BananaTrifleViolin

So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.

As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It’d be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don’t believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it’s not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.

I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don’t benefit big US corporations.

And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn’t be going to Apple or Microsoft. You’d save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.

I prefer XFCE for lightweight uses (e.g. VM or raspberry Pi) and KDE for normal desktop use.

For me MATE isn’t quite light enough for lightweight when XFCE is there, and no where near attractive or pleasant enough for day-to-day use when RAM/CPU use isn’t a bottleneck. KDE is certainly more resource intense but up to 1gb of RAM and 1-3% CPU idle for a full featured, slick desktop environment is worth it.

I don’t really see the appeal of MATE unless you strongly want a GNOME 2 desktop. In which case, yes it makes sense. Although ironically you can make a very close but modern take on GNOME 2 with KDE with modern bells and whistles if you’re willing to customise KDE - it’s that flexible.

So I started by dual booting; it’s not a bad way of doing things although Windows likes to mess with bootloaders.

Optimal way is have physically separate hard drives/NVME cards, Windows on one, Linux on the other. The Linux bootloader should detect windows and point to it’s bootloader as a menu option without issue.

Make Linux the default OS and only switch to Windows when you really have to. I haven’t used my Windows install in like 1 year? I kept it for gaming but everything I want works in Linux. I even have a Windows VM in Linux for using Office if I need to for work (used it a few times in a year and beat having to restart into windows)

I’d wipe the windows drive but I just can’t be bothered right now.

I recommend a KDE distro to start as it’s very flexible - it can mimic windows and also be wildly different if you want. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but I’d recommend OpenSUSE Leap as a stabler point release distro when starting out. I know longer recommend Mint as I find Cinnamon tired and there is so much old and bad advice on tweaking or fixing issues on Mint that it is actually potentially detrimental to being secure and safe.

In fairness to Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird are platform agnostic. It’s not really for them to tell users what OS to use. It’d cause them more aggro than its worth from all the people who have differing opinions on what the best OS is or the best distro to use. It’s already a tightrope act keeping their users happy when they announce things like AI in the browser. I think they’re right to focus on their own areas of interest.

Most home users use a PC for internet browsing, watching videos, gaming and maybe a bit of basic word processing - all of which Linux does well and for free.

So yes absolutely, vast majority of people should stop wasting money paying for software licenses and go free.

Nah that’s it. Their logic is seemingly if you don’t give the money to Google it’s not contributing to economic growth.

The article is very biased - it basically suggests young people are unwilling to read, that AI is a good thing and that the wikipedia contributors are being unreasonable. It goes on to talk about how AI has “extracted value” from Wikipedia in an unquestioning way - no mention of compensation to the project, just talking about what a triumph Wikipedia is a source for AI to train on.

The “Simple Summaries” situation is less to do with the summaries and more to do with the risk of AI slop being introduced into Wikipedia unquestioned. The summaries were unchecked and unverified, which add a real chance that wikipedia started serving up inaccurate summaries and undermined it’s own reputation.

In addition that idea that younger generations don’t have the concentration span to “read a wall of text” is pernicious and patronising nonsense part of a general media bias against Gen Z and Gen Alpha. There seems to be this barely questioned narrative that they have short attention spans and are unwilling or even unable to read, just because they grew up in the era of social media like Instagram and latterly Tik Tok.

I’ll give a better hypothesis for why younger generations spend less time on wikipedia: the big tech giants like Google have stolen all the information people have put on there and serve it up in their own summaries on the search engine (preventing click throughs) or through their own AI slop engines. They don’t want people clicking through to Wikipedia, they want them clicking through to an ad. The problem is not Wikipedia, and the problem is not Gen Z or Gen Alpha; the problem - as is frequently the case - is the tech mega-corporations who steal everything (including wikipedia) and sell it back to us with ads or via AI slop.

Yes, Krohnkite on KDE auto-resizes window tiles and keeps the screen full. It’s a default setting (monocular view) but can also be turned off.

To use krohnkite you can add it from within KDE - go to Settings > Window Management > KWin Scripts. Then top right select “Get New…” and type K in the search box and it’ll be one of the top options.

It works well but you may need to log out and and back in after enabling it to see some of the changes. Also you will probably want to change other KDE panels and layouts to fit how you want to use the desktop in a tiling set up (and there are plenty of widgets available and window animations to add - like Geometry - if you want to a specific tiling set up and look).

KDE is incredibly customisable, but for tiling it may take a little work to get it exactly where you want it. Also worth backing up your settings folders once you’ve got it how you want it (Konsave for example, or manually)

The DE is very important to me, and for me that is KDE. Tbh I find Gnome horrendous to use - too locked down, too uncompromising in it’s design. If you like the paradigm then I imagine it’s decent - certainly looks very slick. KDE on the other hand is very flexible and has been easy to tune it to exactly what I want.

But i’d say switching DE shouldn’t be a “barrier”. Almost all distros support multiple DEs, and Gnome or KDE is a common choice.

When is comes to VR, you can set up an alternate X11 session which only runs Steam in gamescope mode, with minimal or no desktop environment. /usr/share/xsessions/ contains defined X11 sessions; you can manually add one that literally only launches one program via a .desktop file pointing to a script (e.g. launches steam in gamescope mode with a specified resolution). Or you can install a very minimal DE such as OpenBox or i3 and set that up to autolaunch Steam in a window or big picture/gamescope mode. This way whenever you want to VR, you log out of your Gnome desktop session and then login to your “Steam” session, and almost all resources are available for Steam and games with minimal overhead. The minimal DE route is probably the better route just because of options to get out of crashes and problem solve. Either way, this route bypasses the Gnome / and general Wayland issues with VR.

