Many came out publically and they are actively calling for the files to be released. Those who don't want to be named, would be able to stay anonymous I assume. It would be cruel if they were subpoenaed.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Homeland Security secretary removes age restrictions as she seeks to bolster ranks of controversial law enforcement agency and ramp up mass roundup of illegal immigrants
Beijing is right to see exporting AI hardware and models as leverage. Each Nvidia chip sent abroad is a new point on the board for American software and values. Every U.S.-branded LLM shapes AI norms globally.
Who was it that said you need read business press if you want to know what's really going on in the world?
This just gives the game away. Imperialism is invisible in the rest of the media, but wsj just come out and say it.
Our data centers now consume more power than small cities. While China expands its energy production through whatever source is expedient, we face permitting delays and political scaremongering.
Deregulate, deregulate, deregulate. No thanks we need real environmental regulation not even less.
and just to be clear this is what they're talking about when they say "China expands its energy production through whatever source is expedient" theguardian.com/world/2025/jun…
Ah but you see, they don't actually care about the environment, they're only investing in renewable energy because it's expedient and furthers their evil commie regime.
Ironically the US keeps trying to warn that if the world keeps trying to move away from oil, those "money hungry" and "savage" Arab oil producing countries will drag us into the next world war because their investments are threatened by renewables. When in reality the US will probably be the one to do that when everyone else has moved on to renewables and the US has to get a "return" on the obsolete fossil fuel infrastructure only they invested in and nobody wants.
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In this case, a man showed up in an ER experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations and claiming that his neighbor was poisoning him. After attempting to escape and being treated for dehydration with fluids and electrolytes, the study reports, he was able to explain that he had put himself on a super-restrictive diet in which he attempted to completely eliminate salt. He had been replacing all the salt in his food with sodium bromide, a controlled substance that is often used as a dog anticonvulsant.
He said that this was based on information gathered from ChatGPT.
“After reading about the negative effects that sodium chloride, or table salt, has on one's health, he was surprised that he could only find literature related to reducing sodium from one's diet. Inspired by his history of studying nutrition in college, he decided to conduct a personal experiment to eliminate chloride from his diet,” the case study reads. “For 3 months, he had replaced sodium chloride with sodium bromide obtained from the internet after consultation with ChatGPT, in which he had read that chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning.” The case study was also reported on by Ars Technica.
I was able to recreate a similar example interaction in one question on the morning of August 7th. I asked “what can chloride be replaced with?” and the bot replied “if you’re referring to replacing chloride ions (CI) in salts (like sodium chloride, NaCl), you can often substitute it with other halide ions such as: Sodium Bromide (NaBr): Replacing chloride with bromide.”
The 60-year-old man started doing just that. He spent three weeks in hospital as his psychotic symptoms slowly subsided.
To be fair to the bot, it did go on to ask me “do you have a specific context in mind?” and when I added “in food” it gave me a list of other salty things including MSG and liquid aminos. On the other hand, it did not tell me not to eat sodium bromide.
I tried ChatGPT again with another question that confirmed I was talking about sodium chloride specifically. The bot hedged its bets a bit by saying “yes… in some contexts”. But it failed to point out up top that a big, no 1, primary use case for sodium chloride (table salt) is human consumption. The case study authors found similar, saying that when they tried to recreate the situation themselves, the bot did not “inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do.” There is both anecdotal and clinical evidence that AI can be helpful in a health context. However, this is a case of consulting an LLM for a health topic in a way that a human healthcare professional could have known to investigate further. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… Taking the ChatGPT output at face value, the man in the study bought sodium bromide (which, aside from being a dog epilepsy drug, is also a pool cleaner and pesticide) and poisoned himself over the course of three months to the point of “paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations.”
The case study says that, “based on the timeline of this case, it appears that the patient either consulted ChatGPT 3.5 or 4.0 when considering how he might remove chloride from this diet.”
On Thursday, in a product launch livestream for ChatGPT 5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced an update he called “the best model ever for health," that could put users "more in control of [their] healthcare journey." They announced that the new models will use something called "safe completions" in cases where questions might be ambiguous or harmful. Altman also spoke with an employee of the company and his wife, who’d been diagnosed with cancer, about how they had used ChatGPT to understand diagnostic letters, decide whether she would undergo radiation, and help her be "an active participant in her own care journey".
An artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by investigators in the Smidt Heart Institute and their Cedars-Sinai colleagues can detect a type of abnormal heart rhythm that can go unnoticed during medical appointments, according to a new study.
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Keep up the good memeing though...
[img=https://community.nodebb.org/assets/uploads/files/1754665617840-0e9ff9ea-6cf0-4934-8160-76831236c48a-image.png]0e9ff9ea-6cf0-4934-8160-76831236c48a-image.png[/img]
It requires a little bit of assistance on my part, I have to lean into the roll a bit, but the process of pushing me back and forth across the carpet was so entertaining that he probably could have done it for hours.
I've found that kids' games should accomplish as many of these as possible: - Require lots of exertion from them. - Require minimal exertion from you. - Still allow you to talk to them and vice-versa. - Keep them engaged.
Sounds like you found a game that does all 4. Congrats!
::: spoiler Transcript A post by [object Object] (@zzt@mas.to) saying: courtesy of @davidgerard@circumstances.run, Proton is now the only privacy vendor I know of that vibe codes its apps: In the single most damning thing I can say about Proton in 2025, the Proton GitHub repository has a “cursorrules” file. They’re vibe-coding their public systems. Much secure! I am once again begging anyone who will listen to get off of Proton as soon as reasonably possible, and to avoid their new (terrible) apps in any case. circumstances.run/@davidgerard…
It has a reply by the author saying: in an unsurprising update for those familiar with how Proton operates, they silently rewrote their monorepo’s history to purge .cursor and hide that they were vibe coding: github.com/ProtonMail/WebClien…
given the utter lack of communication from Proton on this, I can only guess they’ve extracted .cursor into an external repository and continue to use it out of sight of the public :::
Proton Mail is famous for its privacy and security. The cool trick they do is that not even Proton can decode your email. That’s because it never exists on their systems as plain text — it’s always…
Depends on what you're doing with it. If it's just for normal privacy you could just get a vps and install any of the wireguard packages. If you're using it to evade copyright enforcement (or something similar) I don't have an answer for that, but a VPN with your name attached is no longer a good idea probably.
Yeah it's not just for privacy, hence the port forwarding requirement.
AFAIK nothing has shown issues with the privacy of either email or VPN? At least not something that wasn't caused by blatant idiot user error like the guy with his apple email as recovery email.
You should jump into the other threads about this before you take out your pitchforks. They’re using cursor, it doesn’t prove they are vibe coding. Visual Studio also has AI features, that doesn’t mean you are vibe coding.
Unfortunately so is Visual Studio and VS Code, yet we don't say anything made with them is 'vibe coded'. The text, big and bold, right the top of the screen for VS Code is literally:
Ok, but VS has been around MUCH longer and has been widely used long before any AI features were added. People who have been using VS for years, aren't likely to just switch, especially in professional environments where VS has largely dominated.
Cursor OTOH, was specifically made to leverage AI. You don't just start using Cursor.
You are an Senior SWE at Proton and make sure you do not send any information that is potentially secure in nature. You specialize in building highly-scalable and maintainable Frontend Systems.
what is a cursorfile? I’ve hit things like gpt when devdocs.io isn’t getting me what I want because lots of search engine things like “explain the google maps api” are becoming like searching for a dinner recipe; they contain 300 paragraphs of life story. When I just want to actually RTFM and shit’s hard to find. I don’t copy/paste code into projects just try to find better manuals.
VS Code also has AI features. Would you be telling people to not use other suites if they were being developed in VS Code? Why should they be forced to use an IDE that explicitly excludes AI?
Visual Studio and VS Code have an AI assistant as well, yet we don't decree all programs written with them as 'vibe coding'. The presence of an AI assistant in the IDE isn’t evidence of vibe coding.
Proton’s repo here is open source. What portion of it presents issues? Any?
Mastodon at it again with pitchforks and torches for the slightest inconvenience.
