I've been saying this for some time now: AI is going to kill so many business models because it's really great at creating summaries.

You don't even need a huge cloud-basrd AI! Local AI—running on your PC—can search the web, summarize the news (and Wikipedia articles), and perform similar tasks without a human ever visiting the site.

It's like having your own personal secretary that you can tell to go do stuff.

I think it's going to kill free search engines because it can go do a search on all of them at once in seconds and no human will ever see those ads.

I think it's going to kill free search engines because it can go do a search on all of them at once in seconds and no human will ever see those ads.

So sites will move to paywalls or aggresive WAFs and those LLMs will become useless at the same time succeeding in killing search engines leaving no viable alternatives.

Already half the public internet is inaccessible without allowing to be heavily fingerprinted and be tracked just to prove you are a human user.

Sounds like a good plan. Upgrade if you feel like it and have the dough. The best time is now and/or never.

Speed differences have become more theoretical with every new generation and "mandatory upgrades" have been decades apart lately. Unless win14 is injected into the brain I don't see any changes to the current status quo.

Can't really advise you on what to do, but here's some conaiderations:

• I still use a 4th gen i7 with 16 GB ddr3 and a gtx970, still going fine in its 10th year. Just recently upgraded to a gtx1060 I found around
• 10 years old techbology isn't really any diffetent than today, only slower, but luckily architectural incompatibility is becoming less and less of a problem (except when it's forced upon for no particular reason, see win11)
• gpu especially are extremely backward and forward compatible, if you only need more VRAM, you can use a modern gpu with a very old mobo and cpu and chances are you'll be as good, and even if you need to upgradr them later because you are cpu-bottleneck, you can still keep the gpu. I'm guessing in 90% of cases, pci lane speed is relatively unimportant wether it's gen3 or gen5.

Basically, upgradr when you feel you are limited in what you can do, ignore the pressure caused by the generations passing by, as time goes on, I predict we'll need less and less hardware upgrade until a nee revolutionary technology comes about that changes everything.

The final "Gate" so to speak, will end up being your motherboard.

At a certain point, your motherboard just won't support a newer part and you'll have upgraded all the existing parts as far as they can go.

My current rig that I'm still perfectly content with is just under ten years old. I've upgraded the Ram to as much as the motherboard will allow. I've upgraded the Video Card two or three times in that span, where it's now running a 3060. While I still see a huge improvement with that, there's no doubt that the video card is being throttled somewhat by the motherboard throughput limitations, but for I don't mind. I've added extra cooling fans, replaced the drives with SSD and use the old metal spinners for extra storage.

It still runs plenty fast enough to do Blender (nothing complex, just airplane modelling and animation for xplane), video editing with DaVinci Resolve (as long as I use proxy clips and take it a little easy on the motion graphics), and most newer games (though of course not at ultra settings).

The last bottleneck that I'll simply never be able to pass is the fact that the CPU socket will never support an octocore processor or higher. I can upgrade as much as I want, but it will never not be a quad-core.

For now that's fine. But that's the hard limit that I've given myself. Your mileage may vary.

My criteria for when to upgrade is simple: when it no longer runs the games I want to play at an acceptable framerate. I have a 30-series card, but I have yet to play a game where I had a problem with framerate, so I have no plans to upgrade. It wasn't until I ran into a game where I was getting 20 FPS at minimum settings on my old GTX 960 that I decided it was time to upgrade.

One could probably say the same about workstation performance if it is taking too long to run and becoming a productivity bottleneck. For something like that, I think it comes down to an assessment of how much you will be spending versus what percentage reduction in processing time you will see out of the upgrade. If it is only a marginal improvement, maybe wait, but if it would be a substantial uplift, then it is probably a worthwhile return on investment.

As others have said, the general rule is simple: if it no longer runs what you want it to run, upgrade.

For example, I have an Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU. It's no longer that new, it's like 5+ years old at this point. But most of the games I play are at least 10 years old—I think the newest, and most graphically intense, game I own is Cyberpunk 2077—and my GPU runs them just fine.

So, why would I spend hundreds of dollars on a new GPU when it's still wholly functional for my needs?

Seems reasonable to me, although I might be lacking perspective since my latest hardware is already 6 years old.

In previous years, my criteria was to upgrade once the hardware was holding back my workflow and productivity. But with Moore's Law coming to a plateau, I've upgraded my RAM, GPU, and SSD not because I have to, but just because I got an very good deal on them.

DISCLAIMER
I am not a computer security expert, merely a hobbyist having read some blogs from people who sounded smart. It is more than probable that I am mistaken in one or more parts of this post.

Linux is not more secure than Windows. By default, it's actually considerably more vulnerable than Windows. Source

In my opinion an antivirus doesn't really solve your problem. What you actually want is sandboxing, which means restricting user and program privileges. I recommend getting familiar with SELinux (or alternatively AppArmor, although it isn't nearly as effective) and bubblewrap (or alernatively Firejail, which requires root privileges to run and is thus a bigger threat vector than bubblewrap).

Aside from that just disable any service you aren't using (like ssh), use a deny-all-allow-some firewall, and verify what you download. If the link says "100% REAL 1 MILLION FREE ROBUX DOWNLOAD CLICK HERE NOW", then maybe don't click there.

