AI has democratized software.

If you mean that everyone can now build something that most likely will fall apart in the future, where nobody knows what’s actually inside as nobody reads it, where you might get hit with copyright claims because you stole code willy-nilly (you can’t hide behind the AI, you did it), that is full of security issues as well as structural nonsense and you may never know if the LLM decides to delete everything star anew while blasting a 6000€ hole in your pocket doing do…

…well then yes, it “democratized” something.

You can’t tell me these guys don’t meddle with some suppressed sexual desire for strong men.

It’s a good thing system packages (which should follow a conservative update approach if possible to guarantee system stability, unless hardware demands newer packages) and user applications (which you’d usually want to be most up-to-date) are increasingly isolated from each other and mostly able to follow their own schedules. Also improves security and such.

Meaningful Indentation > Unnecessary visual clutter

I will die on this hill. Python is wonderfully readable as it saves on unnecessary characters because indentations as well as line breaks are (usually) part of the syntax. Something like C++ with all its :;{}<> is just painful to read, not to mention annoying to write on many non-US keyboard layouts such as german without modifications.

That’s exactly the reason why I (with individuals I believe to require it) try to point out a tiny detail that still somewhat sound like it formerly supported me while admitting it, or explaining in great detail what got me bamboozled. Just to distract the other person, which I do not trust to not immediately use my mistake against me, to such a degree they can’t do it. Alternatively swing it like “ooh, this is like when you got XY wrong!” so the playing field is somewhat even already before the other realises you just admitted something.

It sucks, but it’s better than not admitting it at all. Fortunately not a lot of people I know in my life require this.

If you like the default GNOME way of doing things, it’s alright. If you don’t - no amount of extensions will help.

Not to mention Gnome is monolithic, so any bug will immediately crash the whole desktop. Other than basically any other desktop compositor, window manager and desktop environment are tightly intertwined, so any extension (which still monkey-patch code directly into gnome-shell) can utterly break the whole thing to the point you don’t have a graphical interface anymore.

Compared to KDE, Cinnamon and others (who can have their whole desktop crash without taking any applications with it as long as the window manager etc. and drivers remain unaffected, usually trying to restart the DE and spawn e.g. Dr Konqi) Gnome loves to be unstable because of this. If Gnome crashes it takes everything with a GUI with it.

I don’t agree with your take on AI and the comparison at all, however if you want to use them and stay independent in the future it’s probably best to use Mistral. Their models are available for download and (mostly) licensed under Apache 2.0. You only have to pay for commercial use. Also they’re basically the only big EU-company in that space and the only I know of where the web interface isn’t infested with trackers and shit. However they are also involved in the military (guess which edge models are running on those semi-autonomous drones in Ukraine).

All I need to know is does it solve a problem I have, does it work, is it stable, and is it secure.

You have to be aware that

• LLMs are recreating licensed code without telling you, which WILL fuck you over eventually
• They do not produce secure code on their own. Keys end up client-side, in widely opened S3 buckets, encryption falsely implemented etc. Widely known, no link needed.
• It is not faster, in fact you’re slower while merely feeling faster. By now even the techbros themselves just recently finally admitted that.
• There’s no point to mention the immorality of the tech, everyone should know by now.

So yeah, your choice how much you use it. But it’s pretty obvious why nobody trusts vibe-coded stuff, and the metric ton of low-quality projects even forcing the de-facto App Store of a whole ecosystem to completely ban AI code reeeally doesn’t help.

I can respect the self-awareness though.

# Map any historical Claude co-author attribution to the project owner.

So I guess it’s slop? This looks shady.

I can tell you from experience that it’s not a given. Not because of Mint, but because of the driver. You’re just lucky that your hardware-driver-kernel combination happened to work flawlessly.

The difference is that strippers are real. Superhuman AI is still a pipe dream.

Recovering the picture hopefully, 'cause it’s missing.

I only marked those who bundle the driver with the image since that way they can treat is as core system package and add the necessary deep system configurations + helper scripts straight form the start. There are in fact quite a few distros who use such a helper tool (I think Zorin has one too?), but even with their best effort the driver still causes issues so god damn often or just fails to install for weird reasons. Additionally there might be issues after updates. Distros that integrate them from the start might add a few extra scripts to mitigate update problems, perhaps ensure Secure Boot still works, make specific changes to Wayland due to Nvidia being really bad with it by default, set up everything for hybrid graphics, ecetera.

