Remember, for every paid SaaS, there is a free open-source self-hosted alternative

CAD. Free solutions compared to commercial ones (SolidWorks, Inventor, Fusion360, Onshape) are like comparing Photoshop to an open source Paint clone.

The architecture can easily be open source - as long as repo is missing just the training data. Just like there are Doom engines that are open source, even though they do not provide WAD files, which are still copyrighted. The code is there, but it is somewhat useless without the data. Analogy is not perfect, but let’s assume it compiles to a single binary containing everything, maps included.

If ID Software gives you a compiled Doom with maps free to use it is freeware. If they open source the engine (they actually did), but do not release the WAD files as open source, the compiled game is not open source - it is still freeware.

It is not complicated really.

Nothing is happening in Norway. Source: I live in Norway.

I’ve met only a handful people that use Linux on their desktop, plus some developers that use it at work.

Not in a million years. The next generation will though, they won’t see any issue with it.

I guess they will anwser such calls with AI to get a summary anyway…

Great points overall. I guess previous generations thought that a hand-written letter cant be replaced by a digital one, yet here we are.

Let’s say that there is a single player MMO where all the other players are played by AI, but it is done so well that you can’t really see the difference from real-human MMO players.

Would you play this? I would not. The fact that there is a human on the other side is important, even though it does not make any practical difference. Same with birthday wishes - that’s way Facebook did not automate “Happy birthday!” even though it could.

Would you upload your personal data and voice to Open AI for it to make a a birthday wishes call to your mom? So convinient! She won’t know the difference, and you get a 5 bulletpoint summary afterwards! Such a hellscape.

In my previous job I ran my main laptop with Linux. Pain points:

• MS Teams liked to crash on screen sharing
• o365 email and calendar works best on Evolution, but still is not perfect
• meeting rooms often had special usb dongle to connect to the screen. That never worked on Linux.

Overall it was glorious.

That’s the thing - there is no option to update BIOS on Linux then.

You must install Windows or maybe use one of those unofficial Windows Live USB images.

There is no universal solution to this. Some vendors support fwupd (LVFS) on some hardware (Dell, Lenovo), some allow to update via a file on a USB stick (Asus).

Unless it is a system from Linux first company (Tuxedo, StarLabs, System76, Slimbook) expect to manually check what the specific model you are looking at supports.

Yeah, i am retiring my XPS 13 only due to it having 8GB of RAM. It is quite an old model with i7-8550U - the speed is still perfectly fine as my daily driver, but I filled the memory to the brim way too often.

It is the new name for the desktop variant of the immutable variant of OpenSUSE.

This is the only correct answer. Onshape is a fantastict, feature complete CAD system that I would be happy to use for any commercial project regardless of size and stakes. Love it.

It is about installing .deb that you manually downloaded from somewhere. You can’t install them by double clicking on them, you have to install from command line.

I used to use Tubleweed, but I tested Fedora Silverblue to check out what the immutability is all about and never returned. I think I will switch to OpenSuse Aeon, but for now it does not support Full Disk Encryption which is a deal breaker for me.

It does not explain Month to Month swings between 3.4% and 16%.

I honestly doubt that every 10th user in Norway is using Linux.

I assume data comes from statcounter.com. I looked at Norway there.

Browser market share: Firefox June 2023: 2.65%. September 2023: 36.27%!!! December 2.46%.

This does not compute. Similarly for Desktop OS. Linux in Norway has 3.41% is September, but 16.99% in November?

Starlabs StarLite is just around the corner, they should be shipping first units very soon. Passively cooled, Intel N200, 16GB RAM, 3k screen.

One year ago I treated how long it takes to get Gimp to install on various distros in distrobox:

Results:

zypper@Tumbleweed: 3 minutes, 22 seconds

apt@Ubuntu 22.04: 1 minute 26 seconds

dnf@Fedora: 1 minute 2 seconds

pacman@arch: 0 minutes 21 seconds

But that’s just installation speed. It simply shows that there are quite big differences depending on use case.

They are very difficult to break. Even if there is a problematic update that would normalny kill your install you can just roll back too the previous working version.

Great for systems that you need to ‘simply work’.

Consider OpenSuse Aeon if you want to dip into immutable systems.

I’ll parrot the others. I have a Windows PC issued by my employer. The only way to have some Linux is WSL. I use it to sync notes with server at home, python stuff, and w3m when I want to Google something without looking conspicuous in the office.

General Linux tools also help. I needed to make video half the speed - one liner ffmpeg solves it in a jiffy. On Windows I need to install some hive software.