I recently got a mini PC for couch gaming / HTPC functionality, and I installed Mint without ever booting Windows. I’ve been using Mint for a while after years of distro hopping, but I’m having issues with Bluetooth XBox controllers randomly disconnecting. Maybe this is the excuse I’ve been looking for to try Bazzite, although I might just need to get a USB dongle with a chipset known to work on Linux. What I’m really waiting for is an immutable distro with Plasma Bigscreen.

Only websites hosted by landlubbers are bound by such laws.

I’m sure they’ll be getting a lot of photos with abnormally long noses and saggy, wrinkled, hairy chins.

I feel a debt of gratitude to people like Linus Torvalds and Ton Roosendaal. In a world full of greedy capitalists trying to extract every last scrap of rent they can from humanity, people like them show us that humanity can do better.

I use Mint because I want the well-paved path of Ubuntu without Snaps. It’s a fair point that KDE would be a better fit with this mindset, but I like Cinnamon better. Same story with Cosmic and Pop, though it was never my cup of tea.

An equally popular and well-funded distro that is basically Kubuntu without snaps would be compelling, but I don’t know of any distro that fits those qualifications.

I have a RTX 4060 low-profile in my 2U server and am limited to 8GB of VRAM for anything I self-host at the moment. I may consider a larger chassis with a better GPU in the future.

Too bad larger LLMs require ungodly amounts of VRAM, or self-hosting would be a good alternative. LLMs have their uses, but they’re not useful enough to put up with ads.

I guess my overall point is that DEs like KDE or Gnome don’t work well on other form factors like TVs, phones, and tablets. Just having Linux on a device without an appropriate UX isn’t that useful. Steam Game Mode acts like a DE for SteamOS that provides a good UX for a controller, but it’s not something I care to use unless it’s blocked from the internet so Valve can’t collect data and spy on me. If Valve makes a phone that isn’t private, the main value would be that the hardware can run Linux, but it would still need an appropriate DE to make it actually usable.

I considered Bazzite with Steam Game Mode on a recently purchased mini PC I’m using as a HTPC to replace Android TV. In addition to not working well with a remote, the data Valve collects via Steam is a concern. Not sure I’d consider a proprietary, closed-source front-end as the main UI on a phone to be much of an improvement over Android, though I’m sure Valve’s other related efforts to get Linux working well on a phone that get open sourced would be good.

He’s still the same sociopath as always, except now with a savior complex. Giving away all his money, is he? His foundation has been around 25 years and he still has $100b+ net worth. A single individual shouldn’t have that much power, and the fact that he still voluntarily wields it while virtue signaling affirms every negative opinion of him. Even if he were the benevolent billionaire his PR campaign would have us believe he is, such a net worth should be reserved for governments where it’s spread across multiple agencies that have checks and balances and are accountable to voters. I don’t trust any individual with that much power, though I’d trust any random person off the street over anyone ruthless enough to become a billionaire.

Yeah, that’s a good one, and I also enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Stories like Jobs getting a bonus when Wozniak was able to design a board with fewer chips and then not mentioning the extra money to Woz are perfect examples of how sociopaths like Jobs and Gates operate. It’s sad that ruthless charlatans like them who exploit the true geniuses and innovators are allowed to accrue so much money and power in our society.

Exactly, the way Snap is managed is very much out of a big tech playbook, and it won’t be surprising if they’re acquired by big tech. The whole point of Linux for most of us is avoiding big tech bullshit.

Thanks, will check it out!

It unfortunately is. I’m currently using Linux on a mini PC with Pegasus Frontend and a remote to launch Jellyfin, VacuumTube, and games as a HTPC. It’s necessary to exit each app differently to get back to the launcher, and then if anything gets hung up, I have to connect a keyboard and mouse. Really looking forward to Plasma Bigscreen to deliver a UX more like Android TV.

We also continue investing in the snap ecosystem

Who wants Android on a PC? If anything, let’s get some better options for Linux on phones, tablets, and TVs.

I picked up a 64Gi LCD model a while back when it was on sale and then added my own 1TB SSD. 256Gi is enough that you hate to remove it and not use it, but also isn’t quite enough space to be practical.

I worked in heavy JavaScript codebases back in the IE days and wasn’t too crazy about it. Then JIT compilers like v8 came along and made it run a lot faster and TypeScript also made it more usable for larger codebases. I now consider TypeScript among my favorite languages. I’ve also written a lot of Go lately, and while I appreciate its speed and smaller memory footprint, the missing language features kind of grate on me and I don’t mind taking a bit of a performance hit for the (IMO) superior ergonomics of TypeScript, especially for workloads where I/O is more of the bottleneck than compute.

I already don’t trust games and appreciate being able to run them in Lutris as a Flatpak where at least they can be run somewhat sandboxed, in addition to revoking their network privileges so they can’t phone home and spy on me. If a game essentially wants to run a rootkit, hard pass.

A more appropriate line would be that Copilot can shit out code faster than you can pinch off your own loaf.