Because even an antivirus won't help you if you download malware, which isn't compiled by skids who lifted the code from some darknet hacker forum. Antivirus isn't some magical tool which makes your computer inherently more secure. Meaning you can't offload your responsibilty to a program running with kernel level privileges. Your computer, your responsibilty.

P.S: If you want a more secure computer, I'd recommend a minimal and/or rolling release distro (openSUSE, Arch, Void, Debian) or FreeBSD/OpenBSD (BSD variants mitigate many of Linux's inherent flaws).

I run ClamAV regularly, and it has not found anything on my several systems in the last 20 years. Good to know we're safe, or are we?

I'm more concerned about rogue browser extensions that may be innocent when you install them, but then change owners, and after an update that you don't even notice are going to do bad things.

Linux Antivirus is a very specific niche. It's mostly there to scan for Windows viruses and malware. So your Linux mailserver for example (or storage system) filters those out before they appear on your employee's computers.

What you'd instead do in Linux is harden your webserver and services, keep the webservices you host up to date and have some monitoring so you detect known rootkits or if your DNS server gets abused for a DDoS attack. And keep an eye on supply chain attacks if you're a developer. Because that's how attacks against Linux work. I've been scolded for saying this on Lemmy, but to this date, desktop computer malware isn't really a thing with Linux. Attacks almost exclusively target webservers and Internet of Things devices, routers and so on.

So an Antivirus on a desktop computer isn't going to do much, due to the lack of malware which works that way. And you'd still be vulnerable if someone hands you a malicious bash script to delete your home directory. It could however do something if you run Proton or Wine and run Windows programs in Linux.

If you want to do something for security, learn not to copy-paste stuff into the command line. Don't run executables from random places of the internet. Try to rely on your distribution's package repository. Do automatic updates, and generally do timely updates, especially with the webbrowser and stuff that's reachable from outside. Set strong passwords. And don't neglect your backups. Your harddisk is bound to fail anyway, eventually. I think that's going to get you 99% of the way. Installing an antivirus is only the next 0.2%.

Install the apparmor profiles and extra profiles packages from the apt repository. They are sensible restrictions on common apps (web browsers) to prevent anything malicious from happening if they are ever hijacked. Make sure apparmor is enabled. This will do more to keep you secure than an antivirus.

If you insist on an AV, install ClamAV and have it scan weekly. It's libre software and works well with Linux.

None at all tbh, at least if you use the PC alone and don't share a lot of stuff with Windows devices. If you do, then maybe scan .exe or other files (e-mail attatchments, etc.) with ClamAV or similar to prevent spreading stuff.

You usually don't need AV software because you install stuff differently than on Windows. You don't hunt .exe-files from random internet sites, thats irresponsible even for Windows.

You install your apps directly from your software center (a frontend for Flatpaks and repo software), where they usually are pretty safe.

Also, sandboxing is a thing. The prefered way for most people (and often default) is via Flatpak, where apps are restricted on what they can access and do. You can lock them down even further if you want.

There are more ways of sandboxing, but those are not so relevant here right now.

Also:
- If you run a script, check it first. I have zero clue in regards of coding, but even I can usually guess what each line is supposed to do.
- Don't add 3rd party repos if you can, use containers instead
- Go for the easiest route, guides for "Linux" aren't noob friendly. In your case, search for "Mint" instead, most stuff is pretty easy there.

Ultimately, it's going to be down to your risk profile. What do you have on your machine which would wouldn't want to lose or have released publicly? For many folks, we have things like pictures and personal documents which we would be rather upset about if they ended up ransomed. And sadly, ransomware exists for Linux. Lockbit, for example is known to have a Linux variant. And this is something which does not require root access to do damage. Most of the stuff you care about as a user exists in user space and is therefore susceptible to malware running in a user context.

The upshot is that due care can prevent a lot of malware. Don't download pirated software, don't run random scripts/binaries you find on the internet, watch for scam sites trying to convince you to paste random bash commands into the console (Clickfix is after Linux now). But, people make mistakes and it's entirely possible you'll make one and get nailed. If you feel the need to pull stuff down from the internet regularly, you might want to have something running as a last line of defense.

That said, ClamAV is probably sufficient. It has a real-time scanning daemon and you can run regular, scheduled scans. For most home users, that's enough. It won't catch anything truly novel, but most people don't get hit by the truly novel stuff. It's more likely you'll be browsing for porn/pirated movies and either get served a Clickfix/Fake AV page or you'll get tricked into running a binary you thought was a movie. Most of these will be known attacks and should be caught by A/V. Of course, nothing is perfect. So, have good backups as well.

Nothing needs an antivirus if you backup your data properly.

PS: I'm getting downvoted for this so I'll explain a bit more : if you backup properly, you can restore your data. Sure your system is fucked... but who cares? In fact if you care for your OS installation then right away it shows you are NOT in a reliable state. You install another OS and start from there. Maybe it's not even due to a virus, maybe your hardware burns in fire, same situation so IMHO a working backup (and by working I mean rolling, like TODAY it's done without your intervention) then you restore. Also please don't tell me about ransomware because even though it is a real threat, if you do your backups properly (as in not overwritting the old ones with the new ones) then you are still safe. It can be as basic as using rdiff-backup. It's fundamental to understand the difference between what's digital and what is not digital.