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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Patch@feddit.uktoLinux@lemmy.mlXFCE Vs MATE
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    9 hours ago

    For me it’s MATE.

    For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.

    MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.

    Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).


  • The thing to remember about investing (forex or otherwise) is that it’s an enormous global industry. One of the largest and richest there is. If you’re a normal person, with a normal day job, tinkering around in the evening trying to pick stocks or write algorithms, just remember that there are countless thousands of professional, experienced, trained analysts all over the world doing the exact same thing 40 hours a week, week in week out.

    There are no easy bucks to be made. If it was easy, it’d already be done.




  • Bridgy Fed is pretty straightforward. You just follow the account and away you go.

    It doesn’t make your bridged posts particularly attractive-looking (essentially you appear as a bot under a subdomain of a server), but it’s searchable and discoverable in the target network.

    I’m now mostly using Blue Sky, but I bridge to Mastodon, so all my posts form part of the content that’s available to fediverse users. For little old me that’s not all that important, but if every big organisation or journalist or celeb did that too, that’d do a lot to build vitality into the fediverse network.





  • All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.

    I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.

    Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).

    This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.




  • Patch@feddit.uktoLinux@lemmy.mlA Linux Desktop for the family
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    5 days ago

    A regular reminder that ChromeOS is Linux. It’s Linux you can buy from a bricks and mortar store, preconfigured for the average low-knowledge user, and with minimal to no maintenance overhead.

    We enthusiasts obviously mostly hate it, but we’re not its target audience. Its target audience (non-techies who mostly just like to use their phones) get on great with it.

    People need to accept that any Linux distro made for mass market is going to look more or less like ChromeOS. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as traditional distros also continue to exist. But people need to get out of their heads that the “year of Linux on the desktop” looks like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint. What it looks like is ChromeOS.


  • Considering the fediverse microblogging scene includes Threads, which claims to have hundreds of millions of active users, I’d say its death is greatly exaggerated.

    Yes, I know a lot of Mastodon servers refuse to federate with Threads, and yes I know their active user figures are likely very different from what they claim. But at the end of the day, it’s an ActivityPub microblogging platform with a considerable userbase and a very rich corporate backer.




  • Threads (for better or worse) demonstrates that that’s not a fundamental obstacle for fediverse microblogging.

    If someone wanted to launch a Mastodon fork with algorithm-driven content discovery, they could do. Just as with Lemmy/kbin/mbin, the beauty of the fediverse is that different servers can take quite different approaches to use experience design whilst still maintaining compatibility with the rest of the community.


  • It’s not a bad shout for beginners by any stretch, but it has a massively overdone reputation for beginner-friendliness that is not really deserved

    Cinnamon, for one. Yes, it looks kind of like Windows. But the similarity is surface deep, and it’s also pretty janky- by far the biggest resource hog of all the main DEs, lots of weird snagging bugs and stability issues. I’ve always found it very unsatisfying.

    I personally use MATE quite a lot and I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t really be recommending that to Windows users either; it’s pretty old school at this point.

    Keep recommending Mint to people by all means, though. If you like it and it’s what you use, that’s still a great recommendation. There is fundamentally no reason why beginners shouldn’t use it as their first distro.



  • Intel as a company isn’t going anywhere any time soon; they’re just too big, with too many resources, not to do at least OK.

    They have serious challenges in their approach and performance to engineering, but short of merging with someone else they’ll find their niche. For as long as x86-derived architectures remain current (i.e. if AMD is still chugging along with them) they’ll continue to put out their own chips, and occasionally they’ll manage to get an edge.

    The real question would be what happens if x86 finally ceases to be viable. In theory there’s nothing stopping Intel (or AMD) pivoting to ARM or RISC-V (or fucking POWER for that matter) if that’s where the market goes. Losing the patent/licensing edge would sting, though.