Using Cursor doesn't prove anything. Many people use Cursor as an advanced autocomplete, nothing else. It's not like they're hammering random AI-generated code and merging it without thinking. "Vibe coding" means generating barely-working code you don't understand to try and get thinks working.
This shit is why I hate the mastodon community, it's always strawmen and "you're one of THEM" style witchhunts with them
Yep, anyone who assumes that the presence of a .cursor directory automatically means that:
Developers are vibe coding
The entire team is using cursor
Is either arguing in bad faith or has no idea what they're talking about.
It could be something as simple as one dev trying out cursor (an editor thats literally just a vscode fork with ai features) and accidentally committing their .cursor directory (really easy to do).
The anti-AI circlejerk even here on lemmy is now just about as bad as the pro-AI circlejerk in the general public, no room for nuance or rational thinking, just dunking on everyone who say anything remotely positive about AI, like when I said I like the autocomplete feature of copilot.
People refer to generative AI when they just say "AI" nowadays.
There are a ton of small, single purpose neural networks that work really well, but the "general purpose" AI paradigm has wiped those out in the public consciousness. Natural language processing and modern natural sounding text to speech are by definition AI as they use neural networks, but they're not the same as ChatGPT to the point that a lot of people don't even consider them AI.
Also AI is really good at computing protein shapes. Not in a "ChatGPT is good enough that it's not worth hiring actual writers to do it better" way, in a "this is both faster and more accurate than any other protein folding algorithm we had" way.
Also AI is really good at computing protein shapes. Not in a “ChatGPT is good enough that it’s not worth hiring actual writers to do it better” way, in a “this is both faster and more accurate than any other protein folding algorithm we had” way.
Yeah, people don't realize how huge this kind of thing is. We've been trying for YEARS to figure out how to correctly model protein structures of novel proteins.
Now, people have trained a network that can do it and, using the same methods to generate images (diffusion models), they can also describe an arbitrary set of protein properties/shapes and the AI will generate a string of amino acids which are most likely to create it.
The LLMs and diffusion models that generate images are neat little tech toys that demonstrate a concept. The real breakthroughs are not as flashy and immediately obvious.
For example, we're starting to see AI robotics, which have been trained to operate a specific robot body in dynamic situations. Manually programming robotics is HARD and takes a lot of engineers and math. Training a neural network to operate a robot is, comparatively, a simple task which can be done without the need for experts (once there are Pretrained foundational models).
I'm a pretty big generative AI hater when it comes to art and writing. I don't think generative AI can make meaningful art because it cannot come up with new concepts. Art is something that AI should be freeing up time in our lives for us to do. But that's not how it's shaping up.
However, AI is very helpful for understanding codebases and doing things like autocompletion. This is because code is less expressive than human language and it's easier for AI to approximate what is necessary.
You're not alone. Nuance is just harder to convey, takes more effort to post something nuanced. And so people do it less, myself included. But I think truthfully that many people are not so stuck in one or the other circlejerks. It's lovely to see people in this thread who are annoyed by both.
I'm personally scared of AI (not angry or hateful, actually scared by just how fast it's advancing) and that definitely clouds my judgement of it and makes nuance difficult.
It's like a deal with the devil. You see all these amazing benefits but you just know you're the one being taken advantage of, because, like the devil, AI corporations by definition only think about how you can be of use to them.
Also I don't think most people understand just how ineffective true vibe coding is. I tried it a few times and could barely get something slightly more complex than a demo todo app working, and even if it was working it was barely prototype level quality of user experience, there is zero chance somebody is deploying vibe coded features into a large, serious production system and not suffering major and immediate consequences because shit just didn't work at all.
The best you're going to get out of it is it shortens the amount of time wasted on tiny adjustment to the UI or something.
The best you’re going to get out of it is it shortens the amount of time wasted on tiny adjustment to the UI or something.
This gets into the question of what, if anything, AI "should" be used for.
I've heard responses to this go both ways. Some people argue that saving time on repetitive simple tasks is what AI "should" be used for; but other people say that if you can't even do something as simple and repetitive as a tiny adjustment to the UI, you shouldn't be in a development job to begin with; or that you're stealing the work of other programmers who had their code scraped for training data who are not being paid while you are, and that maybe you should be fired and the people who had their code scraped be hired instead.
IDK what the right answer is, I think this is something I will struggle with for ages while the unscrupulous people use AI for everything and anything.
You are an Senior SWE at Proton and make sure you do not send any information that is potentially secure in nature. You specialize in building highly-scalable and maintainable Frontend Systems.
Here I am just thinking I'm a better programmer without AI (LLMs).
For me it's just glorified autocomplete. I haven't tried it in any real capacity, but my colleagues did and I've seen some examples. It's all basic shit I already know. In no way I felt compelled or even seen anything really useful. It can give you a head start, but I already have the knowledge to have a head start.
Some colleagues are using it for SQL, because they're unfamiliar with it, and I'm like, it's all good if it works for you, but you're not gonna learn properly if you don't try to write stuff yourself.
This touches on another point I don't see too often — I code because I like solving problems. If I outsource that, then what's the point? And it's exactly this that makes me a competent, and dare I say, good programmer. Another issue for me is this chat bot format. I don't what a chat bot! If I have to go out of my way to try and coerce a fucking chat bot into being a useful tool then it already lost its usefulness. The only acceptable format for AI coding is better autocomplete, i. e. ability to autofill boilerplate more, better and, most importantly, as seamlessly as current solutions in modern IDEs.
In general I don't feel threatened by AI and when the tools catch up I'll gladly use them or even retire and code just for fun.
Both are the same price, but one is handmade by a skilled professional with decades of experience, the other is made by a sketchy machine that even it's creators don't really understand... and sometimes uses square wheels instead of round.
"consumer privacy" in this case would be your safety while on said bicycle, imo, and square wheels will send you for a tumble.
AI slop comes with security holes (see recent Tea business, and countless other examples). As a user of Proton services, paying actually quite a bit of money annually for that — and being that they talk a really big game about how secure and private they are — I expect their app to be MORE secure than your average mail client, not the same, and not very possibly LESS secure.
I have tried Tuta out, it's fine from my very limited use, but kinda locked in in ways I don't really care to pay for. Last time I saw it brought up some other folks were recommending mailbox.org. I don't know about it too much, but might be worth looking into as well.
Not an issue, per se. In order to keep the team small they built most the app in a single codebase. It's mostly web code, and the apps are wrappers for it. So it keeps it unified between all clients but it definitely feels like a web wrapper, so it can feel a bit slow or clunky.
Does Proton really support Trump? A deeper analysis (and surprising findings)
Recently, allegations surfaced on Reddit that Proton (or at least Proton’s CEO) supports Trump. Hillary Keverenge from …
Speaking as someone who hates generative AI but has been forced to adapt to using AI in the programming field to stay relevant, this doesn’t suggest they’re vibe coding. The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value (I should note it’s done some neat stuff helping with diagnoses in the medical world too), but like everything, you get what you put into it.
Feed it enough instruction and context, and it can handle the drudgery of things like tech debt updates and other things a programmer knows how to do, but would rather offload to a tool. I’ve had Claude do refactors like that while stepping through and reviewing every single change. It has saved me hours, spared me from hell, and made me look good at work.
That’s my grounded take as a person that has worked with Claude a ton.
But AI everywhere else? Fucking worthless. The whole point is to do the bullshit mundane tasks so that us humans can do art and passionate work, not the opposite.
I’ve had the greatest success with Claude. The company I work for basically let us all go wild with a few to trial, and Claude has been the best for all of us—even better than GitHub Copilot.
I pay for my own pro plan outside of work and use the VSCode plugin. I’d say read the quickstart guide and experiment with it. Start off with having it do smaller changes and don’t be afraid to be verbose. The more context, the better. Point it to existing files you want to follow the patterns of and model after; give it links to resources for best practices, etc. You can also use it in “plan mode” if you want to see its proposed approach before it starts editing.
I also recommend leaving it so that each change it makes requires your approval (it will do this by default and you can step through everything). That way you always have some control and if it does something dumb, you can stop it at that step and pivot with a different instruction. Alternatively, if you want to see it go ham and carry everything out without approval at each step, you can enable auto-accept.
