That’s On Me, I Set the Bar Too Low

I bought a low profile, low power A380 for a minitower linux machine to get something with enough power to smoothly run a modern high resolution desktop with minimal heat and sound. It has worked exactly as I hoped! Driver support seems perfectly solid, in comparison with my prior machine on a GTX750Ti. Hardware video decoding for modern codecs, variable refresh rate, etc. It have just been a solid trouble-free experience, which has been unusual in my prior experiences with Linux GPU support.

Ubuntu user here. Swapped away from Debian in its early days when Ubuntu made a real effort to stay current with the desktop environment (even coordinating their releases after GNOME), and back then it mattered. Nowadays my few attempts at other distros suggest that the hardware driver situation (especially proprietary) seems better on Ubuntu, for example to get everything working on fairly new laptops.

There are of course other things I’m less happy about. The snap installs via apt drives me crazy; not that I necessarily hate the technology, but sometimes I need a non-containeraized browser (for example to run inside another container), so I need to be allowed to choose what is being installed.

I made this the other day.

Would it work for you to drive to a larger parking garage (or even better, use public transport to a larger subway or bus station) and then use some form of battery operated micro-transport type vehicle fit for your type of limitation to move around the sidewalks/bike lanes in what can then be a more compact city center?

Anyone want to team up to build a time machine and travel the future until the perfect utopia is achieved?

How about we team up and try to make this world better instead?

Cortana is/was by far the best name of the digital assistants - probably because it was created by sci-fi story writers rather than a marketing department. They should just have upgraded her with the latest AI tech and trained her to show the same kind of sassy personality as in the games and it would have been perfect.

Who in their right mind thinks “Bing copilot” is a better name? It makes me picture something like the blow-up autopilot from Airplane!

I like calling it “x-twitter”, as it is short and makes sense when reading it out.

So, what you are saying is that by checking this trust API, we can filter out everyone running unaltered big-media approved browsers and hardware? We’d end up splitting the web into two disjoint parts, one for big corporate and sheeple - and one more akin to the web of old comprised by skilled tech people and hobbyists? A rift that could finally bring an end to eternal September? … Are we sure this proposal a bad thing?

As a different, more techy, solution that can work depending on the people you collaborate with, is to use a hosted Git service for collaboration (if you want to stay completely open source, a self-hosted GitLab).

Then, change your publication workflow to write in Markdown, ReST, or one of the other ascii formats that previews correctly, and set up your CI to render the documents automatically into, e.g., pdf:s using a converter. There are all kinds of converters from Markdown/ReST -> docs, presentation, etc. formats that are as competent - if not more so - than the usual office suites. This setup offers both online editing in the GitLab instance and offline by local cloning of the Git repo.

The side effect is that this system very seriously records and preserve your document history. You can see exactly who, at what point, changed, added, and removed things. For some types of documents, this can be very important.