Using Napster was one of those defining childhood memories for me. I was in junior high when it came out and I remember hearing about it through rumors at school. It was one of my early memories, realizing that computers could be used for interesting things and not just office work.

Those were the days, spending 20 minutes downloading a 3 minute song over dialup.

What’s the recipe?

I wonder if all these companies rolling out AI before it’s ready will have a widespread impact on how people perceive AI. If you learn early on that AI answers can’t be trusted will people be less likely to use it, even if it improves to a useful point?

I’d also be interested in learning about IRC servers that were more social and less technology driven.

When you’re in school you’re often stuck with the software they require. No harm in that. Once you’re finished with school you can reevaluate. If you want to be more privacy focused you could make sure you’re only using Gmail for in a Firefox container tab for instance or look into sandboxing it other ways.

For the same reasons don’t worry about keeping Windows on your computer for classes. It’ll get easier when you’re out of college, any job will give you work equipment with the software and tools they make you use and you can keep all personal information out of those. You’ll be able to use what you want on your personal items.

Privacy is important, but not important as passing your classes.

You’re doing great!

Would be baller to be able to use a switch for running emulators for nes/snes/gb/gba.

I’m curious where you’re having issues. I’ve been able to use the little GNOME widget for setting up wireless connections for years.

Do you have an edge usecase that makes you drop back to using nmcli or is there a missing feature forcing you back to the ip/ifconfig commands?

No sarcasm, I’d just be interested in understanding your frustration a little better.

I still haven’t been able to give up reddit but I have always been a lurker there. Here I’m trying to make a conscious effort to participate in conversations. I’m trying to be positive, kind, and thoughtful because that’s what I want lemmy to be.

If you’re at a mid to large size company your direct managers likely don’t have any authority to give a bonus. There’s simply no budget they have access that go directly into paychecks.

I like the idea of trying to help your coworkers but I worry that rumor would be more disappointing to them vs any positive outcome.

I recently purchased a laptop from System76. I’ve been very happy with it. You can get many of their models with coreboot used as the system firmware which is unique. I have been disappointed that they usually recommend installing open source, but not in-tree modules for getting things like keyboard backlight working. It feels a bit like they’re not a Linux laptop company but instead that they’re a Pop!_ OS laptop company.

Linux distributions have definitely standardized over the years. You get a kernel, systemd, network manager, Firefox, etc from basically every distro targeting desktops. Most will have different spins for the popular desktop environments as well.

From a purely technical perspective the main difference of distributions today is the package manager. Are you using pacman, apt, dnf, or something else? We know as users that while some of these different package managers have advantages and disadvantages they are all doing the same thing. You can get basically all the equivalent packages on each major distribution. I sometimes feel sad thinking about all the volunteer effort working in parallel, but not together to package the same software using different package managers. In many ways it’s duplicate effort that I wish could be spent in better ways.

Even package managers are beginning to converge. Flatpack is becoming extremely popular and is my current preferred way to add software to my system.

Leaving technicals behind the only major difference I see between distro today is their philosophy on how frequently to update and what to exclude. Does every package get a new update immediately when it’s rolled out upstream like Arch? Are we going to stick to older packages and only apply security/bug fix updates like Debian, or do something in between? Do we want to bend over backwards to make it easy to install Nvidia drivers or tell users we don’t support closed source software? Do we want to make it as easy as possible to install codecs or leave it to the wider community to figure that out on their own?

I don’t think there’s any right or wrong answer. Use what you enjoy!

I’m glad to see open source video editors are still evolving. I know Davinci Resolve has become popular with Linux YouTubers for serious work.

I’d be curious to know a video editors opinion of what’s missing. Is it stability, GPU acceleration, UI or a combination of all of the above? What would be needed for you to switch to Kdenlive for example?