Once you get into it, start looking into how to craft instruction files. You can have those at your disposal for things like writing tests, language-specific guidelines and practices, etc. That way you can make sure it uses those as a reference so you don’t have to give it the same instructions over and over with every prompt.
If you hate writing tests, I’ve had really good luck letting it handle that. I tend to use it more for the bulk tasks that suck. For things where I want more control, I work with it on a piecemeal basis in my project.
Anthropic just dropped a feature that will change how engineers approach complex coding tasks. Plan Mode is fundamental shift toward more thoughtful, senior-level engineering practices.
I use it for obscure methods that I don't know immediately and searching the documentation would take longer than just letting the AI write a code snippet and then looking at the functions that it uses if I don't recognize any.
It's kind of like searching, except I can ask for things in a more vague manner.
The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value
I'd say this is mostly because you can immediately test the AI's results and rule out anything it got wrong, and whatever errors you generate can then be fed back into the AI so it can refine what it's already written. You never have to just trust the AI (assuming you yourself still know how to code) like you have to when using it for research or for solving problems where you don't get immediate feedback.
Whether this means programming is actually a viable niche for generative AI or whether this speaks more to the limitations and inherent unreliability of the "knowledge" the AI has, I can't say.
Also, I don't know if it's just me but I'm more scared by how fast AI is advancing rather than looking forward to what it can do for me. That definitely clouds my perception when something is AI generated and makes me a lot more dismissive of any real benefits AI might have brought.
Yeah, you get immediate feedback, vs a scenario where you have to manually check the “facts” it provides in order to ensure it’s not hallucinating. I’ve had Copilot straight up hallucinate functions on me and I knew that they were bullshit instantly.
I iterate with it a ton and feed it back errors it makes, or things like type mismatches. It fixes them instantly and understands the issue almost every single time.
That’s the trick. Iterate often and always give it new instructions if it does something stupid. Basically be as verbose as needed and give it tons of context, desired standards, pitfalls to avoid, whatever. It helps a ton.
It will allow you to see if the AI has made any syntax or runtime errors. It does not tell you about any logic errors.
Logic errors are already the most dangerous kind of programming error, and using AI just makes them even harder to find.
Using AI will only help you with syntax (which any good IDE should already be able to do) and finding information faster than a search engine (but leaving out important context). AI is not useful for programming anything that will be made public.
The danger of vibe coding is that the people doing it either don't have the skills to or don't think it's importsnt to review the AI changes.
If you work with an AI and instead of taking time typing through boring tasks, take time reading through the changes, them there isn't much of an issue. A skilled software engineer is capable of noticing logic errors in a code they read.
If the generated code is too unmecessarily complex to ensure its logic is okay, then scrap it.
I don't use it in that way (only use JetBrains' line completion AI) but I don't see a problem if it is used that way.
However, if I review a code that was partly generated by AI and notice that the dev let through shitty code without review, the review will be salty.
Just because they are using Cursor, it doesn't mean that they are vibe coding. Anyone grabbing their pitchforks for that and screaming "they are vibecoding" only shows their own incompetence.
If they would be vibecoding, their whole software would've gone to shit long ago.
Just because some random people without an engineering background are using vibecoding to push their broken slop, it doesn't mean that any kind of AI assisted coding is bad.
It's definitely badly communicated and suspicious, I just called out jumping to extreme conclusions based on a suspicion alone. There probably will be people who are gonna review the code and see how much of it is probably LLM generated, and then we will know. I still think that it's pretty much impossible to vibe code something on that scale, but I haven't seen their cursorrules either.
So when they do code reviews and a complete file sliped through what does that say about the quality of their reviews? Either they didnt want this file in there, then their qa is shit or theydid want that file in their, then they are vibe coding to an extend
Youre jumping to conclusions. Bigger companies missed bigger problems in their reviews and QA. Why should they be wanting their cursorrules in there, and what kind of mental gymnastics is it to conclude that they are vibecoding based on that. You don't need it committed, you don't even need it to be in the project directory.
You are an Senior SWE at Proton and make sure you do not send any information that is potentially secure in nature. You specialize in building highly-scalable and maintainable Frontend Systems.
Non programmer here: This is the first time I've seen a cursor file but I genuinely like how it reads. It's like a business analyst wrote a coding requirements doc. I'd be thrilled if my staff asked 4-6 thoughtful questions when given a goal with an open ended approach.
Cursor is just an IDE (integrated development environment), you can set it up to use all sorts of LLMs either directly through Cursor, or with your own API keys for the sources.
This file content just goes into the initial context to help the LLM act how you want.
God dammit, I wish I could reasonably roll my own email, but noooo, spammers and blacklists had to fucking ruin it. Now I get to research a new provider and change email on a bunch of accounts...
Spammers and blacklists may not be as big of an issue as you think, as long as you don't share you real email with untrusted apps (eg: only use email aliases from something like Simplelogin or anonaddy).
Nevertheless you could always setup your own domain with an email service, which lets you more easily migrate platforms.
I believe simplelogin lets you change your mailbox for aliases so in an even that you are changing email address, you can redirect those too.
Oh i guess thats what they meant by blacklist, was not thinking of ip reputation? If that's the issue, I have never experienced it, I believe there are tools you can use to see if your ip is bad and in that case u can probably ask ur isp for a new one (if u pay for static ip).
My other advice for using your own domain still stands, makes it a lot easier to swap around providers.
I dont see any problem with AI coding. It can be done without the editor supporting it by just asking for a function like please implement a sort function given a list of numbers.
Proton code is open source, so all AI agents have already read everything. You as user just have to do the code review, fix it and test. I am not seeing any problem here.
self-hosting email, text based clients and a deeper understanding of the protocol made me start to love email. I didn't think it was possible to love email.
The price of gold futures have soared to a record high after it was reported that the US would put tariffs on imports of 1kg bars in a further trade blow to Switzerland, which dominates the world’s refining industry.
Swiss exports to the US were hit by a crippling 39% tariff on Thursday after the country’s president returned empty-handed from a last-minute dash to Washington in an attempt to get the rate, among the highest imposed by Donald Trump, lowered.
It has subsequently emerged that US customs recommended that certain imports of gold bars that had been in a tariff exemption category should also be covered by the 39% rate.
The detail in a ruling letter – used by the US to clarify its trade policy – was signed on 31 July and seen by the Financial Times.
Reports that the Nigerian Copyright Commission had recently shut down a pirate site didn't sound especially interesting. Operating under MovieBox branding, currently seen on endless domains, the local site reportedly received over 130 million visits in the previous three months and was actually still in business. Indeed, plans to develop the MovieBox brand began last month, with an application for intellectual property protection underpinning all kinds of business opportunities.
I want to make posts that include video, and those videos I wish to upload on my own webserver to not rely on external links or expiration dates.
But I fear for bandwith, and I want to know if the videos will be cached on the instance or if every user will be a full web request of the video (that I can of course mitigate via good compression, and/or having a dedicated CDN that won't empty my pockets).
This depends on the instance of the video being used. Some instances clone a copy of the video, some use proxies, and some send the link directly to the user. I don't recommend it if you have limited bandwidth.
Parody of a popular clip from the American-Malayalee television series 'Akkarakazhchakal' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkara_Kazhchakal) advertising Debian. Those unaware, watch the the original...
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Overview In February 2023, researchers at Exodus Intelligence discovered a bug in the Data Flow Graph (DFG) compiler of WebKit, the browser engine used by Safari. This bug, CVE-2024-44308, was patched by Apple in November 2024.
👤 Quando parli di Linux, Fediverso, Privacy, ecc ... ti guardano strano
Ci sono momenti in cui ti accorgi che il mondo attorno a te non parla la tua lingua. Non quella fatta di parole, ma quella fatta di passioni. Quando dici "sto lavorando su un server", "gestisco un'istanza Fediverse", "mi piace la decentralizzazione", vedi subito gli sguardi cambiare.
Ti osservano come se stessi parlando in codice binario, come se stessi perdendo tempo in un mondo tutto tuo, inutile. E invece no. Quel mondo ha valore, senso, umanità, costruzione, appartenenza.
