I realize NixOS has some hurdles and learning curve though.
Been using Manjaro XFCE for a minute, KDE is great if you're rocking ~32GB of RAM but for lightweight, MX Linux (Debian), Lubuntu (LXDE) Lightweight Ubuntu. Most distros come with drivers that trackpads and wireless just ..work. So many flavors but with KDE you can customize everything with rightclicking, no config edits. It's fun, but lower end machines I'd suggest XFCE, KDE will use 2GB of RAM just idling on desktop.
I ditched Windows completely back in 2017-2018 and haven't looked back. I'm no star-programmer or star sys-admin or anything but the love of tinkering with things, VMs, networking, sockets, SSH, SCP, rsync, having direct access to my kernel (like sysctl stuff), managing my ssh keys in ~/.ssh/, using a drop-down Quake style terminal (Tilda) has been a dream.
Why would somebody want to sign on with a 'cloud account' for their desktop login, have forced stuff like Teams, Edge (Are you SURE YOU WANT TO SWITCH TO CHROME/FIREFOX? notifications), OneDrive, and have things like Recall pushed on them.
Linux isn't rocket science any more there's Add/Remove programs on every distro and people can browse from there, there's software pulled straight from github for compiling/installing as well as the 'app store' for exploring.
It's been my tinkerer's heaven. Most you need is a trustable VPN with a killswitch that runs Wireguard and your linux install is going to be great.
Gaming wise, well gaming needs to get their heads out of their asses and dev for Linux and respect that just because there's not yet manjority market share doesn't mean there won't be.
Disposable OS now adays is just boot a live CD (USB) that loads everything in to RAM with NVidia drivers already loaded.
My suggestion to anybody, check out Ventoy: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
Try a bunch of linux distros .isos in oracle VMs or any VM managers, use Ventoy to put the ISOs on a flash drive, my 128GB stick lets me have dozens of them, and boot any distro you want you can have as many ISOs that will fit, they'll all boot when you select which one you want.
For the nerds: https://www.ghostbsd.org - BSD Desktop.
Say no to Recall.
</rant>
As much as I dislike KDE, this is just not true. Perhaps you mean your whole system idles at 2GB including all other running services?
To anyone new to Linux, I recommend sticking to Wayland. Gnome if you're familiar with MacOS, KDE if coming from Windows. Use a popular distro with good documentation online (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch).
Don't worry too much about memory. Just about anything will be lighter than windows. I've had friends choose the absolute worst X11 desktops because it's "light" then run into all sorts of multi monitor issues
Oh, thank god. I definitely heard the "You can't opt out!" line and was worried.
But I'm in the IT department at my work and our privacy teams are also not even considering to implement this as it's a legal minefield in Europe. So big brother won't come to my work yet, at least for now.
- people are going to be using intelligence with Siri. Siri sends all transcripts to Apple, even if processed locally. Will this include text transcripts too? That’s some seriously private information that gets sent to Apple that you can’t opt out of.
- have you looked at what’s in knowledge.db?
People hissy with Microsoft’s product because of OCR of the screen or is that only a factor?
And Apple intelligence is mostly local on device. I don't think I'll use it either as I have my own AI server already and I only use a Mac for work. But Apple's implementation is privacy-first, where Microsoft's is "get this to market first, worry about everything else later"
How is that different than disabling Recall on first boot/setup?
I don't use Siri. I have never been interested in talking to my computer. So that's one way to opt out.
On the other hand I kind of need a screen to use my computer.
I think you’ve skipped over the knowledgeC.db part. Know what that is and how it works?
Why would I trust that company with my data?
I assume they’ve changed functionality after that media, so I don’t know anything about its expected implementation anymore (and don’t particularly care, since my Windows device is just for games).
aI, on the other hand, is very interesting because it runs locally from a custom LLM with some very interesting instructions pre built. I’m excited to see where it goes and Apple’s press during WWDC makes it clear that they’re extremely interested in a secure and private implementation.
I think this is probably as good as it gets from a security pov, and completely misses the point of why this is an absolutely-terrible-no-good-idea in the first place.
