Every year or two I give Windows a genuine try for around a month. WSL2 is actually pretty decent, it’s a massive improvement on the Windows development experience I had back in 2015 when I tried running Windows full time doing Python/Ruby/Java development. Required cygwin, git bash, power shell, and cmd depending on what I was doing. It was a special kind of nightmare. Lots of native gems couldn’t compile, lots of tooling issues, etc.

Now you can use exclusively Windows terminal, keep essentially all your development stuff in a Linux subsystem, and pretend you’re in Linux. Integration with things like vscode or intellij is quite decent with the WSL.

That said, I hate Microsoft, hate the lack of customization, hate the default UI, hate the split between Windows 95-style settings and new Windows 10+, it’s inconsistent as hell. Moving windows across monitors with different scaling still resizes the windows in a very archaic way. You can’t reasonably use multiple desktops because you can’t easily rebind keys to swap desktops without third party software. I’ve changed DEs in Linux for smaller issues than these.

Yeah for both Ubuntu and Arch on two separate computers in my house, the process was just install the distro then install steam + Lutris (steam for steam games, Lutris for every other kind of game like League or WoW).

Installing steam games is identical in Linux and Windows for the vast majority of games. Installing non-steam games is arguably easier since you never have to go to a web browser.

Honestly the only reason Windows is “easier” is because it’s preinstalled on computers. As someone who has fresh installed Linux and Windows, Linux is miles easier to install. To install Windows 11 I tried following their recommendations (enabling TPM and secure boot in bios), but the W11 installer still didn’t like my 2 year old computer, so had to open up the command prompt, regedit, and add 3 Bypass registry DWord 32 bit values. Then actually installing the O.S you just sit there and wait with an unusable computer. Linux installations have nice GUIs that are far more modern, don’t require weird terminal hacks, and you have a usable computer while it’s installing (you can open up Firefox and browse the web for example).

\rant

Saying the word “Nazi” or “slave” or whatever doesn’t automatically make someone incorrect. Even if this were another Godwin’s law that doesn’t make the comparison invalid.

There’s a subset of people that anytime a comparison is made, where one situation is worse than the other, something happens where they become unable to understand the concept of a principle.

It’s like you recognize “hey, chattel slavery is worse than wage slavery!” (which is correct), and therefore there can be no principle applicable to both situations (incorrect).

I assume it’s that you’re offended by the comparison, and the emotion gets the better of you, disallowing you from thinking clearly about it. I don’t know what else it would be.

Yeah I do, just on the principle that an environment that retaliates against worker solidarity is an oppressive environment.

It’s similar to someone saying “can slaves be well taken care of by their owners?” Many people would say yes, but I would say no on principle. No matter how short the work day, no matter the benefits, months off every year, etc. I would say on principle that being owned means you’re not well taken care of.

The principle here being that sometimes “one” negative can be enough to mean you’re not “well-taken care of”.

If you’re in an environment that would retaliate against you for unionizing, you’re not “well taken care of”.

I’m on Linux full time for programming and gaming. I play battle.net games (WoW, hearthstone, overwatch, HoTS, WoW classic), League of Legends, and a lot of steam games. I have virtually no issues. I have a ryzen 5900x and a RTX 3080.

The key to Linux gaming (outside of steam) is Lutris. You just search the game you want to install, and it installs all the dependencies needed automatically and you can launch the game from one place. They even have a simple 1 click button for adding steam games too if you want a single launcher for every game you have (this is what I do).

The only issues I really have are with EAC, like DKO didn’t work for a bit after it came out (but does now), and Valorant/Fortnite don’t work (they can easily enable Linux EAC but choose not to). I happen to not play these games so it’s a non-issue for me, but worth mentioning.

League of Legends is also worth mentioning as having more issues than the rest. Usually I can run the game for months or even a year+ with no issues, but earlier this year the game was virtually unplayable on Linux for about 6 days due to a bug Riot Games added. This bug also effected Windows users, but to a much less extent. They would get disconnected once every couple games, while Linux users would get disconnected once every couple minutes. The League of Linux community is amazing though, and people were troubleshooting it constantly and making it more and more playable (getting to Windows parity on the bug), until Riot Games fixed it on their end.

I even helped my brother swap from Windows to Linux recently. He isn’t super into Linux or anything, but he was having consistent issues on Windows with his monitor turning off in games, specifically League. We tried reinstalling drivers, watching temps, reinstalling League (since it didn’t happen in other games), and uninstalling certain apps that can add overlays (though they were disabled). Some of these issues seemed to fix it until it returned usually hours or days later. Eventually we gave Linux a try and the issue is entirely gone. It’s likely that resetting windows would work too, but he dual boots and it’s easier to not have to reinstall everything.

