Apple supposedly makes good hardware, and my ‘23 mbp in 14’ has excellent battery, great trackpad, very good sound and a beast of a screen. Now I don’t like whatever material these machines are made of, they are downright unpleasant to grab or touch, and the keyboard is abismal shit. I hate it, I am seriously not using it as much as I could not because Asahi, or Fedora, or bugs, or the availability of certain software for Arm64, but because of that shit keyboard. Asahi runs great, the full Pipewire sound stack developed for it is a pleasure to work on. Switch monitoring every which way, plug Firefox into Ardour and rip youtube, it all works, period.

To me M2 with 16g of ram is about on par with an intel i12 in everyday life. Sure it will win on rendering movies or some specific stuff, but day-to-day it’s like my friend’ Carbon X1 on Mint really.

Depends on the machine… Arch, Debian and …Asahi! (Actually Fedora)

I see I sideload of Gentleman Agreement with the hardware vendors here:

• Hardware Vendors : “Oh No, The Market is Slowing Down!”
• Microsoft: “Hold My Beer, it’s Payback Time”

Everyone wins. Well, the usual suspects win as usual. The environment and the customer can go kiss Mr Gates and Mr Dell’s asses.

You can also ask it when is the cutoff date of their database - there is a gentleman’s agreement between providers not to have ai involved in news / current politics in it’s public chats.

I tried them on a topic I’m pretty proficient on, (a spaghetti recipe lol) and the answer was the most bland imaginable.

The way it is setup by DDG, the restrictions and blandness, shallowness of the replies give me peace of.mind when a ‘natural language’ query is the easiest one. And Claude wouldn’t give me the DOB of that queen because it is Personal Info!

DDG has it’s non-track version online since a bit now. Use the !ai bang to get to it

Also you have the choice of Claude insted of ChatGPT, and your queries aren’t harvested for further ai training

In any case, it’s a completely different tab, it’s not mingled in general search results

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Ponyos, is in fact, GNU/Ponyos, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Ponyos. Ponyos is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, that version of GNU which quite nobody uses today is called Ponyos, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Ponyos, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Ponyos is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Ponyos is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Ponyos added, or GNU/Ponyos.

I know everybody always grandly takes on the High Seas, sailing them with lots of "arrrr“ and stuff, but I’ve found that small, quick flowing rivers oftentimes do yield a good catch.

Marcan (@[email protected]) is talking about tackling thunderbolt and power usage while sleeping these days - and other stuff

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/112277289414246878

AsahiLina (@[email protected]) was back on the graphic driver to get, ultimately, to Vulkan

https://vt.social/@lina/112371925319342726

Don’t miss “The freeze-frame revolution” then!

(+ it is available drm-free from its publisher, Halcyon)

There’s a lot more to Peter Watts, with the Rifters trilogy in particular.

Thanks for sharing this list ; about everything I enjoyed recently is there, so I’m saving this as “I should probably like most of them”. Martha Wells, Becky Chambers, and Ann Leckie - Leckie is fab. I get your point about Connie Willis, but her portrayal of London’s wartime is poignant.

One author that didn’t do for me is Sergei Brin. I like the themes, I can’t go though the books (uplift).

And anyone feeling overwhelmed by your olympic-grade S-F nerdery should just pick any John Scalzi book and stop worrying.

It all works quite smoothly ; the install process is a breeze of a single .sh script to run directly from macos. The amount of software available for Arm64 is surprising, tho gamers will be disappointed there’s no Vulkan / Steam available yet.

That “Default” install is really just Fedora, shipped with KDE for it’s superior handling of fractional scaling. There’s the dnf package manager, flatpaks, the works.

I’m 80~90% of the time on the Asahi side of things on my device. Showstoppers today are sleep battery drain (50% a day) and pure “ooomph” - performance of an M2Pro chip is more akin to a 12th gen i7 than the same chip under macos. Rendering in kdenlive or blender is noticeably slower on Asahi. But it’s a huge reverse-engineering undertaking, and it will be getting better.

It’s a blog post on how to get Netflix and Spotify to work on Asahi Linux, the project to run Linux on new “M” chipsets 64bits Arm apple computers. Their solution (and widevine hack) is now integrated in the Fedora Linux Asahi Remix project’ default distro. You still have to do the user agent mod tho.

I only ever update between projects - no way am I going to break something in the middle of everything.

This time, jump to new gnome means broken extensions as usual, and a hilarious one: qbittorrent doesn’t show it’s window in Wayland (gnome-with-X works). The soft is running, it there in the list of apps, there’s even a big X “Close Window” button on Zoom Out but no actual window.

Eh. Lol?

You wonderfully deviated this conversation towards the real threats we are facing in the near future, and right now. That was very well said, thank you.

OP’s premises may be not wrong on the first point, is in need of some realignment on the second, and I have no idea about the third.

The idea of a post-piracy world can still be envisioned and discussed; will it be full of FOSS and CC-BY-SA? Will it leaves us with only secondhand pulp comics while our roku devices blast 23h out of 24 of ads? Who knows?

Lifa has a lot to offer beyond screens

Yarr, mateys, all sails to the Public Library! We’ll drop anchor at the secondhand bookshop on our way back! And drop all that electronic ballast, it’s only slowing us down…

You are absolutely right; I hadn’t thought of it this way but a post-piracy world should be a frugal one, could be a quiet one. A planet-friendly one.

[??Uh, you’re getting downvoted for asking a straight question? WTF lemmies??]

There’s a difference here that I describe as “pro” meaning specialized, complex software targeted at big businesses vs individual tools of the trade: Vectorworks is gonna get paid for happily by companies needing support and relying on it for critical output, while your next door young architect will run an outdated, cracked version of AutoCAD because it’s just too expensive - that kid could (and should) run Qcad.

Where I see pirated software surviving is also as a form of legacy support: if you run old hardware (i.e. 32bits), that’s where “pro” software is gonna suck & leave you dry, while torrents are still out there.

In gaming or media, cracking looks like a sport, I feel people just want to have fun blowing restrictions to pieces. It’s heartwarming!

Back to the 'tools of the trade" category, I am happy to pay a moderate price to support a talented dev (Isadora, D::Light) but get understandably annoyed at huge businesses practicing insufferable licensing schemes. I wish people start looking, and using then supporting more alternatives out there - but isn’t photoshop still crack-able because it helps it dominate the market where The Gimp would do if it was the standard?

Dropping The List here because answering in detail would take …a very, very long time.

DRM-free ebooks. I make a point of buying them, of thanking the publisher… And not sharing it on the usual piracy channels.