 times, failed all 3 times. I gained more knowledge since, fixed discord’s screenshare, so I might give it another shot, but I also heard that you can get instant replay with OBS somehow.
I’d like some alternative to fancontrol, I know I could set fanspeed in the bios, idk why I don’t. But I had a nice lil software that managed fans, now I don’t.
Piper also doesn’t support my mouse. It does however support the one I just switched from a month ago…
Idk what Realtek does, but I never had any sound related problems on windows. AKA it just worked, I’d like it back pls. I now use pipewire-pulse. Made Virtual Surround sink, loving the customization, hating the documentation. I’d still like to fix the bandwidth (I read somewhere that it’s limited by default) and mess around with EQs, my lead is AutoEq.
OBS just doesn’t work. But I remember it barely working on windows as well. It’s popular, I can probably fix it.
I already have qpwgraph, but I don’t have a use for it, I just used it to visualize, and fix connections when they’re wrong. Might do some soundboard fun later with it, or in-game mic trolling :p
Thanks for the links tho, I’ll look into what I can utilize. But don’t get me wrong I love linux, there is just so little support, paired with such a steep learning curve.
rant: I’m not using linux for long, and I have a bunch of stuff to get working. Password manager, find nice image and PDF viewers (web browsers feels cheap), fix recording (obs can’t capture and barely can anything else), get (or make) a nice theme, try out tiling window managers, set-up WMs so I don’t have to dual boot anymore. While don’t even get me started on stuff I have no Idea how works on linux. Like grep’s powerful, how does regex work, links?, everything in /etc, bash script. hopefully I can get these answered in 2024. I hear the memes that this is the “year of linux desktop”; well it’s certainly for me.
Which distro do you use? I don’t really have much sound issues here and I have a pretty exotic setup.
I mostly used AMD Software for instant replay, I miss this loads. Tried replay-sorcery like 3 times, failed all 3 times. I gained more knowledge since, fixed discord’s screenshare, so I might give it another shot, but I also heard that you can get instant replay with OBS somehow.
Yes, I use OBS for that. The feature is called “Replay Buffer” and I have it running with no issues with hardware encoding. I would recommend you use the OBS flatpak, depending on your distro you might also want to use Steam in a Flatpak to make things easier.
I’d like some alternative to fancontrol, I know I could set fanspeed in the bios, idk why I don’t. But I had a nice lil software that managed fans, now I don’t.
I’m not aware of a software that controls all fans but I didn’t really look since I just let them do what they want. CoreCtrl can do the GPU fan but I also leave that alone.
Piper also doesn’t support my mouse. It does however support the one I just switched from a month ago…
You might have some luck requesting support for your mouse/keyboard on their git page, maybe support can be added.
Idk what Realtek does, but I never had any sound related problems on windows. AKA it just worked, I’d like it back pls.
What does not work?
I’d still like to fix the bandwidth (I read somewhere that it’s limited by default)
There’s no bandwidth limit on Pipewire that I’m aware of. The default sampling rate is 48000 if you mean that but it’s a sensible default and you probably don’t want to change it.
and mess around with EQs, my lead is AutoEq.
AutoEq sounds good. EasyEffects definitely can do your EQ and much much more.
there is just so little support, paired with such a steep learning curve.
The learning curve can be steep but don’t be afraid to ask, there’s a lot of helpful people on here. Also most Github/Gitlab projects might look intimidating but they also gladly offer support for applications there.
PDF viewers
Okular is included with KDE and is pretty competent.
Like grep’s powerful, how does regex work, links?, everything in /etc, bash script. hopefully I can get these answered in 2024.
Those are not strictly needed in order to “use” Linux but if you want to learn about them you there’s a lot of resources for them out there. ChatGPT is also pretty useful in helping with bash scripts/commands since they’re sometimes hard to read.
Thank you. I’ll look into this “Replay Buffer” and OBS in general, as it doesn’t work atm. I’m on Arch, and when I plugged in my laptop to the TV via HDMI it didn’t play any sound. With some brute force commands (can’t remember, could maybe check history) I managed to play a static noise on the TV, but I couldn’t get it recognized as an audio device. Gave up after a while as we just wanted to watch the movie, so we found another way instead of me holding up my family with debugging.