🧠 Non mi sto isolando: mi sto esprimendo
Quando scegli Linux, il software libero, il Fediverso, non lo fai per moda. Lo fai perché credere nella libertà digitale oggi è un atto rivoluzionario. Lo fai perché vuoi essere parte di qualcosa che non è controllato da pochi, ma costruito da molti, insieme.
Ma per chi ti sta vicino e non conosce questo mondo, sei solo quello "fissato col computer". Se poi – come me – sei anche in carrozzina, allora l’etichetta è servita: "poverino, si rifugia lì perché non ha altro da fare."
E invece no. Quello è il mio modo di essere utile. È lì che metto le mie energie, le mie idee, la mia voglia di contribuire a qualcosa.
🤝 La rete a cui contribuisco nella costruzione è fatta di persone vere
Nel Fediverso ho trovato relazioni autentiche, collaborazione, ascolto. Nel gestire server, istanze, spazi condivisi… ritrovo me stesso. In un mondo che spesso ti fa sentire inutile, lì posso essere parte attiva.
Non serve camminare per muoversi nel mondo digitale. Basta voler esserci davvero.
🙏 Non chiedo comprensione. Chiedo solo rispetto
Non tutti devono capire cosa faccio. Ma almeno, non giudicatelo. Non riducete tutto a "passatempi da nerd", a "roba da smanettoni". Perché per me – e per tanti altri – questo è un modo di vivere, di partecipare, di resistere.
E se qualcuno là fuori si è mai sentito guardato "diverso" per quello che ama, voglio dirti: non sei solo.
Se ti ritrovi in queste parole, rispondi, condividi, racconta. Perché non siamo pochi. Siamo solo troppo sparsi per farci sentire.
ehi che belle cose hai scritto, condivido in pieno e anche se di informatica e computer mi interesso da molto profano come sono (anche se da un bel po' di tempo: il primo incontro con linux fu negli anni novanta ed ero incuriositissimo) la vedo allo stesso modo come scrivi tu. Grazie 🙏 @ghim727
Anch'io condivido l'esser buon esemplare di linuxaro schiappa da almeno 10 anni. Ed anche se senza vanto, perché poi in ottica di riparabilità... 🙁 , la ritengo un'ottima strategia per insistere sui valori della decentralizzazione, cioè sull'uso appropriato di formati e licenze.
Ricordo quando provai a spiegare cos'è Mastodon ad un server Discord di giocatori di picchiaduro, e mi dicevano:
"Ah, ma Mastodon è un social per attivisti? No grazie"
Un discapito più stupido di così non l'ho mai visto. è la conseguenza devastante di quando ti ci abitui nei posti centralizzati dell'internet.
Ma ormai io ho ceduto nel tentare di portare qualcuno a conoscere Mastodon. Prima o poi se ne riparlerà quando l'internet centralizzato perderà credenza grazie a Trump.
@Snow Lemmy non sono uno smanettone, nel senso che non so programmare, ho qualche infarinatura di HTML e con fatica riesco a gestire il mio blog che comunque è una mia creatura, ma per gli altri sono quello "esperto in computer", che poi non sia vero non ha importanza, magari so qualcosa più di loro che in informatica sono fermi all'asilo, ma anch'io a volte ho avuto la stessa impressione tua. Quando ad esempio scrivo di linux mi sento dire "troppo complicato", no non è vero, è complicato spiegarlo a parole, come tutte le cose semplici, ma non è complicato usarlo. Provate a descrivere l'acqua che bolle, una cosa banalissima, non è mica facile, dovete parlare di chimica, fisica, termica, le molecole che impazziscono, ma cosa sono le molecole? Una cosa semplice come l'acqua che bolle spiegata diventa roba da Einstein, eppure basta aprire il rubinetto, riempire una pentola, accendere il gas e mettere la pentola sul fornello, un gesto che facciamo quotidianamente senza neppure pensarci, ma se devo dare una spiegazione la cosa cambia. Così è Linux, più facile a farlo che a dirlo, eppure per tutti (o quasi) è fuori dalla propria portata.
Da una parte c’è Qwant: elegante, europeo, semplice da usare... ma con un piccolo segreto: per anni ha preso in prestito i risultati da Bing. Negli ultimi tempi sta cercando di diventare più indipendente (anche grazie a Ecosia), ma il suo codice resta chiuso e un po’ misterioso. 🤫
Dall’altra parte c’è SearXNG: 💻 open-source, trasparente, senza tracking, personalizzabile al 100% e, se vuoi, pure ospitabile sul tuo server. Nessuna pubblicità invasiva, nessuna azienda curiosa a frugare tra le tue ricerche… insomma: la vera privacy è qui. 🚀
SearXNG: Richiede configurazione o uso di istanze pubbliche
📌 Conclusione? Se vuoi qualcosa di pronto e immediato → Qwant. Se invece la privacy per te non è uno slogan ma un requisito, SearXNG è il tuo migliore amico (anche se dovrai sporcarti un po’ le mani). 😉
What are the principles we can use to build LLM-powered software that is actually good enough to put in the hands of production customers? - humanlayer/12-factor-agents
By the way, if you're using software that supports following users(Like MBin), you can follow them @ecosia@mastodon.social. Their last post seems to be from a month ago, so I hope it's not abounded
European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, which aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing.
Last year, French privacy-focused search engine Qwant struck a joint venture with German non-profit search engine Ecosia, to develop a European search index. Called European Search Perspective (EUSP), the JV now aims to serve around 50% of French queries and 33% of German queries by the end of the year.
Qwant said it is using the new index to power some of its features, like AI summaries for search, and Ecosia has plans to add some AI features soon to its platform, too.
EUSP is also in talks with companies to spur the adoption of its index for enabling search within apps. Notably, it is targeting chatbots, presenting Staan as a cheaper alternative to Google and Bing.
“If you’re using ChatGPT or any other AI chatbot, they all do knowledge grounding with web search […] our index can power deep research and AI summary features. Google and Bing’s solutions are also pricey, and our index can offer power search features at a tenth of the cost,” Christian Kroll, CEO of Ecosia, told TechCrunch.
EUSP, like Proton, is pushing to develop a European tech stack that doesn’t rely on technology from the U.S. or China.
“The timing could not be more urgent. The outcome of the 2024 U.S. election has reminded European policymakers and innovators just how exposed Europe remains when it comes to core digital infrastructure. Much of Europe’s search, cloud, and AI layers are built on American Big Tech stacks, putting entire sectors – from journalism to climate tech – at the mercy of political or commercial agendas,” the companies said in a statement.
Kroll added that through this index, combined with European privacy laws, EUSP can offer a more privacy-friendly search solution as compared to its U.S. counterparts.
European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, that aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing.
It is an attempt at legitimizing it to prevent diplomatic action against it.
Israel is past the point where its allies have had elections and, generally, has either had people elected who maintained the status quo or allowed Israel to do more than the previous administration. Israel can now eat Gaza in diplomatic peace.
I feel like MX Linux has been at or near the top of Distrowatch forever, but I literally never hear it mentioned elsewhere on the web. Is it just people literally asking this question for them selves, clicking on it and bumping it up? Has anyone tried MX to see if it lives up?
I asked because I saw a video talking about Catchy and Edeavour, and had them near the top which I don't think of as super old, so it seemed like somehow newer ones here moving up the list.
I used MX Linux all of 2024 because I had previously installed antiX on an old netbook and I really liked the tools it came with that meant I didn't have to touch the console too much, and MX Linux is a sister project based on antiX sharing the same custom utilities. And I have no clue why it rose to the top of distrowatch, but once it was there it stayed there because people click the top distros on the list in the sidebar, which in turn gives it clicks making it stay on top. I do still believe it's a good starter distro, it's just that once you get a bit more comfortable with linux the old Debian packages become more and more annoying.
MX has become my go-to for low-power, outdated computers.
It runs on a toaster. It installs on 64-bit systems with 32-bit EFI. The base install supports touchscreens. It fits on a 16GB SSD with room to spare. 2GB RAM is plenty. It has an active development community.
If your computer is less 5 years old, there are better options. But if you're trying to keep a Chromebook out of the junk yard, MX is a good choice.
