Willie

Yeah, that’s the internet for you. Anything you want to stay around will vanish someday, and anything you want gone will be here forever.

And be careful, a lot don’t have built in speakers either. Don’t just expect to get a TV out of a commercial display.

Windows has been getting worse and worse all the time. With any luck, as Windows gets worse, interest in Linux will rise on its own. But it’s hard to say what tomorrow brings.

No, it’s better to be honest. The average user isn’t ready for Linux, because Linux is not ready for the average user. I’d never try and get someone to use it if they’re not already interested. I hate that it is this way, but it is. Linux is only really for people who already want to use it. Because if you’re not interested in using it, you’re not going to put forth the time investment to gain the benefits from it. No matter what angle I look at it from Linux is not for the average person.

Your second paragraph says it all. Find out if the user needs to dual boot? The answer is obviously “No” because no matter what they’re using the computer for, Linux is unneeded for them, since they have Windows. There are tangible benefits to using Windows, since it runs their software, meanwhile, you failed to list any real benefits to using Linux for the average user. It’s faster? No, not really, since they’ll be learning how to use it, and even ignoring that, it’s not so much faster that they’ll perceive it anyway. It’s more secure? Not really, Windows is the better choice for the average user in that respect, since it’ll automatically force them to restart the machine every week to install security updates. Main choice of professionals? That’s not entirely true, and even if it were, it’s not relevant, the average user is not a professional. And for anyone who already owns a computer already running Windows, Windows was ‘free’ too.

The only time to have this discussion is if the user is having a PC built, and then the answer is also “No” to Linux, because they’re going to buy Windows anyway, since it’s better for gaming, and that’s the primary reason for someone to build a PC, unless they’re doing a specialized task like video editing, and if they are invested enough into the task to want a PC just for that, they have specialized software that almost always runs only on Windows, and even if it were able to run on either, it’s not my place to alter their workflow.

The real elitist attitude is thinking people need to use Linux in the first place. For me and (maybe) you, it might get the job done, but for my family and friends. It’s better that they use what they’re comfortable with. The main point of a computer is to accomplish tasks, and giving them Linux is a hindrance to that.

Linux is great, but it’s not for everyone, and it may never be.

Yeah, I am imagining the soil moisture things from the garden store, with the little needle gauge thing, that takes so little power that there’s no battery slot. I feel like the amount of power this thing makes is extremely low.

What happens if your brain implant is like a phone, and stops getting updates after 2 or so years? That’d suck really bad.

Make note about what? This is a good thing. They went through the efforts to acquire the rights for the training data, and people might have even been paid for the original work.

It’s not like this stops someone from paying artists or photographers to make art or photos for their training data, or creating some sort of group where contributors actively give the rights to their own artwork or photos for a model, like some sort of open source project kind of thing, people love that kind of stuff! You’re just acting like this is some awful thing, when it’s completely fine, and the way it should be.

Honestly, if you want to use Nintendo Switch JoyCons as your PC controller, your best bet is to just use the JoyCons. I’m not sure if later revisions corrected it, but the HTC Vive controllers had pretty poor build quality, I’m not confident they could stand up to any real heavy usage.

The biggest issue with them though, is that they simply have too few buttons to do anything great with. On each one, you get two side buttons, a menu button, a power button, and (this is what kills it) a single trigger. This gives us 4 real buttons on each. We need ~16 to emulate a real controller, and we’re only half way there. You might be able to squeak out some extra buttons from the touch pads, but I’m kind of assuming you’d be using those as joysticks, since the controllers have none. Having buttons and joysticks both in there sounds like a bad time.

So yeah, I’d probs go with the JoyCons and just live with the poor wireless range if possible. It kind of sucks, but they seem to be the right tool for the job.

I feel like that’s even more of an agreement than a thumbs up.

It’d be very very bad for schools in the US in rural areas. There’s no way they’d be able to afford equivalent services to what Google offers them for basically free, ever again. Many children would lose their assignments to Google Drive and others would be sad from losing what’s basically a time capsule of their entire life that was stored in there.

Another loss would be Android, and the Google Play Store. So many phones would basically become waste overnight. It’d be absolutely tragic. At least that’s the way I see it.

Most less technically literate folks would lose their ability to use their computers overnight. They’d go to Chrome to make a google search to go to their favorite website, and when they see the page showing that Google cannot be found, they’d just assume their computer is broken. Microsoft would be the ‘saviour’ in this. I’m sure they’d happily push out an update for Windows that resets your default browser to Microsoft Edge (again) and your default search engine to Bing.

Later down the road, whoever buys the old Google domains would likely be able to spread some sick malware and steal a lot of data from people who didn’t prepare properly.

That’s just what I can immediately think of. I’m sure there’s more, or something worse I forgot about. Haha.

Another interesting thing is, what would they do with short blogs that are almost entirely code snippets, which ChatGPT tend to copy & paste?

Probably nothing, since small blogs aren’t big enough to sue them while news sites are.

I think we’re almost there, really. A lot of places already have what is basically the terminal of today for users to use. It’s just a little box with keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and maybe some USB ports, and it connects the user to a virtual machine running on a server in the building somewhere.

Until Linux can just let users double click and install .exe files from Windows. The average user will never touch it. People will just stick with what they know, even if it’s been neutered by being made into an online service.

That said, I don’t see Microsoft doing that for some reason. There are just too many things that aren’t suitable for an online instance of Windows. Not to mention that lots of areas don’t have a good enough network connection to make something like that viable. They’ll almost certainly continue to offer an installable version of Windows for a long time still.