Basically the same as in Windows: Keepass with manual sync between devices(using Syncthing for example) or Bitwarden (Vaultvarden if like you like to selfhost and don’t have enterprise account).
I wonder if native D3D would really help at all. Most OpenGL drivers in Mesa are really Gallium drivers. Gallium is a low level internal Mesa API uses to implement support for higher level APIs, including OpenGL and Direct3D 9. Vulkan support isn’t implemented on top of Gallium, because Vulkan is apparently lower level than Gallium is. These drivers are still pretty damn fast, despite having to go through and intermediate API. If Gallium is fast enough for OpenGL drivers, I don’t see why the lower level Vulkan can’t be fast enough for Direct3D drivers. As far as I’m aware, the performance difference between DXVK/VKD3D and Direct3D drivers on Windows is already negligible.
It’s definitely not 20%-30% behind. I’d say the difference is usually 10% or less. Sometimes DXVK is even a little ahead. Does depend on the game and drivers, tho.
Well we’ve had binary packages for ages for big builds like firerox and default is still to use source packages.
Still I’m really excited for this, having the whole, or big parts of the package tree, will speed up initial installations by a lot on weak arm systems for example. Now initial installation can be done quick and later you could still compile stuff yourself for the full gentoo experience.
Easy… decoupling. You hit the pause button on your keyboard, it does not need to “know” (in code or compile time or at runtime) what your music player is, and it can still pause it. Similarly, you can write a new media player, and not have to convince 1000 different projects to support or implement your custom api. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus
There’s nothing about dbus that makes decoupling easier, you can do it just as well with sockets. Pipewire and pulse both speak the same protocol, and they both rely on sockets, not dbus. The vast majority of the apps on my system don’t know or care that they’re speaking with pipewire instead of pulse. Read my comment here lemmy.world/comment/6284859
There’s software for that. Honestly, i prefer that over the ‘whole package or nothing’ approach in Flatpack, which still has ~/.var for packages hardcoded btw.
Can you elaborate on update system? AppImage is just a format, right? Whereas flatpak is a format and an entire toolkit for downloading and running flatpaks.
You already said it. Flatpak and Snap both include an entire system around updates and rollback which provide some pretty strong guarantees for update success. AppImage does not. It’s got some libs available that an individual developer could use to implement their own update mechanism but isn’t a built-in. And besides, without a system-level component that manages install/update/rollback, you can’t have any guarantees about the update process. You’re back to the Windows-world per-app update.exe paradigm (or update.sh in Linux).
It’s funny because the first time I read it, I thought it was serious and was just written by a tech-illiterate parent. Saying that Comet Cursor and Bonzi Buddy are hacker software kinda gives away that it’s just satire though.
oh I guess that’s also something that younger people may not know about… In the late 1990s / early 2000s, it wasn’t uncommon for people to install spyware to get things like custom mouse cursors, emoticons, and purple gorillas that help you navigate the web.
I remember dealing with migrating from LILO to GRUB when I was in high school, maybe 2005ish? It’s been a while. I remember the migration from ipchains to iptables, too (which is happening again now with the iptables to nftables migration)
I used Ubuntu at the time… It was a great distro back then. I only had dial-up so couldn’t download large files easily, and Canonical or one of their local partners would mail you a CD for free regardless of where you lived in the world. I think that helped a LOT of people get into Linux.
Similar experiences here. I remember waiting for the free CDs bundles with monthly magzines, and add then I’d the CD as a mirror in my repos to update my packages lol
So I did miss that Linus is in the article, but the reference to him says he was awarded the title, which makes it sound like an honour rather than a hierarchical system. I don’t believe that he’s ever been anything other than the projects owner/founder but I’m happy to learn if I’m wrong.
Yes, that’s just how open source works. Of course they always serve at the pleasure of the community, otherwise forks would happen. Nobody said otherwise. As the “Usage” section of that article implies, the “benevolent” bit comes from the feedback loop of a happy community supporting their dictator-for-life.
I mean how the community refers to him. I’ve never read a thread where someone called Linus a BDFL, I have with python. If they do, they do. Just haven’t seen it myself.