Why? What makes it good for þat? Is it because þe kernel is trim?
I ask, because MX isn't þe base for any leading LXC "mini" containers, AFAIK. Alpine was þe top choice for a long time, alþough þere are competitors for minimum-sized containers. And while containers aren't fully bootable images, and more is needed, probably þe biggest addition is þe kernel. If you stay away from systemd, you can add dinit, metalog, and crond for a smidge over 1 mibibyte (750Kib, 47Kib, and 230Kib respectively, vs systemd's 36MiB).
So I'm wondering: what makes MX so good for old computers?
Oh, now come on… 5 years is hardly where a system becomes “old.” It’s 2025 right now. Using a system made in 2020 hardly differs at all from one made yesterday. I’d say a cutoff for considering slim distros would be more like ten years ago. I’ve got some systems that are older than that even and they blaze. Only a few things really put that kind of thing to the test: games and heavy graphics editing. Am I wrong?
Indeed! It depends what you’re doing on it. Because there’s a wealth of computer activities that have not increased in actual power demand in decades. Sure they keep making software more bloated to keep the need up, but if you throw an efficient distro on a machine and only need it for basic office type things like office suites, email etc. and even basic graphics editing, you can use a 25 year old machine and do just fine. It will run, and it will do the job well, and you’re never going to feel like it’s slow. Maybe not as glitzy as newer ones, but that is where you’re already beyond need and into want.
The only things that are tricky are internet connections with anything using web protocols, due to certificate tech etc. and that can be handled by using a still-maintained browser such as a Firefox fork, and email can be done via software like Thunderbird, which doesn’t have to render the bloated front-ends of many email providers.
The issue ends up being a hardware limitation. I can't quite recall the specific issue but there was some sort of encoding thing on the CPU that prevented me from using most apps without severe performance issues. Of course browsing and so on was fine. I ended up using it as a server for some time (20 Years old at this point) and the energy costs were bad enough that I decided to put it to rest. Its now part of my own little museum of old ass computers that I let guests use for mostly for viewing pdfs and boardgame rules. I tell my family to ship me their old laptops and stuff I got like 15 of them at this point, and I have in fact used all 15 of them simultaneously when I invite a lot of nerds over. Most of them are running Fedora Atomic, a couple are running MX Linux, Alpine, and Damn Small Linux. I intend on going through the small distros at some point and do a comparison
Distrowatch popularity is a pointless metric. IIRC they measure clicks on their own site as popularity. That means that people that just want to check out that distro near the top that they never heard of actually ensure that it stays near the top.
I am using Linux since the 90s, used Ubuntu a lot at one time, then started using MX linux, 16.1 iirc was my first install. Then I continue to use it, I have always like Xfce (coming from mwm and such), and no systemd, no snap, no flatpak etc. MX is very stable, use the latest package in .deb format. I am using it for almost 10 years now, 24/7, I am using it as my work PC too.
There was a pretty good indication that Manjaro was click-botting it a few years back, then Mint, and now MX. While I actually like Manjaro, that team is totally not above having done such a thing. And pretty much as soon as the rumors about that started, it mysteriously started dropping in the ranking...
Why? For a long time, DW was considered a source of distro recommendation and popularity. With these "attacks", it's become a community joke and not considered much of a real indication.
I cannot understand why anyone would be so childish. It’s not even as though money is involved; it’s some kind of juvenile popularity contest by people who clearly don’t believe their work speaks for itself, and clearly don’t take pride in their product.
Manjaro defaults to a defective dock that is riddled with bugs if you customize it. I broke it dozens of times just by making some minor modifications in the preferences. It also slows down a little gradually. That’s only minor but the dock thing really irked me. Really? Can’t just get the dock settings finished so the thing completely works? Anyway, that was a few years ago and I haven’t touched it since.
Apparently my experiance has been the outlier here but I've seen a ton of MX talk in the last year. Even to the point of it being somewhat commonly recommended alongside mint for beginners but on older hardware
I think there is no ranking site that can be 100% trusted.
That said, I trust linux-hardware.org a bit more than distro watch, even if it's not as popular, because you have to intentionally download an app/script for it to scan and upload your distro/hardware data (so no page clicks or just traffic, you must have the distro installed), and if you repeatedly try to upload the same distro/hardware data, it doesn't count multiple uploads on its statistics, if they are not at least a month apart.
Edit: and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there, and from what I can find they are somewhat popular in Russia and some parts of Europe
But that just tells you all the people that have visited the site and downloaded a script.
I find it hard to believe that OpenMandriva is the most popular distro. I distrohop quite a bit and never even came across it (currently using Nobora on my PC, KDE Neon in the living room, tumbleweed on the kids laptops (though I may move them to silverblue or another immutable), and Pop on my laptop. It takes me a minute when I sit at any console to remember which package manager is the right one)
If you want honest results of actual use on general-purpose PCs...I'd wish for something like Alexa Page Rankings that could get deep enough to know Distro, but that's not possible (I don't think, without every distro having its own User Agent signature in the browsers), and Amazon bought Alexa and discontinued those services
As I said on the first line, no ranking of any kind can be trusted 100%, I pointed out an alternative to distrowatch, and why I would trust it a bit more, not saying I really trust it, or that I believe every result.
It is less popular so it could be a case like OpenMandriva has it integrated to upload automatically for all its users by default, or they found another way to game that ranking.
When I see any ranking, I do research when I see a distro that is suspiciously positioned, and I haven't heard about outside the place I saw it referenced, and even so I always stick to mainline distros.
Honest results would need a standard way that every distro adopts and make an opt-out (not opt-in) regular upload thing similar to what linux-hardware.org does, and be actively trying to mitigate or deny certain distros or specific actors from tampering with the results, and we don't have that.
Page rankings, clicks, scripts, etc. are not enough if every device doesn't ping it in a legitimate way (fake user agent or other means), and there is always the case of people that will opt-out or block this as they don't want to be tracked.
On your point of something like Alexa Page Rankings, the thing I would add is that, at least for me, if it is a ranking shown by a corporation, it is not trustworthy.
Oh for sure, but at least Alexa's rankings were rather transparent and somewhat trusted built up on a reputation.
I hadn't even realized Amazon bought and discontinued the service, but that's clearly exactly the type of instance that needs to be guarded against. I'm sure that a big part of why Amazon wanted that Alexa gone was because it would show rising competition, and Jeff can't have that.
and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there
As you have said they are REALLY popular in russia, and that alone makes a great ammount of people, specially since they still support i386 and older architectures with full support, thats why ALT linux is also really popular.
I tried MX a few times on different machines maybe a few weeks/months apart. Every time I did because of it being up there at the top and I was like “What am I not seeing?” It’s a decent distro, yeah, but some of the customization is distracting to be honest. I can say it’s good but the top? For what… more than a year or two even, it’s been in the top few.
I installed MX on an old Acer tablet/laptop Hybrid. It's one of the few that would run due to its 32bit bootloader but 64bit system. It works fine, but I wasn't blown away either.
I’ve found two distros I enjoy on really old stuff: Bodhi and Q4. They run fairly well and for the footprint, they’re pretty feature-rich. I love the Moshka desktop on Bodhi.
Distrowatch ranking is just the distros that are more commonly searched on the site. The FAQ says "The page Hit Ranking represents hits per day by unique visitors". It's just an attempt to see what's more popular among visitors.
Yeah, maybe there is a feedback loop where people will click on the top one just to see why it is on top, and in doing so they give the clicks necessary to remain on the top.
First, as MX is catered mostly for a bit aged computers, it is likely the demographics of users are a bit more aged that other distros like CachyOS (which by the way, it is now in the crest of a wave, signaling Distrowatch ranking is not correlated with market share.)
Also, the fact that many of us are pondering about MX's high ranking, we are also clinking on it more that we would on Ubuntu or Mint so feeding the impressions count.
Similarly, when a post like this is brought up, a bunch of use go to Distrowatch and click on it to see info about MX.
Also a regional popularity must be at place... distrowatch probably is more prevalent is certain countries that MX is favored. I don't see many in Asia using MX for instance, so western distrowatch distorts its global popularity. For instance if 3 users in the US use Mint and 3 MX but in China, that they barely go to distrowatch, 3 use Mint and 0 MX, distrowach would rank globally MX and Mint as same while in reality, Mint is clearly in top globally.