I only have windows 11 on my media pc (accidental upgrade that i've never bothered to revert) and I believe it is not able to run recall - but even on a media pc, the thought of MS taking screenshots every few seconds creeps me the f*ck out.
I mean that seems like an absolute mountain of a factor. Who asked for or would want this? Delivering the ingestion of agents before the consumer use-case was never going to work. At least apple intelligence (:rolleyes:) seems to be tailored around the hypothetical needs of users.
I don't understand it and I can't imagine how out of touch you'd have to be to make it the default, but weirdly the market for this is out there.
Of course this information will only be used to improve your experience by us and our 872 selected partners.
> I definitely heard the "You can't opt out!" line and was worried.
> Microsoft is known for being utterly user-hostile when pushing features on people.
In truth ( so far ) .. you can opt out (not easily) and here Microsoft is guilty of poor engineering rather than active hostility (although hard to seperate).
Chris Titus, the source of a two week(?) old HN thread about Recall being "Mandatory" and unremovable from latest Windows w/out breaking file explorer released an eight minute update video on the matter:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42002418
For those not watching, the problem was a bad Microsoft dependancy manifest - a common DLL not marked as a file explorer dependancy got removed along with Recall causing file explorer to glitch.
This is now 'solved' and included in his cleanup | debloat scripts for those that want the feature gone.
He closes with some other thoughts on Microsoft feature software deployment going forwards into the future.
'Recall' for now is little more than a placeholder stub for most, incapable of activation or more for many w/out specific hardware, and intended to be "removable" provided the engineers get their manifest dependancies sorted out.
I find that a bit hard to believe given how aggressive Microsoft is putting copilot in the market. Copilot buttons on keyboards, in edge, in the windows toolbar, all without being asked for it.
I think it's more of a combo of both elements. I'm sure the marketing people don't like it being too easily removable. And the "not easy" opt out process is something I already call user hostile for such an invasive feature.
Sure it's only on copilot+ hardware but soon that'll be the only thing one can buy. And there's more reasons to want local AI without having a big brother spyware integrated.
_So far_ to date it's plausible to see what's happened with Recall being hard to "safely" remove as casual incompetence rather than deliberate malicious behaviour.
He expands on this in the latter part of the video linked above - but a very good point is that moving into the future, whether intended or not, care will likely not be taken to ensure ease of removal and seamless operation after scapel applied simply because the Windows stack of cards is getting big, unwieldy, and harder and herder for single engineers to grasp all of.
> And the "not easy" opt out process
In this specific instance it looks more like human error on a dependancy tree .. generally these are correct in Microsoft packages, screwups can happen.
but I've been using something of a homegrown equivalent of Recall most of the year and I really do think the concept has a lot of potential. definitely understand the privacy concerns (and especially if there's no opt-out), but I just want to encourage y'all to be open minded and consider the potential benefits.
anybody use google photos? I've got almost 20 years of photos and videos on it. But there's so many gaps in the timeline! so why not just record everything. and with an AI layer on top to help surface and search interesting/relevant moments. same thing for facebook and twitter and ig and hn and whatever social media you might use. it's such a privilege to be able to go back and look at our digital artifacts from years and decades past. so why not do it in 4k+audio.
but it's basically private daily youtube livestreams whenever I'm at my PC (so like 8+ hours a day) + limitless.ai for real time audio transcription (and whisper for local/offline transcription) + every 30 minutes throughout the day I do a quick status update+reflection in my obsidian notes, or ad-hoc annotation of notable moments in the day. WIP is using local multimodal models to add additional more fine-grained annotation from my livestream videos.
it's very much along the lines of "i've got a great idea for a video game, all you have to do is implement it". that and two bucks will get you a cup of coffee
also, get off my lawn :-)
I've been waiting for Windows to get the vertical taskbar back, but I'm beginning to think that the difficulty-to-develop is increasing faster than the development itself is progressing.
- Jean-Claude Juncker, former president of the European Commission
Haven’t liked windows in a long time (XP?). But still sad to see it go down this way.
it will be forced on using group policy, feeding some dashboard which then will inevitably form part of promotion/payrise/layoff process
But not all companies care about ethics of course.
... some sort of Total Recall, if you will.