Both sides announced this to boost their share prices as they’re both growth stocks. Growth stocks are a trap - no company can keep on growing forever.

This announcement is a sign the AI boom is probably soon to end. Nvidia quietly announcing the $100bn deal isn’t going to happen, is Nvidia trying to reduce it’s exposure to the bubble popping. Unfortunately for Nvidia, it’s already way way too deep into the mess, and the vast majority of it’s value is speculative. The question is have they damaged their core business by chasing the AI bubble, and what liabilities will they be left with if their customers go bankrupt and don’t pay them for their product.

No because time is just time. Time in the moment is a perception of enjoyment and pleasure. That is a choice to be present and take enjoyment in what you’re doing. You don’t need to trade time for time you already have, you just need to use the time you have in the way that makes you enjoy it.

You don’t need to do anything, it’ll work without Windows, and grub should auto update with your distro when you do a major update (such as Kernel update)

You might want to manually update grub to remove the Windows entry just to keep it tidy. On mint it’s as simple as:

sudo update-grub

It’ll scan your installed kernels and other OS. If windows is gone, it will no longer be detected and disappear from the boot list after running this.

If you’ve set up a default OS at boot (like Windows) you might want to update the grub config files. Thats as simple as editing /etc/default/grub and setting:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0

Where 0 is the first boot entry.

You can also use:

GRUB_DEFAULT=“saved”

which will remember the last selected item and boot that. Bit redundant if you’re going down to 1 OS.

Wow it really is heading towards crisis point when you have people saying “keep feeding the beast or it’ll eat us”.

During the OpenSuSE install you can choose custom package collections (or packages). So you can install any of the DEs available and multiple DEs if you want. You can deselect the default DE and chose something else entirely.

It’s not put front and centre as an option like CachyOS seems to be doing but is easily accessed in a submenu.

The Microsoft strategy often seems to be “It worked well, but we completely redid it because we need to justify out existence. Now it barely works with new bugs”

I think it’s really matured in the last few years. I’ve used linux on and off for the last 20 years, but things only tipped in favour for me at least about 2 years ago. For me it’s a combination of the polish of KDE, and the maturity of Wine/Proton for gaming. Before that I was dual booting but spending most time in Windows because I’d get in the habit whenever I started playing a game.

So I think despite the jokes, now really is the “year of the linux desktop” because it’s finally tipped over to being an all round 24/7 good choice for most people.

So on my linux PC, I have made a KVM (Kernal Virtual Machine) using QEMU and made a Windows 11 machine inside it (and I bought a digital license for it), which I have work office and email set up. I personally only need to use it occasionally. If you give it enough resources it works decently & runs all windows software; although as it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card it won’t look as slick as native windows 11 machine and run GPU intense software well (you can get it it’s own dedicated video card and pass it through but really isn’t worth it for just using Excel). It means I can main linux but use Windows occasionally if I really have to. It means you can have a full Windows machine with work Microsoft account set up for Office, One Drive etc - depending on your employers policies of course. You can cut down the resources you allocate it if you want to be switching between the Windows machine and other software in Linux, but Windows can be laggy without enough resources as it’s so poorly optimised.

There are sites that guide on setting up a windows 11 machine in linux, but essentially you need to install KVM modules and Virtual Machine manager in linux (available on all distros). You do need to access your PCs bios to ensure the settings that allow virtual machines to access the CPU are on (slightly different name between AMD and Intel CPUs).

Then you create a machine in Virtual machine manager, give it plenty of resources (especially if the idea being when you use it if it’s the only think you’ll be doing, give it access to most of your CPU cores and the majority of your RAM), and create a decent size virtual hard drive file (I’d say minimum 128gb or more as Windows is bloaty - you can set the virtual drive file size to be flexible so it has a max size but the actual file size is only what is used by the guest system but some file systems still use the whole space unfortunately; not sure how Windows behaves). Download the Windows 11 installer ISO, and then add that file as a virtual CD drive for your guest machine, boot the guest machine, and you should get the Win 11 installer. The VM can only see the virtual hard drive file, so you can install Win 11 safely onto the drives it sees with no risk to your PC. Then reboot and you should have a new Windows install; test it - if it works, buy a digital license (if you want…) and install Office using your 365 account OR if you have old CDs then pass those through to the virtual machine and install as on any Windows PC.

My guess would be the unrest in Iran and the regimes attempts to shut down the internet in that country to prevent organisation?

Yeah it can be confusing; Flatseal makes it easier as it’s a GUI way of doing what is otherwise command line with flatpak itself but it still assumes some knowledge about what you’re doing and can be a bit of trial and error. The more you expose to the sandbox, the more “native” performance you can achieve but it’s at the expense of security.

In Flatseal you can set global options for all apps, or individual apps. For graphics, in the Device section, toggling the option to make the GPU available to the sandboxes may be needed - “GPU Acceleration” in the Device section. That one option can be pretty effective as GPU hardware acceleration is often important, if not essential, for programs like Handbrake (which are video transcoding).

This is equivalent to “device=dri” when launching the flatpak via the commandline.

I game on Linux but these are all FOSS and multiplatform:

• DosBox-X - For my older Dos/PC games
• UAE - For old amiga games
• ScummVM - for my old Adventure games (preferred over Dosbox)
• Wine/Proton - for the vast majority of my gaming on Linux now
• RetroArch - a good all-in-one tool; it uses Libretro as a backend which is basically a distribution method/API to give access to other emulators like Dosbox, ScummVM etc.

There are also dedicated open source engines for old games like OpenTTD for Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and OpenMW for Morrowwind