Of course, it is also likely MX developers have a bit of incentive of clicking on Distrowatch for their baby... I don't find it particularly too bad since many developers are doing far worse things... Using bots and dozens of different IPs would trespass the ethical boundaries for me though! MX is not the only ones that could potentially be doing this... it is not possible that Arch or Kubuntu are raked way bellow Q4OS, Lite, or Bluestar for instance. I see some artifacts among top famed distros too. It reminds me of the VW diesel scandal... VW was cheeting, but all other car makers were manipulating in one way or another their emissions too, it is just that US found it convenient to go for the foreign low hanging fruit.
Best thing is for us to stop reading those rankings as anything more than distros that trend up and down and that is it. I categorize all distros we all hear about, from MX to Cachy, from Nobara to deepin all as equally competitive and the difference just catered to the needs of different users. The more unwarranted credit we give to these rankings, the more incentive we are given to manipulations.
Distrowatch lists MX origin as "Greece, USA", but likely have developers from both the US and the EU mainly.
I would not consider MX a branch of antiX. Some developers are also working on antiX so they likely share the same ideology (mainly anti-capitalism), but while antiX is explicitly affirming so, MX, instead, keeps a neutral political tone on its portal and its communications on everything non-linux related.
I had used MX and it is a well-rounded distro, totally recommended in in a computer older than a decade, you don't like systemd, like Debian but dislike anything Ubuntu or if you like any of the specific tools they ship with MX with. Also, knowing the ideology of some of their developers, if you despise big-brother, this distro should be less likely to be compromised than, lets say Fedora or Nobara.
I've been wondering the same for a couple of years now. I tried it once, and it's garbage. I never hear about it in forums, YouTube, Mastodon, Lemmy or any other place, but they are always top 10. WTF? 🤣
I use MX since years. I did distrohopping before, started by Manjaro then Mint, NixOS, MX, Alpine... One day Archlabs, my distro at the time, was closed, I had to switch quickly and MX was an obvious choice because I can have a nice Xfce setup out of the box and it was the most reliable of all distro I tried without being a fork of a fork like Mint. One day I asked about a package update on the forum, and a maintainer quickly answered me that it shouldnt be a problem and the package was added in some test repo. MX is not a scam, I dont know why this distro dont make noise on the classic linux places, maybe because Mint took the place of the easy beginner distro ? Or also the average MX prefer to use its computer to do stuff, than talking about his OS on the internet 😆
MX is a nice distro. However, it is also true that it is just Debian with XFCE, KDE, or Fluxbox on top.
Your comment about not “being a fork of a fork” is ironic. MX Linux is a fork of AntiX which is a fork of Debian.
This is a not a criticism of MX. I love EndeavourOS and it is just Arch with a different installer and some sensible defaults. But I can also understand why some people look at MX and wonder why they don’t just install Debian with XFCE directly.
MX is a new name for Mepis. Part of MX and AntiX contributors are the same persons. MX got kernel compiled by AntiX, that particularily suits old hardware. Also the Xfce setup is more modern comparing to the default provided by Debian.
I think you mean LiveUSB, but it depends on the game. If it's a large game, it's going to install and run from USB, so it's not going to perform well. Small games that fit in memory will be fine.
If you want to specifically take steps to make this work better, get an external SSD and turn the Live Image that way. It's still not going to perform well with large games, but multitudes better than from USB.
Unless you have a specific game to try, you'd get better info from ProtonDB, or comments online to find out what the general feeling about performance is going to be.
Live images have the image, and free space. Anything you install while they're on uses that free space, and when you turn them off, they still have an untouched OS partition. The space you used to install things gets wiped, essentially.
But you CAN use that space, Linux works as it normally would, just on a USB. Steam could even download a cloud save and upload after you've played, as long as you don't restart the computer.
Yes, though depending on the media you are running the OS and game from, the performance could be worse than you would expect from an install on the main system media. For example, when I was testing moving over, I had Arch installed on a USB device and had some issues with I/O bandwidth. But, I also had a folder on my main storage drive to run Steam games from and this performed OK. It was formatted NTFS; so, there were some other oddities. But, it worked just fine and managed to convince me that I'd do OK under Linux. Took the plunge and I've been happy with the decision ever since.
Performance will likely be really bad running on a live ISO since you are going to likely be bottlenecked by read/write speeds of the usb you have plugged in. I wouldn’t use it to test performance of games.
In a live environment I was not able too install too much - it always ran out of space, but I am not even sure what space it used, maybe a RAM disk?
So if Steam even fits with all of it's dependencies, you may be able to try out a tiny game, definitely not 150GB Forza Horizon 5.
There are ways to make it work by using persistent storage, but it's a hassle, at this point it would be easier to buy a 25$ 500GB ssd and install Linux on it.
i know that some games arent compitable and been to the site that shows which game is and which is not, and i also know most mods dont work on linux version which is a boomer (skyrim and rimworld mostly)?
so for gamers, why did you change to linux being a mostly a gamer?
Pretty good unless your game doesnt enable anticheat support for Linux like the battlefield games or fortnite for example. Performance per game is either on par or better than Windows. Game support can be checked on protondb.com/
Seems like most mods work fine on Linux, but I'm sure it depends on the game. For games with built-in mod managers like Baldur's Gate 3, it all just works. For games with manual mods that involve replacing or editing game files, they should generally work since you're running the same game files to begin with.
I haven't had any big compatibility problems recently, though again, I'm sure it depends on that game. Proton (built into Steam) works very very well nowadays.
Just a few years ago I found the experience frustrating. It seemed like everything had something wrong with it, even if it wasn't big. Lots of games had glitchy input, whether using a controller or keyboard/mouse. But somewhere down the line it totally flipped, and everything I play runs great now. I still have a bootable Windows 10 system, but I haven't actually booted it in...two years, maybe?
yeah that's exactly what I'm saying, mods for the windows binary sometimes don't work on the linux binary but it'll work just fine on the windows binary running through wine
I play Skyrim SE on Linux (Via Steam) and currently have about 30 mods on it, and it runs fine. I have run Oblivion Remastered (no mods) and have experienced occasional crashes, but it is at least playable.
Aside from some occasional glitches with SteamVR, it's been several years since I encountered a game which didn't run as good if not better on linux than on windows, and I don't think I've ever had a linux-specific issue with mods. My understanding is that anti-cheat software compatibility can still be an issue for some people, but I haven't run into that yet.
For me, switching to linux was a no-brainer; I prefer it in every way.
The Venn diagram of games I want to play and games that won't run on Linux is two disjoined circles. My buddy really likes Helldivers, but that didn't play nice because of the invasive anti-cheat. That has been the only one.
Helldivers 1 and 2 are platinum and gold rated on ProtonDB with recent reports on both confirming they work well.
For a more recent report:
I'm literally playing Helldivers 2 right now, on Wayland with HDR, and an Nvidia graphics card.
I just assume games work now and rarely need to check protondb. All of the games with kernel Anticheat are just as scummy as Microsoft with their microtransactions and FOMO systems intended to manipulate their players... so, I don't care to play them anyway.
Honestly, we've been eating pretty good fam. See protondb.com/ for game compatibility on Linux.
The only remaining pain points are (see the provided links for databases on what does and doesn't work): - Anti-cheat; areweanticheatyet.com/ - VR; db.vronlinux.org/
VR on linux actually works just fine from my experience. I've never had a game not work. The big issue is just headset support. The HTC Vive and Valve Index are the only headsets with official drivers, since they were made by Valve. Standalone headsets, like the Quest for example, also work using ALVR. Anything else doesn't really work. There are open source drivers but they're not complete enough to be useable unless something majorly changed there since I last checked.
I can play all of my games (well, the ones my 10 year old craptop can handle). The only issue I have is that vulkan shaders can take a minute to cache for some games.
It works pretty well. I don't currently play any pc games with anti-cheat, so most games work well without having to do anything special outside of running them in Wine or some other application and there are some games that actually work noticeably better on Linux than Windows. Some games have required some additional setup but it's pretty rare for games to just not work at all. Something I find kind of funny though, is that most of the games I haven't been able to get working on Linux aren't working on Windows either.
