More rare than an i5-8600 and probably becomes rather rare as time moves on.

I’d still keep it. Even though it doesn’t appear to be a more rare CPU (like, a 5950X or similar). Might become worth a little bit in a few years.

Pretty much any distro can do any of the things Windows/Mac users are hoping a computer can do.

Without knowledge and at least an hour of your time for configuration, CLI-first distros like Arch can’t even play a video - or show a GUI for that matter.

[…] Nvidia GPU […] It’s not super complicated to set up, but it’s definitely going to feel like a foreign experience the first time.

If you’re lucky that means. If you happen to pick a distro / device combo that doesn’t harmonize and the distro didn’t took care of the driver from the start you’ll have a really, really bad time. Especially if it’s a hybrid GPU system. You’re right about picking a distro that comes with it. Options like Pop!_OS, TuxedoOS or Bazzite come to mind.

Given they have an Nvidia and want stuff like the Valve Index to work (so in the best case to have all those super new drivers, libraries installed and stuff) it should be a distro that comes with a lot preconfigured, like the Nvidia driver.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Bazzite in this regard.

Windows Vista.

Oh, oups. That’s a remnance from a meme I made a few minutes earlier. However now Tux is looking towards the text, therefore this was all planned.

I thought you said healthy.

Oh, translation mistake on my side. Is the word “desktop” really still in use for tower computers? 🤔 I only know it for the kind of computing, not the device type.

Anyway, can’t quickly find proper statistics for that. I once read an estimate done by what I think was Valve, that’s obviously scewed towards the gaming bubble though. Still, I think it “only” was about 50-60% desktops over laptops and “other”. They won’t vanish anytime soon though, you can’t squeeze highest performance into a laptop and game streaming only works very selectively.

I’m really curious how it will shift in the future given Linux becomes more and more popular, and that ecosystem is already offering a synergy approach (not just the way SteamDeck does, but also with both GTK and Qt apps able to shift depending on display size and touch capabilities).

According to this data, desktop devices still make well over 50% with over 75% in Europe.

It was somewhat of a special situation back when Gnome 3 dropped. Ubuntu & flavours of it was still regarded as the go-to distro by many and KDE still had a somewhat damaged reputation due to KDE 3 (even though 4 was already available, however that also had some issues). Many environments we know today didn’t exist yet, so lots of people were rather distraught when Gnome broke with a lot of concepts and dropped what arguably was a horrendous DE.

Many of our current DEs are Gnome 2 or 3 forks (MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and back then also Unity), made exactly because of this whole debacle.

Same here. Has to be degoogled though.

Bloated when being run on a potato.

Luckily 99.9% of people do not compute on a potato.

That sounds like a design decision (not saying it’s good or bad here), not something broken.

it’s nothing but config files you have to edit from the local console shell

Some people seem to love that, as well as the total lack of any kind of access control or security. I mean, look at how many people are still arguing that “Systemd is destroying Linux”, clinging to initd with all its bash scripts and no nice way to prevent race conditions and such.

To roughly quote someone from a talk (not sure where I heard that, was about systemd as well I think):

“We nerds are very good at change when we’re the ones proposing it, but very bad when it comes from the outside.”

Reminds me of an old story about the game director Chris Taylor. He wanted to make a second iteration to bis game “Total Annihilation” since he promised to do so to his fans. However the current rightsholder, Atari, refused to sell the rights to him and instead took it as a business opportunity. They announced they’d do it themselves (without Taylor). The project got immediately canceled after the public reaction exploded in their faces (this was before social media).

Taylor still didn’t get the rights to his creation back and proceeded to do it anyway with a new name, “Supreme Commander” (with great success). Atari only lost both money and public good will. This still worked though since there wasn’t that much of a public mass manipulation machinery. With social media Atari could’ve potentially gotten through with it.

I mean, that’s a whole different topic. Documents and info material everyone should have access to need to be inclusive so even your average Fox News viewer can read it.

The project will either die through lack of interest or over-availability of cringe. There’s no way for it to succeed with this MAGA nonsense and threats plastered all over it, they’d have a hard time finding enough devs even without alienating everyone except Fox News viewers. Meanwhile they’ll feel confirmed in their worldview due to all the rightful criticism flooding in.

If the project survives this initial phase of antipathy we’ll probably get years of cringe from it.

Found more context, for who is now curious:

• Apparently threatening violence with guns is okay (just got marked as “off-topic”).
• The maintainer of X11Libre, Enrico Weigelt, is an anti-vaxer who already got scolded by Torvalds for writing bullshit on the kernel mailing list

The more I read into X11Libre, the more I’m laughing. Now the freedesktop ban also makes perfect sense.

There are about 675 million pigs worldwide.

I’ve read the fastest as Pepsi Co.