My brother just threw out an RTX 3060 because of all the issues (in that case on OpenSuse) and I had so. many. issues. In the last 10 years with all kinds of green GPUs that I can only in good conscious recommend distros with pre-installed drivers to Nvidia users, and to avoid that company like the Plague.

Debian is rock solid, there are even more user-friendly distros though. In a few edge-cases it will expect you to know your way around things, however there are a lot of guides for it. Going with this will cause the growth of a mighty white beard!

Arch Linux will make you cry. If you want to learn how to fix and configure things it’s great (and their wiki arguably is the greatest of all), but their lack of QA and expectation to do that yourself often causes issues. You’ll probably cut your fingers on its bleeding edge. If you want to learn with less bleeding I’d recommend CachyOS these days. I’m certainly not saying this because my computer didn’t boot after updates multiple times. /s

HOWEVER if you have an Nvidia GPU, first off: I’m so sorry. Secondly, you absolutely (!) should use a distro that takes care of their driver for you. Their drivers are hot steaming garbage that you do not want to meddle with (many distros try their best to do it for you, but often enough it won’t work for some people). See below, Nvidia distros marked with recycling symbol.

A few other options to consider with noticeable features:

• Bazzite (♻️): If you mainly play games. User-friendly, most compatible with handhelds next to CachyOS. Takes care of a lot of small things related to gaming.
• Fedora: If you want modern features on a very stable system. Very good ecosystem. Basically the other stable workhorse next to Debian. Will spawn a nice hat on your head, m’lady.
• OpenSuse: Also very stable, best distro for those concerned about US influence (it’s strongly EU-based). Tumbleweed arguably most stable rolling-release distro (newest system software) with a great graphical settings’ tool YaST (future unknown, unfortunately). Leap is rock-solid but slow, meant more for Office PCs and Enterprise users. After installing this you’ll suddenly start talking german.
• Linux Mint: If you want things to just work with the flattest learning curve possible for former Windows victims. Helpful tips for Ubuntu usually apply and that weird software offering you a manual download for Ubuntu will just work.
• ElementaryOS: Very good for users used to MacOS, probably flattest learning curve for them. Great accessibility! Not as feature rich as others (their whole desktop is made in-house, so it’s very cohesive but a lot of work for them), but what they have is very well tested.
• ZorinOS (Core): Also very good. Most likely the one with the biggest software selection from the start (comes with both Snap and Flatpak pre-configured). Probably the one you’d eventually find on some school computer.

And three others interesting if you might buy new hardware soon (damn, you rich):

• TuxedoOS (♻️): Default OS on devices from Tuxedo Computers (EU). Works on any machine and is a really nice distro in general.
• SlimbookOS (♻️): Default OS for Slimbook (EU) devices. Also nice.
• Pop_OS! (♻️): Default OS for System76 (US) devices. They’re currently developing a whole new desktop environment (Cosmic), so their normal release hangs a little bit behind. It’s okay though. Be aware it’s from a US company (not just maintainers, but commercial entity). Fucked up Linus Tech Tips once.

The lack of PPA support might bite you though. For newcomers I’d strongly recommend staying with the standard Mint (Cinnamon) version, any reason not to is highly technical and more of an issue for the maintainers.

if there are working drivers that don’t have issues

There aren’t. Some distros come with Nouveau alone, which is often awfully slow or lags behind in support for new cards. Some by now ship with nouveau + NVK, which is still unsuitable for demanding tasks and has bugs as NVK is still beta. And some ship with the proprietary Nvidia driver which is a hot mess. Changing something about this usually ends up in a mess due to how the Nvidia driver has to install itself into the system every time an update runs, and the fact you have to basically rip out a kernel module for it (nouveau).

Sure bro, all the endless people having issues with those shitty drivers are at fault. Nvidia is making a whole new driver because they just love to do it, not because the old one is a huge mess.

I’m doing my best helping family and friends with these things on various distros, but by now they all moved over to AMD or Intel or are in the process of it; even swapping out RTX 3000 series cards because the driver keeps fucking up and the Wayland support is a hot mess. Every single time the constant issues and glitches vanished once the Nvidia was thrown out. Nvidia on Linux is just hot garbage.

Uugh, why do I see this at 3 in the morning. Good thing there’s Termux.

Security is the first thing that comes to mind. Compartmentalization prevents or at least makes it considerably harder for compromised services to screw up all the others.

Another thing would be that it might be easier to manage backups and snapshots.