“Time to switch to uBlock Lite or another ad blocker”

No. Time to switch to Firefox or derivative such as Librewolf.

The in- in inflammable means “to cause to be”. Like indebted or indent. Flammable and inflammable are actually subtly different words, they dont mean exactly the same thing although often used interchangeably now.

This is not open source? There is no license just a statement saying free to use for personal and commercial projects, but don’t redistribute or resell.

This freeware at best but if you contribute to this project it’s not clear who owns the work.

A prediction for the 2024 US election

Trash “research” and trash journalism covering it. First they find that monkeys would write Shakespeare, it would just take on average longer than the entire existence of the universe. They then try to infer that how long it takes is relevant. It is not. The calculation is vaguely interesting as a curio but the shoehorned “discussion” and interpretation to get attention is crap and another example of bad science misleading people.

It’s pointless and stupid - the thought experiment itself is that infinite monkeys typing would eventually type the whole of Shakespeare. Not how long it would take. The whole point of it is that in a truly random system all known patterns should eventually emerge somewhere within it. The length of time it takes for the pattern to emerge is irrelevant as the idea is based in infinity. So for example if there is a truly random infinite multiverse then in theory all imaginable possibilities would exist somewhere within it at some point.

The metaverse a resounding failure, Facebook has latched on to the AI hype train in hopes of making the company relevant. They’re basically put of ideas on how to feed the beast of “forever growth” the markets demand.

I don’t have specific experience with the tools you list, however on googling it looks like Ableton Live does work under wine. Wine is what underpins playing windows games on Linux too; it’s very powerful and effective.

You can install Mint into a VM environment on your current PC (such as Virtual Box) and see how you get on with software you really can’t live without. It won’t run as fast as real life in a VM but you should get an idea whether any tools you can’t live without can work.

As for OneDrive there are unofficial clients to get it working with Linux if you want to sync to your local filesystem. However Microsoft doesn’t officially support it beyond Web browsers, so if you want something slick and supported you probably would be better migrating to other solutions. You’d certainly be able to migrate with the unofficial clients but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on them long term as things xna break if Microsoft unilaterally changes something.

There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?

Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don’t need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don’t need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.

However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).

Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?

Quick FYI - Exa is no longer fully maintained; there is a fork called Eza which is maintained. They couldn’t take over the original Exa repo as the original creator is unreachable. Eza is in many distros; I’ve installed it on OpenSuSe Tumbleweed with ease from the factory-oss.

https://github.com/eza-community/eza

For the Flatpak apt upgrade how about “flapt”.

Yeah I’m surprised they still haven’t got a large form colour E-ink tablet in their range.

I like by onyx colour tablet. Having said that colour eink still has a way to go in terms of quality and maybe they don’t think there would be enough demand for a large form colour tablet yet? I must admit while I like my colour eink tablet, I do still prefer the fidelity and crispness of my black and white boox.

That’s rather simplifying history and not the main reason Netscape failed.

Netscape lost because Microsoft used it’s dominant monopoly position to bundle Internet Explorer with windows. By 1999 the writing was already on the wall - IE had already overtaken Netscape market share and was growing rapidly.

The Mozilla project and code base change was a gamble to try and fix the problems. When Microsoft released IE6 2001 they didn’t bother releasing another major version for 6 years as they were so dominant.

So while the code base change was arguably mishandled, at worst it accelerated the decline. Instead the whole story is a poster child for how monopoloes can be used to destroy competition. The anti trust actions in the US and EU came too late for Netscape.

Ironically Microsoft was the receiving end of the same treatment when Google started pushing Chrome via it’s own monopoly in search. They made a better product than the incumbent but they pushed it hard via their website that everyone uses.

Genuinely, nothing so far.

I’ve tinkered with it but I basically don’t trust it. For example I don’t trust it to summarise documents or articles accurately, every time I don’t trust it to perform a full and comprehensive search and I don’t trust it not to provide me false or inaccurate information.

LLMs have potential to be useful tools, but what’s been released is half baked and rushed to market as part of the current bubble.

Why would I use tools that inherently “hallucinate” - I. E. are error strewn? I don’t want to fact check the output of an LLM.

This is in many ways the same as not relying on Wikipedia for information. It’s a good quick summary but you have to take everything with a pinch of salt and go to primary sources. I’ve seen Wikipedia be wildly inaccurate about topics I know in depth, and I’ve seen AI do the same.

So pass until the quality goes up. I don’t see that happening in the near future as the focus seems to be monetisation, not fixing the broken products. Sure, I’ll tinker occasionally and see how it’s getting on but this stuff is basically not fit for purpose yet.

As the saying goes, all that glitters is not gold. AI is superficially impressive but once you scratch the surface and have to actually rely on it then it’s just not fit for purpose beyond a curio for me.