Free software doesn’t have owners. If someone else did a better job of being the “benevolent dictator” of a fork of Linux, everyone would start using that fork. Arguably this is a more free-market system than non-free software.
You can fork it, sure Linus is very respected and his decisions are considered very important but you can fork it and change however you want so it’s still compatible with Anarchism.
Linus’ power doesn’t come from Ownership, but respect. Anyone can fork it and do what they want, but because Linus is respected, everyone else follows suit.
Anarchism would function in a similar manner, it wouldn’t be a bunch of opinionated people doing whatever they want, but people generally listening to experts who don’t actually hold systemic power.
Many times what? Most forks die within a few months. Especially for big and well known projects. For example, io.js was a fork of NodeJs. Didn’t last long and was killed by NodeJs. All the Firefox forks are pretty much dead as well. Linux also had plenty of forks by people who disagreed with Linus and where are they now? I bet you don’t even remember their names.
Forks don’t work unless the original project is dead.
So mass adoption is your answer, and I’d say you’re misguided. The purpose of FOSS isn’t to make a profit, but to satisfy uses and needs. If a few people have a need for a fork and use it, then it’s a success.
You’re judging FOSS software by popularity, rather than use, as though it’s for profit.
Most new businesses fail as well. Maybe we shouldn’t be starting new businesses either? Or perhaps this more about people being unprepared and out of their depth whether it’s starting a new business or forking a code base. And not the individual actions themselves.
This is incorrect. It’s true that most (in fact, I would say almost all) forks go nowhere but that doesn’t mean forking isn’t incredibly valuable. Even the example you cite, “original project is dead” isn’t just incidentally useful, it’s critical to open source. Other examples include:
project’s core team is part of a for profit org that is moving the project in a bad, profit motivated direction:
project’s leader suddenly and dramatically loses respect (maybe he killed his wife or something);
project’s leader dies without leaving a digital will regarding who controls the core repo;
project continues to direct effort into features while falling to address major security concerns;
project is healthy and useful in every way but there is an important use case not being addressed, and the fork would address it.
Even if 99% of forks fail, that’s irrelevant because 99% of original projects fail in the same ways. Forks are critical to open source.
I would say we should just let unjust societies fail so just ones can take their place, but that seems to be the natural course. We’re seeing that right now.
Nextcloud is a FOSS fork of OwnCloud. Both projects are great in their own way, hugely successful and serve a lot of people very well. They just moved in different directions.
This is just one example of many. Ability to fork is super important to ensure that projects stay open source, like in this example.
I would disagree and say it’s more akin to a philosopher king hence less anarchy and more monarchy. It’s all good until the king dies and let’s see who succeeds them.
I meant that as a reply to the second paragraph which generalised anarchism; including the non-Linux world.
I also disagree that this isn’t an issue in the broader Linux community however. See for example the loud minority with an irrational hate against quite obviously good software projects like systemd who got those ideas from charlatans or “experts”.
I know, I used Linux as an example. Just like not everyone needs to be a weatherman to trust weatherman that can recognize experts among themselves, so too can engineers recognize experts among themselves, and so forth.
Skilled programmers can see that Linus is an expert. It works in tech. It probably works in any professional environment - anywhere where skilled people are picking someone highly skilled.
For the average person, we have clearly seen average people suck at picking expert leaders, though it works fine in small groups
There’s a word for this, the promotion of leaders based on merit instead of popularity - Technocracy. And it’s not a distinct ideology but a syncretic one that has been adopted by many groups with differing politics. The most prominent example would be the Technocratic faction of the People’s Republic of China, which was opposed to the Maoists back in the 50s and 60s; they argued for society to be led by experts instead of Democratically with a strong emphasis on Peasant participation (the standpoint of the Maoists). China today follows a moderate path taking from both factions.
In the West, however, Technocracy is mostly associated with Liberals; however, I would argue that the modern Liberal view of Technocracy is fundamentally flawed, since it relies on Capitalism distributing wealth meritocratically (which Socialists understand is not the case).
Programs still have to be written to accommodate the specific protocol that the program on the other end speaks, and dbus paths could translate pretty directly to subdirectories of /run. All adding dbus in the middle does is add a daemon where there doesn’t need to be one and force the programs to talk to each other through that rather than directly to each other
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