I find this mindblowing.

A few years ago we were disocovering AI chat. AI could create sentences and have a basic conversation with us.

Today, it can identify a photo ___location with minimal "direct' information on it.

Where will it be in 3 years?? Crazy time to be alive.

and the "it simply works" feeling

Install a modern distro. It does just work. I've literally done zero config to my laptop, nothing has broken or not worked. Literally everything works. Touchpad, touchscreen, webcam, fingerprint reader, stylus, suspend, audio, etc...

Always love how arrogant Linux users are: "You can't possibly experience something different from me"

I wanted to make a genuine effort to get into using Linux because it's the only OS I'm not super comfortable admin'ing. I bought a secondhand Lenovo t440 and installed Linux Mint on it. Everything seemed to work well, boot was nice and quick, no issues with WiFi chipset or sleep and battery life was at least okay.

It was fine for browsing the web with Firefox for my normal web browsing, and made a great netflix machine.

Then I kept trying to do other things. I was playing with Blender at the time and despite the laptop being old at the time, it Mint installed a broken intel graphics driver. It couldn't render anything without artifacts and was unusable. The fixed driver was older than the release of Mint I was using. Why didn't Mint install an up to date driver?

I wanted use my steam controller to control mouse and keyboard input exactly like you can on any windows machine. In Linux, it required you to hand edit some config files to allow Steam to even communicate with it's own controller. Like what the fuck? Why?

I wanted to dual boot Windows to play more steam games (this was before proton) but if you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, you have to install windows FIRST. Otherwise you have to be an expert in x86-64 boot semantics to do the configuration required. So this was impossible without reinstalling everything.

So fine, I decided to just install Windows on it. Windows pulled the license details out of the BIOS from the previous owner (whoops) and auto-registered itself, and had the fixed intel graphics driver from the get go. I installed steam and the steam controller worked as expected. Battery life was SIGNIFICANTLY better.

THAT'S usability. THAT'S "just works".

Not going to lie, Mint is a buggy POS and the fact anyone recommends it at all is a travesty. It's so bad it makes me think it's sponsored by Microsoft to sabotage new users.

Mint basically takes a years old Ubuntu, then an even older fork of a DE, uses an abandoned protocol then rolls it together and adds even more bugs to it. It's honestly one of the worst distros that exists.

Ubuntu, Fedora and (open)Suse are the only ones worth using if you want a smooth experience (ie. the corporate ones).

Edit - also needing to install Windows first to dual boot is a result of Windows installation wiping existing bootloaders.

Funny you should say that. I just tried to install some recent Linux distro on my Thinkpad two days ago. Fedora 42 wouldn't even install because apparently the installer doesn't support boot partition located past the 2Tb boundary, and that laptop has a 4Tb SSD with the first 2Tb used up by Windows. The error was completely incomprehensible, though.

Mint, OTOH, installed just fine and is working great.

I've had a ThinkPad, an Acer and now an MSI. All worked flawlessly. Even the MSI which, according to the Internet, probably wouldn't work.

aka, the apple lie.

for me the main reason is that mac just works. I spent less time configuring my OS and tinkering around and just focus on my work.

For low levels of "it just works".

Every major OS update Apple changes something that breaks either specific programs or restricts the OS further which leads to breakage.

The "too many files open" error could be fixed by raising the limit of open files (there are instances where a tool really does need lots of open files and isn't leaking) but nowadays I need to break the security of my own hardware to maybe be able to raise it as Apple adds hoops and is changing what to do every so often.

you're right - lately mac seems to have been doing bad moves. In "lately" I mean since 5-10 years

Is it just because you can't on a mac ?

what do u mean?

There are choices and source available for Linux, not so much for tooling on osx.

> Why am I in this state of tension with computer products when I use a multitude of non-computer products made by corporations that cause much more harm to people and nature?

> I drive a Hyundai car, shop at Reliance stores, wear clothing made by Zara. Why am I not concerned about the poor behavior of these other organizations? It’s not like they’re any better than Google, Microsoft, or Apple.

> Honestly, the reason is not entirely rational.

Honestly I don't have the answer and it's a great question. There seems to be a mix of passion, trends, media, social exchanges and probably tons of small parameters making this happen in our heads.

I love that kind of article. So much that I'd like to find a system prompt to help me write the same quality paper.

Thanks for the inspiration!

Nice, good luck

Crazy!

Yes it does.

I love these papers. I have been on a similar path on macOS.

Concerning Vimium, there is the Vimium C version that seems to be a bit faster.

On macOS there is a similar software (don’t remember its name) to use a Vimium like feature on your whole desktop.

You may be thinking of [Homerow](https://www.homerow.app/) for Macos. Its okay for popups that I used to need a mouse for. There's another app that does similar "Vimium for Desktop" but it wasn't as responsive and sometimes focus would get stuck, but I forgot that software's name.

Oh nice, thanks for sharing this. I don't think it was homerow (or it has evolved a lot).

I'll give this one a go to see if this helps me touch less my mouse

You might be thinking of Shortcat. I've been using it for a while and it mostly works but doesn't seem as polished as Homerow. Going to give that one a try now.

https://shortcat.app

Thanks for sharing will try this out.

Vimperator was even better, and allowed a very smooth operation of most Firefox without using the mouse. Sadly, it was killed by the transition to a new plugin API.

Vimium and other current options lead to quite some friction, as Firefox disables plugins on many scenarios, such as a new empty page.

Hence, you often find yourself in a situation where you have to think whether Vimium is active and you can use Vim-like shortcuts, or you need to fallback to the Firefox UI.

> Vimium and other current options lead to quite some friction, as Firefox disables plugins on many scenarios, such as a new empty page. > > Hence, you often find yourself in a situation where you have to think whether Vimium is active and you can use Vim-like shortcuts, or you need to fallback to the Firefox UI.

Tridactyl works around this by setting a global keybind ( Ctrl - , ) that either pulls focus back to itself or, if it's not allowed on that page, kicks you to a tab it can control

Oh I saw it's name I think but I have never tried it.

That's so amazing! I wish I saw this at school while learning these by heart like a dumb student.