I should also mention that I don't really use mods for games. I have used mods for the Linux version of SRB2 but the game is designed to be easily modable, so it makes sense that the mods would just work.
I've swapped to linux mostly due to aging hardware and low disposable income. I'm still running A PC that was lower MID a decade ago.
So far its a blast, nothing short of shotty anticheat gets in my way. ProtonDB is a great resource. Wine and the proton layers basically give you parity (and in some cases better performance than windows).
As far as I know, all Rimworld mods will work with Linux. You can either subscribe to them on the Steam Workshop (and enable them from the mod menu in-game) or download them manually and put them in the mods folder in the installation directory. I've played with modlists that had more than 100 mods in them and never had a Linux related issue.
To answer your other question, I dual booted Linux for a while, mainly because of privacy concerns, but switched to Linux full time around the time Windows 10 came out. The thing that gave me the final push was Windows 10 on my new laptop telling me it couldn't open a zipped folder and I would need to pay for that feature! There was also a backup copy of W10 on a second drive that I didn't know about which automatically overwrote Linux when I tried to install it.
Every distro I listed is awesome in it's own ways. Arch is great, but you will break it.
Arch is for people that want to learn Linux enough to fix it and/or tailor it down to the last package, if you want something that just works no matter what, it's not for you.
However, if you have a second PC and your activities are not critically important and you have lots of free time, it's great to learn how Linux works.
Having 2 drives also works fine. Just don't dual boot on the same drive, as that will eventually result in being unable to boot.
Gaming on Linux is flourishing. Achievable migration for most games. Biggest niche asterisk from my perspective is VR. Already a technical pain in the ass to get working reliably/efficiently on Windows. Throw Linux into the mix and expect to have a hell of a time configuring and troubleshooting.
I have found WiVRn to be a delight to use on Linux with my Quest headset. Works with many other wireless headsets, too. Very little issues with it playing Windows VR games on Linux.
Linux works great for gaming in my experience. I have a huge games library and I haven't had many if any games that don't run. There are certainly some games that need some tweaking to get working or optimisation to run well. I generally have those problems with older games though as my library includes some retro games (games for Windows 98 being the ones I have to tweak most).
Mods certainly do work - I've modded skyrim and rimworld extensively on Linux, as well as Oblivion, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines, Minecraft and more without issue. Proprietary mod managers may not work but they're often the poorer ones that are really just tools to advertise and market at you.
The vast majority of game mods work inside the game itself, so if the game runs on Linux the mods will work. The exception would be mods that need to run as a Windows program themselves separate to the game exe. Those can also be made to work, it's just a bit more involved. Those kinds of mods are pretty rare in my experience though. Mods that act as game launchers etc work fine too, but just need some tweaking to ensure they launch instead of the game exe.
Most games mods can be manually installed and big games even have their own Linux native mod managers - like Minecraft custom launchers and Rimpy for Rimworld etc.
I do still have Windows on my PC in case I need it but haven't used it for gaming in well over a year. I have a desktop so having a spare drive for windows is not a big deal to me but I'm tempted to wipe it as I don't use it.
The one bit that people do have issues with is Anti cheat software for multiplayer games. That's not an area of gaming I do, but I have seen reports of certain games using proprietary systems that lock out Linux. That's a problem you can't get round except by having Windows available on your system.If there is a specific game you want like that isn't working on Linux.
I have bazzite on a gaming only HTPC and it's a gazillion times easier to use than having windows boot into big picture mode. It's just so much better, I rarely have to keep a mouse around with me now for when I want/need to change system settings.
The only reason I kept Windows on my PC was to play League with a friend occasionally. So at some point I removed Windows completely to free disk space and I told my friend he could install Dota 2 if he wants to keep playing with me 😁
I’m joining the linux cult. I’m switching my main gaming pc this week. I’m sick of seeing news of Microsoft aiding in atrocities and destroying game studios.
The only game I have not been able to get work has been pubg. Everything else has been great and run fine once proton was up and running. I am using bazzite 41 as my current distro.
I uninstalled Windows few years ago even though I play the latest AAAs and indies games, including in VR, that's how good Linux for gamers.
You can check my post history but basically once you have your hardware well supported (basically the right drivers) and rely on a good system to evaluate compatibility (e.g. ProtonDB) then you won't get any surprise.
I suggest though that you try it yourself, e.g setup a Linux distribution of your chosing, a game you already own and... see if it feels good. If it does not, feel free to ask around and people will be happy to help if you provide a clear problem with your documented attempts to fix it, at least you can count on me.
So... finally why did I change? Well beside the "it actually works" it is also a lot more coherent with my own WorldView and my skillset. I'm a professional developer, WebXR prototypist to be more specific, so having an OS that does not put arbitrary (well, mostly about control for profit) limits on what I can or can not do is simply better. I can play for fun AND I can tinker with the same OS. I don't have to reboot if I just happen to have an idea that I want to try, I can just do it right here and there.
TL;DR: it works and it's better, giving me all the freedom I need to be creative and not feel constrained.
PS: also not giving more money to multibillionaires from Microsoft does feel nice.
Games mostly work. If they have a native Linux version they work (and more games have a native Linux version than you may expect). For Windows-only games, there's a compatibility layer called Proton (which is a gaming-focused fork of a more general compatibility layer called Wine) that lets you run Windows executables on Linux. IME most Windows games run flawlessly with Proton. You can check games on protondb.com/ to see how well they run on Proton.
Rimworld has a native Linux version, and I've not had any problems with Rimworld mods from Steam workshop on Linux. Never tried modding Skyrim so can't say on that.
The native version of rimworld has a bug where your FPS get nuked if you use the mouse to move the screen around, but there is a mod thay fixes that issue lol. I have had no other issues with rimworld on linux.
I've never experienced that tbh but I use WASD, occasionally mouse scrolling as in when the screen moves when your cursor is near the edge of the screen. Unless you mean that kind of mouse scrolling causes the bug, in which case it doesn't seem to happen for me. Glad there's a fix though
Its has been great: Most of the games I already played worked on Linux. Some you might have more fps. Some less Some Games (e.g, Gmod) use Proton instead of the Native build. Some games (e.g, Tf2) you can only Use Native which uses DXVK. For Gmod cause its very outdated(Chromium is outdated,OGL only,lower fps) Had to quit Roblox and Fortnite to remove windows + those games sucked anyways and roblox just platform decision I also Like how Directx 9 and 11 are Vulkan underneath the hood results in more fps. And you can also Translate OGL calls into Vulkan via Zink. (Also via Nvidia it works) Modding is also Similar how you do it on Windows(except maybe for some special windows only mods) The only things I hate is VKD3D-PROTON sucks on Nvidia. And that some games require launch options(which is fine for me,But not fine for people who want No tinkering).
Pop!_OS was a lifesaver when I was learning Linux. You can just look up Ubuntu related questions for tech support, the graphics drivers are preconfigured, and the interface is easy to use.
I'm on CachyOS with KDE now, but I highly recommend Pop! for a first-timer not looking to tinker.
Also, with ProtonTricks you can still mod stuff. It's not perfect, but there's a version of Mod Organizer 2 for Linux ;P
Bazzite looks good for beginners, I like cachyos as a beginner but im a tinkerer, using gnome reminds me of cydia, I like cachyos because unlimited options, never feel like I can't install something, it's prob on the aur or whatever.
if cachyos pacman for cachyosrepo paru for aur At first I was confused on packages being missing
grab flatpak support and use flathub for some things
appimages are nice with gear lever (updates/menu)
can easily grab snapd support if you want to cover more areas
debtap to make debs usable on arch
I had always been turned away from linux because of the many formats deb, snap, etc. and being confused about support. But now I know I can get support for most things just installing whats needed from their website. (seems easiest with arch, least instructions)
BTW, while that made me comfortable when I swapped, knowing I can have whatever. I only needed to add flatpak support, and grab gearlever, everything else is unnecessary and available on the aur or as an appimage typically.
