Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.

Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I’m only familiar with local usage where you can’t easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It’s certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.

By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia’s superior speed and AMD’s superior capacity.

These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you’re no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don’t want to implement autodetection.)

Nvidia’s Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD’s; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.

Also, Nvidia’s drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There’s typically just an error code for “the driver has crashed”, no matter what reason it crashed for.

Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn’t contain error information beyond “something bad happened” and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from “the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards” over “some BIOS setting might need to be changed” and “sometimes the card doesn’t like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard” to “it’s a manufacturing defect”.

Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can’t fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It’s slower but I like the driver better.

They did PR campaigns against Linux and OpenOffice for quite some time – until cloud computing took off and it turned out they could earn more money by supporting Linux than by fighting it.

In fact, Microsoft weren’t happy about FOSS in general. I can still remember when they tried to make “shared source” a thing: They made their own ersatz OSI with its own set of licenses, some of which didn’t grant proper reuse rights – like only allowing you to use the source code to write Windows applications.

And I wouldn’t know where to start using it. My problems are often of the “integrate two badly documented company-internal APIs” variety. LLMs can’t do shit about that; they weren’t trained for it.

They’re nice for basic rote work but that’s often not what you deal with in a mature codebase.

Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.

Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.

But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.

NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.

As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.

I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.

I just use the Europass CV Builder. Works fine for me, has been for well over a decade now.

Definitely one of the more subtle benefits of the EU: They made a perfectly serviceable resume builder.

(But yeah, a LaTeX template would also just work forever. This stuff is what TeX and its derivatives are great at.)

When I debugged my crackling sound I followed various advice that said to enable 44100 in addition to 48000 and it fixed nothing. Then I disabled 48000 and it worked because the auto-switching refused to work. (And of course the other computer runs the same games just fine on 48000 because things can’t ever be simple.)

That’s why I mentioned it.

Try setting the rate to 44100 and only that, no double rate support; most games try to output at that rate and don’t deal well with being upsampled to 48000.

I gotta be honest, I haven’t used a dedicated sound card since the Vista/7 era when EAX stopped being a thing and onboard sound could handle 5.1 output just fine. The last one I had was a SoundBlaster Audigy.

These days the main uses for dedicated sound interfaces are for when you need something like XLR in/out and then you’ll probably go with something USB.

Port 220.

IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1 was what I used for my SoundBlaster 2.

Later I used IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1, high DMA 5 for my SoundBlaster 16.

Mind you, the real winner is of course Android. It has a consistent, easy to learn interface and a wide range of applications that integrate nicely.

And we don’t need to speculate; it has already won and is the true face of Linux for the masses. Plenty of young people don’t even own traditional computers anymore and do everything on their smartphone or tablets.

And that’s why this entire discussion is really just a form of fan wank; we don’t need to find a unified UI for Linux because it has already been found and has a massive market share. You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.

Everything else can be as complicated, janky, or exotic as it wants because it doesn’t matter.

Honestly, if you want one simple DE for everyone it should probably be XFCE. Dead simple to use, feels vaguely familiar to Windows users, not overly complicated.

KDE is heavily customizable, Gnome is very opinionated, and tiling WMs don’t adhere to orthodox UI patterns. Those are all suboptimal if you want something usable by the absolute widest range of users.

Gtk and QT weren’t consistent but there was a Gtk style that used QT as a rendering backend, which allowed you to get some semblance of consistency. Then they came up with Adwaita, which doesn’t really allow that anymore.

To be honest, I’m kind of afraid that Linux will go the day of Windows with zero UI consistency because of apps that can’t be themed to even look vaguely similar or may even take over the window decorations.

I kinda liked it more when gtk-qt was still a thing and you could actually get a semi-unified look for the while environment.

True, but getting someone to switch to Linux is a hard sell already. Any compatibility issues are seen as the OS’s fault, not as the game company being lazy.

Kernel-level anticheat and DRM are killer features, like it or not. People don’t care how invasive they are, they want to play League of Duty. If Linux can’t do that then it’s not good enough yet as far as they are concerned.

Meanwhile the only thing keeping me from switching to Garuda on my desktop is that the GPU is wonky and misbehaves even worse under Linux than it does under Windows. Screw competitive online games.

That’s why I dropped them when my mid-2013 MBP got a bit long in the tooth. Mac OS X, I mean OS X, I mean macOS is a nice enough OS but it’s not worth the extortionate prices for hardware that’s locked down even by ultralight laptop standards. Not even the impressive energy efficiency can save the value proposition for me.

Sometimes I wish Apple hadn’t turned all of their notebook lines into MacBook Air variants. The unibody MBP line was amazing.