If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered things in IT that “should be easy to XYZ…” That actually were a nightmare to deal with, I’d damn near be retired already.

And you’re 100% correct about Microsoft products. I’ll give you 1 guess what company was bragging loudly earlier this year about how much AI-generated code their software engineers are using.

I know they are talking about PSDs, they listed it in their test suite. I read it as the test working for all but a few tools, but I guess they could just be talking about coverage.

Either way, it still does and will suffer from all the same issues I listed in my comment.

From their own documentation:

opening and re-saving a document renders the same for 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set and 169 of 170 in our mixed ag-psd/psd-tools set

Just what I want in my editing software, the assurance that my saved files will mostly render properly when reopened in the same program…

This is exactly what will sink any attempts to do similar things, it’s not the broad functionality of the software, it’s all the billions of edge cases.

The LLMs will be able to get all the general requirements mostly right, and that’s where it will stop. The subtle errors and bugs will pile up steadily as the codebase grows too large and complex for even frontier models to accurately summarize, and the people who vibed it to begin with don’t actually understand what is happening, so they can’t troubleshoot effectively.

Automated bug reports will pile up, agents will be dispatched in greater numbers, leading to cost issues and further complicating and compounding the errors in a bloated and convoluted codebase. The leads of the project will get burned out and abandon the project, leaving a giant, rotting, husk behind. Software that was forever, “almost working properly.”

I agree with Stallman and others on this sort of thing, it should be illegal for any public institution to use proprietary, corporate software in any capacity.

Public institutions are supposed to serve and benefit the public good first and foremost. The idea that they can do that equally well or better by partnering with mega-corps who’s only fundamental drive is to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders, is idiotic.

Was this the guy who had that blog post about Europe being “ruined” by immigrants?

Don’t let this nut sully your views on actual leftists, most of us are pretty sensible. ❤️

They are very likely a bot anyways lol

If you’re using a 30+ year old computer in the modern day, you’ve already sacrificed security.

The price and availability of a 15 year old computer is almost the same as a 30 year old computer, you can get a fully functional 1st gen i5 PC that will sprint circles around the highest end 90’s PC for $40. Honestly, most people are just e-wasting computers that old, I’m sure you could easily get them for free, hell, lots of people would pay you to take them off their hands.

You’re right, it’s way better.

No prob. Most of these things won’t take long, a few mins each. I tried to order them roughly by easy to difficult/time consuming.

Good luck!

1. Check your thermals on your CPU and GPU, make sure they aren’t running too hot.
2. Turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Then check all your physical connections from the power supply to the motherboard and your graphics card. Everything should be fully seated in the sockets and firmly locked in. Loose connectors can cause power delivery issues that freeze or crash a system. In rare cases they can short out, causing severe damage to the components, or even a fire. So it’s important to do anyways.
3. Check your motherboard manufacture’s website and make sure you’re using the latest BIOS version. Your BIOS screen will tell you what your exact model number is and the current BIOS version.
4. Check to make sure you’re not running out of system RAM.
5. Use Furmark to stress test your GPU. If it runs in stress test mode for at least 4 hours straight without any crashes, that’s a good sign that your GPU isn’t the issue.
6. Use a CPU stress test program to do the same to your CPU. I actually like to go to Lichess.org, open their analysis board tool Lichess Analysis Tool, go into the settings and max out the move search depth, memory limit, and maximum lines calculated. Then I just make 15-20 random moves. The chess engine will sit there and calculate as long as you have that tab open on your local machine, and it will max out every core on your CPU 100% but there are dozens of other ways to stress your CPU, so feel free to search for them.
7. You may have a lemon of a CPU or GPU chip. All chips are “binned” meaning they are tested at the factory and depending on how they perform, they are accepted or rejected within certain boundaries, but there is a range. Some chips just barely pass the minimum standards brand new. Since all electronics degrade over time, especially modern chips with billions of microscopic transistors, if your chip already was barely good enough to pass the minimum specs when it was fresh out of the box, it can start to become unstable even under normal workloads, let alone more heavy use like what you’re describing. Undervolting and underclocking can help fix this. Using your motherboard’s settings or 3rd party tools (like LACT for GPUs), you can limit the maximum voltage and/or maximum frequency of your chips. This not only will reduce the thermal output of your chips, making them run cooler and slowing the degradation process, but often will make them run much more stable.

If you like/don’t mind working in the terminal, Neovim can do basically anything, it’s hyper-modular. But the learning curve is very steep. The people who use it are absolutely devoted, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but it’s not made with the beginner in mind.

If you want a traditional GUI app, Kate from the KDE team is a really nice, reasonably lightweight IDE. Kate IDE

It’s like a simplified VSCodium. It has all the basic IDE features, LSP and syntax highlighting for 400+ programming languages, tabs/panes/window support, code breakpoints, Git integration, built-in terminal execution, and community plugins for various other features.

The one thing Kate doesn’t have for your use case, is a built-in live HTML preview. Technically, Kate actually supports a simple HTML live preview if you enable it, but only in the Linux version, and from what I read online, other than very basic HTML stuff, it’s not very good. There may be a community plugin that somebody built, but you would need to research that yourself.

It’s easy to slop together the 10 Billionth remake of Pacman, Minesweeper, Kanban board, ToDo list, etc.

Actually making something innovative, unique, interesting, and useful is tough. It requires skill, knowledge, creativity, and passion to keep at it long after the high of vibe coding your first solitaire game fades away.

If LLMs are blockchain 2.0, then Vibe coding is its NFT fad. Just a way to take advantage of useful idiots who think being a software engineer consists of typing code all day as fast as possible.

It’s a lightweight, independent distro for power users. It’s also currently one of the very few distros still offering an official 32 bit version out of the box.

I use it on my oldest and lowest power machines. It’s snappy and stable. Plus, the name is badass, for whatever that’s worth lol.

Been using it for two years on my side business laptop, works awesome. Plug and play functionality with most the apps I need, and rock stable.

Slow and steady, with occasional spikes when a government or mega-corp does something particularly terrible.

I’ve been loving Incus containers for this very use case. Unlike Docker, Incus containers are by default persistent, and are full system containers, not just applications. So when you launch an Incus Debian 13 container for instance, you get a full Debian 13 installation, but at a fraction of the size of even a small traditional VM.

It’s a great happy medium between Ultra-minimal Docker containers designed for single applications, and old-school heavy VMs.

Gaming PC - Nobara (Fedora base with lots of gaming-specifc kernel optimizations baked in.)

Personal laptop - Linux Mint

Business laptop - Linux Mint Debian Edition

Junk/Test laptops - Void

Home lab main hypervisor - XCP-ng (Highly customized Fedora under the hood.)

NAS - TrueNAS (Debian under the hood.)

Virtual servers - Mostly Debian, but a few Alma Linux VMs to get that RHEL experience. Ubuntu Server for my self-hosted gaming servers.

Steam Deck - SteamOS (Valve’s immutable spin of Arch.)

Waterfox on Mobile has been working well for me so far.

Awesome to hear!

+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.

It’s my #1 “just works” distro