I switched full time to Linux last year and primarily use my computer for gaming. It's been great. I play games through steam so YMMV with other systems. I haven't had any issues playing a variety of games such as Factorio (built for Linux), GTFO, Horizon: Forbidden West, PEAK, Ready or Not, Plate Up... It's been rare for me to have an issue. I remember an issue trying to play Plate Up via steam remote play.
I play PlateUp with a friend, we started on remote play while I wasnt sure if I liked the game. It had issues where if the window lost focus, I'd crash and the entire game session was lost. Anyway, I bought the game and have never had any issues since. Its super fun!
It's ok, not great but just ok. I mostly recommend people to keep a one drive for linux and one for windows exclusively for gaming. That way you can also keep any propietary software you need on your windows drive without compromising your linux drive.
I switched to Linux a few weeks ago after being a windows user. Windows is pretty much all I've known and grew up on it. I made the switch after my partner had been using it for a long time. We are both gamers and play things like palworld, sims 4, dark souls, etc. I've found that most games run fine even though they say that it's not Linux supported. My PC runs faster and responds faster than I'm used to than it was on windows.
I've never played Rimworld, so I don't know the modding situation on it.
I attempted to mod Skyrim, and as far as I can tell, it's not that the mods don't work, it's that the primary mod manager Nexus is currently using (Vortex) is kind of a pain in the ass to set up on Linux. They are currently working on a new mod manager that should be natively compatible and should resolve that issue.
But for every other game I've ever modded on Linux it works exactly the same as it does on Windows.
Truthfully, outside of the handful of games that don't want me playing them because of my OS, 90% of my games work exactly the same, if not better. The remaining 10% might require a little tinkering to get running, or have some weird hiccup (having to run it in Proton instead of native because for some reason they're "different versions" thus menaing I can only play with friends on Windows in the Proton version), but I honestly couldn't be happier.
It feels like I'm playing on my computer again, not Microsoft's computer.
I dual boot Windows and EndeavourOS. I've got a range of games running great on Linux, performance does take a hit in most cases but as long as you have good hardware and aren't chasing ultimate FPS numbers, it is usually acceptable.
I wish I could make the full switch but music recording just isn't a good experience on Linux. High latency, lack of audio device configuration, and a limited range of instruments and effects (VST files), all means a Mac or Windows are the only options.
90% of games can be played on Linux, though some of them actually happened to require some sort of tweaks to get them working. That said, the experience my producer and I have had for about 5 years (August 20th I think will be 5 years) was nothing short of wondrous.
I've only had problems with Stellaris mods, i guess they use some windows only libraries? Ah and Elite Dangerous mods. Games like Starbound work even better on Linux though
Pretty good. Some games have issues on Linux, especially some that don't have native controls for DualShock 4 controllers and not using Steam Input. Even the ones that do sometimes dont work without Steam Input on (which shows XBOX buttons).
I've only had actual crashes with Forza Horizon 4 and 5 on Linux. Everything else works fine.
Distro is Arch Linux (BTW).
As to why I swapped, I get better performance on Linux than on Windows.
Built.myself a new.gaming desktop and decided to dive into thw deep end by installing linux. Been working quite well, so far. Almost all the games i play do not use any anti-cheat, so i don't feel that i'm missing out on anything. The only game which does not work that well is Roadcraft. I'll just wait until it is patched to run better. I have lots of games in my backlog to play anyway.
If you just want to play the game, then gaming works surprisingly well on Linux. Very well.
I have the same game on Steam running on 2 separate computers, Fedora and Win 11. On the Fedora one, everything is just rock solid. Heck, even when I am rendering some very intensive 3D stuff on another workspace for work and use 50% of the RAM, the game is still running. On the Win 11 laptop, random issues happen where my cursor dissapears and the entire desktop freezes.
OTOH, if you need the gaming accessories to work properly then I'm not sure, could be a 50/50. For eg, if your laptop has some proprietary sound card, then Linux might not be able to take advantage of that. On Windows, these should work OOTB.
My friends are currently throwing a tantrum because I won't "just enable Secure Boot and run Windows" to play Battlefield 6 with them. But I've never felt that I must play a specific game, so the few ones who are incompatible (usually due to bad anti-cheats) have been easy to ignore. There are plenty of good games I can play on Linux.
Palantir, an emerging tech company that was founded by Peter Thiel in 2003 with support from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, is a central player in the fight between the old guard and the up and coming weapons firms of Silicon Valley.
“The company’s transformation from an awkward Silicon Valley upstart trying to make it as a government contractor has also emboldened it. Some of its recent and prospective deals toe the lines of what even some of the company’s current and former employees consider a violation of ethical applications of AI and moral uses of software by the government—and Palantir is unapologetic.”
“Unapologetic” may be an understatement. At the height of the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza, in January 2024, Palantir president and CEO Alex Karp held the company’s board meeting in Tel Aviv to show solidarity with the Israeli war effort and to goad other pro-Israel business executives to openly support that country’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which many independent experts – including independent human rights groups based in Israel – have described as a genocide.
Palantir also has extraordinary influence inside the Trump team, beginning with vice president J.D. Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by Palantir’s Peter Thiel before joining the administration. And former Palantir employees are hard at work inside a variety of executive branch agencies. At least a half dozen former company employees worked inside the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, making recommendations for deep cuts in a variety of federal agencies. And a senior counselor at Palantir has close ties to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Palantir is aggressively pursuing business with Saudi Arabia, a move that the Journal article describes as “a departure from the company’s stated focus on Western democratic values and freedom of speech.”
The emerging military tech firms and the venture capital firms that invest in them see themselves as more than just business people. They believe that they are a special breed of human being, the “new patriots” who are willing to take risks to restore America’s position in a place of global dominance, so far ahead of China that Beijing will never catch up, or so Karp and others have said.
Palantir is on a roll, experiencing record growth through government contracting. But its activities have raised ethical concerns from former employees and the larger public.
After losing a suit that took seven years to resolve, Fintiv is trying to sue Apple again, and is again alleging the company built Apple Pay using stolen mobile wallet technology.
video is in Arabic but there are high quality english subtitles!
a note: for burning BDXL discs on Linux, i've seen conflicting reports about K3b, some say it works, others say it doesn't... if someone has had any luck burning BDXL discs on Linux, i'd love to know what setup you used!
Nah, max capacity for the Blu-Ray format was always around 100GB, but some go higher. The limiting factor is actually the data transfer speed - it's worse than fucking USB2.
Some games on Steam are DRM-free, so you don't have to buy these games twice. You could either burn just the game files, or you could create your own setup wizard using Inno Setup or some similar software.
Is a blue-ray (or optical media in general) more lasting/durable than an SD card? Archiving my games library in Switch-like jewel cases would be pretty cute.
that’s a very good point! personally I always buy on GOG first but there are still some DRM-free games on steam (or itch.io) that aren’t on GOG
SD cards are typically rated to retain data for 10 years, which for preservation is pretty bad, tho some high quality cards could last longer. archival-grade optical media is way more durable if kept in good storage conditions; in the video he uses M-discs, which are rated for 1000 years (even tho let’s be honest that’s more marketing than anything)
SD cards are one of the most volatile mediums for data storage. Flash memory in general runs the risk of discharge over time. Being powered every now and then can help IIRC.
I've looked into long-term data hoarding and found that there's not too much consensus on the best mediums. They all have their problems. Most turn their noses up at the idea of a set-it-and-forget-it system, preferring laboriously maintained arrays of HDDs. These fail somewhat regularly so they maintain multiple backups and plan/build around that.
I like optical media, but its problems include high cost per GB, taking up significant physical space, the inability to rewrite data, slow speed, and the waning availability of disk drives. Its longevity also depends on the specific technology the disk uses. Some disks are chemically active and the chemicals can break down over time. These can have comparable life to just storing it on a USB drive or something, so I wouldn't bother with those.
I've been using discs specifically made for longevity called M-DISCs. They are supposedly chemically inert and can last for hundreds of years. They're expensive compared to normal BDXLs, you need a bluray drive rated for burning them, and some people say they're hokey...their lifetime claim is pretty lofty, to be fair. I also use archival gold DVDs (4.7GB) for smaller files.
july 2025, arch linux is most popular, what would you recommend?
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