Over 85% of Mozilla’s income comes from their Google search deal. Google is keeping Mozilla alive to prevent antitrust issues. If Mozilla rocks the boat too much, Google will fund a more obedient alternative.

If you’re not going to spend the 60 seconds it takes to read my comment, don’t bother responding. Nobody mentioned a conspiracy to cull the population, the millions of people who are dying a year from hunger or entirely curable diseases like TB aren’t dying because of some deep state conspiracy, they’re dying because it’s what’s logical in a capitalist economy. These people have no economic power, so they get no resources.

Similarly, as the economy gets further automated, workers lose economic power, and we’ll be treated with the same capitalist logic that anyone else in the world is treated with, once we have no economic power we are better off dead, and so that’s what will happen.

The position that “alternative industries will always exist” is pretty foolish, humans aren’t some exceptional supreme beings that can do something special artificial beings cannot. Maybe you’re religious and believe in a soul, and you think that soul gives you some special powers that robots will never have, but you’d be simply mistaken.

Once the entire economy is automated, there will still be two classes, owners and non-owners, instead of owners and workers. Non-owners will either seize the means of production or die per the logic of capitalism (not some conspiracy).

Suggesting an alternative industry as an escape from AI doesn’t work. The media tried this with the millions of truck drivers, pushing them to go into software development 5-10 years ago, as we started conversations around the impending automation of their careers.

The thought at the time, and this seemed like an accurate forecast to me, was that the tech industry would continue to grow and software engineers would be extraordinarily safe for decades to come. I was already in this profession, so I figured my career was safe for a long while.

Then a massive AI boom happened this year that I hadn’t anticipated would come for 15ish more years, and similarly AI experts are now pushing up predictions of AGI by literally decades, average estimates being under 10 years now instead of 30 years.

At the same time, the tech industry went through massive layoffs. Outsourcing, massive increases in output with generative AI automating away repetitive copy/paste programming or even slightly more complicated boilerplate that isn’t strictly copy/paste, amongst natural capitalist tendencies to want to restrict high value labor to keep it cheap.

Those people who shifted away from truck driving and towards software engineer 4+ years ago, thinking it was a “safe path” and now being told that it’s impossible to find a junior dev position might become desperate enough to change paths again. Maybe they’ll take your advice and join a trade school, only to find in 4 years we’ll hit massive advancements in robotics and AGI that allows general problem solving skills from robots in the real world.

We already have the tech for it. Boston dynamics has showcased robots that can move more than fluently enough to be a plumber, electrician, etc. Now we just need to combine generative AI with senses and the ability to process information from those senses and react (this already works with images, moving to a video feed and eventually touch/sound/etc is a next step).

While everyone constantly plays a game of chicken, trying to move around this massive reserve army of labor, we’ll see housing scalpers continue to raise rents, and cost of living becoming prohibitive for this growing class of underemployed or unemployed people. The reserve army of labor, when kept around 5-10% of the population, serves as an incentive for people to be obedient workers and not to rock the bed too much. That number growing to 20-50% is enough to rock the bed, and capitalists will advocate for what they’ve already advocated in the third world, a massive reduction or total annihilation of welfare, so millions more can starve to death.

We already have millions of people dying a year due to starvation, and nearly a billion people are malnourished due to lack of food access. Raising this number is a logical next step for capitalists as workers try to fight for a share of the automated economy.

We have 3 paths forward:

• liberal capitalist solution (à la Tucker Carlson): ban AI and allow workers to do bullshit jobs
• alternative liberal capitalist solution: let excess workers die in the streets because they’re no longer needed for production
• socialist solution: distribute the means of production (AI in this case) so we can share equitably in its output

I’d advocate for the socialist one, it sounds like you might be more in line with Tucker Carlson’s thinking here?

Capitalism hit a massive roadblock with the dawn of the internet, information has a tendency to want to be free and easily accessible, but corporations need to own our productive output to maximize profits. In the age of the internet, our productive output more and more becomes our ideas and thoughts manifest into code or other forms of digital information.

Capitalists somewhat fought off the first wave of this, but AI will be a second and more challenging wave to overcome. I hope the capitalists fail and we don’t restrict the learning and power of AI so corporations can maximize profits again, but I recognize there’s a world where they successfully slow down or even entirely hault these learning systems and stop the technology from developing.

We already see people like Tucker Carlson calling for bans on AI because it’ll put people out of work. Of course, we should be trying to reduce the amount of work needed, but the natural tendency of capitalism in this environment is to maximize efficiency in favor of capital owners. Once workers aren’t needed anymore, the best thing (from a capitalist perspective) to do is let them starve in the streets instead of “giving them stuff for just existing”. We already live in a world where millions of people die from hunger a year, and almost a billion people are dangerously underfed, because global capitalism dictates these people don’t deserve enough food.