Flatpak is supposed to be a sandbox, so if there is a vulnerable dependency then in theory any attack would be limited to the sandbox.

However, it depends on the software - some Flatpak need quite low level access to use, and in that case an attack or mlaware could get into the main system. And unfortunately Flatpak itself has vulnerabilities which cna negate the whole idea of a sandbox.

Flatpaks should be using up to date secure dependencies, but the reality is many do not. I would not rely on Flatpak for security. Even fully up to date Flatpaks can be insecure, and Flatpak itself have vulnerabilities that have needed fixing. And for many Flatpaks it’s not even clear who is maintaining them.

Flatpaks are useful for deploying software that’s just not available in your distros repos. But when deploying any software outside your repos - including App Image, build from source or 3rd party repos - you are opening your system up to security vulnerabilities. That’s the nature of installing 3rd party software. Flatpak offers some reassurance compared to some methods but it’s far from perfect.

If security is your prime concern, then Virtual Machines may be more secure route to sandboxing software (if done properly). Building from source would be the other option, as it means you take ont he responsibility for security by using the latest code including for dependencies. But there is no perfect option, it’s always about balancing risk vs convenience.

It’s also worth noting that software repos are also not perfect. But good distros invest a lot of time and effort in keeping them as up to date and secure as possible, usually via the hard work of volunteers.

The LLMs can claim whatever they like, it holds no weight or value. They are basically advanced plagiarism engines and the law has already made it clear you cannot copyright the output of an LLM.

This particular case will go nowhere, but there are plenty of legal cases between content creators and AI makers that are slowly moving through the legal system that will go somewhere.

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Then you have to trust the person you are communicating with has turned off windows recall. That has to be the starting position.

Tools will come to block or break windows recall but it will still be based on trust that the recipient is using them. Privacy centred apps like Signal wouldn’t want windows screen shotitng every message for example. There are many apps and tools including in the professional sphere that would not want their data leaking via recall so it will come.

Unfortunately it may come late in the professional realm probably after scandals break. Employers using recall data to investigate staff for example - it’s bound to happen eventually.

My own organisation, a huge health organisation, has opted in to CoPilot. It’s crazy in my view, even if our data is ring fenced in some way. I don’t want private patient information being used to train Microsoft shitty tools, or stored on their servers. Regulation and the law is way behind when it comes to this stuff.

May be less Nobara and more KDE. I love KDE but 6 defaults to Wayland and that is not a good mix with Nvidia in my experience. I am on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed on my main gaming desktop and had numerous problems at the beginning of the year when KDE 6 launched but since switching to X11 have had no issues. I have tried Wayland a couple of times since KDE updates and it has improved but remains flaky in my view. On a separate home media PC I use Nobara with an integrated AMD GPU I’ve not had any issues with KDE and Wayland.

When it comes to immutable desktops, I like the idea but be aware they do have their downsides. Installing custom software relies on universal formats like Flatpak (which have their own overhead and downsides, and not all of the packages are “official”) and if what you want is not available then it can be a pain having to use virtualisation and containers for a less locked down system, especially if dependencies for software are complex. They can bloat quickly but storage is dirt cheap these days so might not matter to you. I still find it too much faff. These are not insurmountable and may be worth it if concerned about the security and stability benefits. For me that’s particularly problematic as I like to try out niche programmes and play with the latest versions of emulation tools. If you like to tinker then immutable can get in the way.

I must admit though, I am someone who is (generally) quite happy to reinstall if I break the system. However the purported stability and security of immutable systems does make sense if you want a good system that “just works”.

Overall, in my experiences with Nobara and separately KDE and Nvidia have been good, as long as you avoid Wayland. May be worth a relook if the immutable nature of Bazzite isn’t for you.

Edit: should say I did consider Nobara for my desktop PC but opted to try OpenSuSE first. I really like it and haven’t had issues setting it up for gaming so I’ve not bothered switching. But Nobara in my media PC in my living room has been super convenient as it “just works” when it comes to controllers and all the gaming set up, so I also haven’t bothered switching that to OpenSuSE. Both are good.

That is a good point. I have moved to Proton mail but I keep my Gmail account as a backup and it’s part of my still used Google account. Can’t see myself ever shutting it down completely just in case, as much as I avoid Google as much as possible now.

I’ve had lots of problems with Nvidia over the years; you’re lucky not to. Latest has been with Wayland which are ongoing. That being said Nvidia drivers are much better generally than they used to be, and I’ve not had the myriad of small issues I used to get.

This is less to do with them being closed source drivers so much as their drivers being poorly maintained in the past. They seem much better maintained but even now the software support lags behind windows - you have to use 3rd party open source software to make use of the streaming features for example.