This is why I don’t contribute. Kudos to you for doing so, but I literally couldn’t handle that on a passion project. I get enough of that in my day job

If I could make a living off my passion projects I would love that and deal with what it entails, but dealing with that in my free time sounds like a nightmare.

There’s got to be a better way… But I appreciate you and hope you all the best from the bottom of my heart

Days after exposing himself as a fake poser of a gamer, Elon has conveniently (again) reminded us he’s also a fake poser of a programmer

I’m going to go out on a limb and say fedora silverblue or bazzite

Basic user? Use flat packs and enjoy easy graphics support, as well as all of the windows compatibility for gaming

Advanced user? Learn to do things in pods/containers or distrobox, it’s easy even if the quick start docs aren’t great (I can find my cheat sheets if anyone is going down that road)

Pro: most stuff just works, and it’s harder to config yourself into a corner you have to research your way out of

Cons: normal Linux install guides need to be modified a bit, it’s not hard but you do have to learn how to do it

It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron

We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then

It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support

Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently

I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?

We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

Ditto. I’m not going to put in the time to clean up a project working fine for me just to have it ignored or complained about. It’s all expectation, very little reward

And even if I did get volunteers, I’m not coordinating people on my personal projects. Sounds like a great way to take all the joy out of it…

Open source is just broken right now, it runs by draining the passion out of people

Well hey listen, I appreciate it. I would’ve spent who knows how long waffling between distos that I don’t feel drawn to, and even if I came across an atomic flavor, I probably would’ve just assumed it was marketing fluff

Good ideas need advocates, and this is a good idea… It’s a promise of an OS I want, not just running from one I don’t

I’m probably going to look at bazzite first. If I have containers that can run LLMs on my GPU, that checks off everything on my wish list except gaming. I’ll read up on it though, you’ve given me the context I need to care about learning more

Ok, when I googled it earlier I saw “containers and roll back to previous version” and I made a note to do more reading

Your write up was good, much clearer than what’s on fedora and Wikipedia. And the fact you pitched immutable OS’s in general first caught my attention… The concept is a no brainer. Decouple the os and the rest of the software, and don’t bother digging into one of a kind conflicts when updating things - just make it rebuildable and create it fresh. You never know when the wrong bit will flip

Nix’s “learn this one thing, configure it once, and you’re done” stuck in my head. And after a different distros, a couple lines installed Nvidia, Nvidia’s docker package and docker

But then I had to configure WiFi and spend half an hour learning why I couldn’t mount an external drive and how to manage it… I still have no regrets, I’ve got a USB that should start converting my friends and family’s old PCs into a self organizing AI/self hosting cluster… Hopefully it works next month lol

But not what I want in a daily driver. I want something that’ll quickly do what I tell it and gracefully handle the fact I have 6 versions of Java and no idea why I need a version from 2018 specifically. And that I’m going to add a repo to install something and instantly forget what I did if it seems like the best path forward at the time

You’ve sold that pretty well - my takeaway was that atomic fedora is very modular and low side effect and also an interchangable foundation I can swap out and roll back easily… At this point, if it can run containers and the drivers I need, it sounds like a great option.

I used to use VMs so every 6-12 months I could start clean with the latest and run setup scripts for my dependencies… It was just easier than debugging some conflict. This sounds even cleaner - I swap out the base at will, and the stuff I’ve built on it should stay intact. Plus it sounds much more testable

So my main concern is will it run on an HP omen - it has zero Linux support and a bunch of concerning driver needs, but it does have a second m2 slot… What’s the worst that can happen? Except apparently some models forget they have fans in Linux and I just know the iGPU-GPU switch will cause some problem with sleeping… But Windows is only going to get worse

Now that you’ve convinced me this might be the best course (I only see less problems than other distros would have), and I’ve talked myself into giving it a go, is there any recommended reading or key concepts I should look into? Any particular flavor(s) you’d point me to first?

Fedora Atomic a chance, it’s an extremely nice family of distros (e.g. Bluefin/ Aurora, Bazzite, etc.)!

Can you elaborate on this? I landed on nix for my PC turned server and haven’t regretted it, but I’ve been hesitant to go all in on my main laptop (I’m wary of my laptop iGPU and GPU switching becoming a config issue, and I’m dreading having to configure my wsl dev environments again…)

Windows is getting blatantly terrible enough I know I’m just putting it off, maybe a cool new technology might help make it sound more fun

People just don’t get it… LLMs are unreliable, casual, and easily distracted/incepted.

They’re also fucking magic.

That’s the starting point - those are the traits of the technology. So what is it useful for?

You said drafting basically - and yeah, absolutely. Solid use case.

Here’s the biggest one right now, IMO - education. An occasionally unreliable tutor is actually better than a perfect one - it makes you pay attention. Hook it into docs or a search through unstructured comments? It can rephrase for you, dumb it down or just present it casually. It can generate examples, and even tie concepts together thematically

Text generation - this is niche for “proper” usage, but very useful. I’m making a game, I want an arbitrarily large number of quest chains with dialogue. We’re talking every city in the US (for now), I don’t need high quality or perfect accuracy - I need to take a procedurally generated quest and fluff it up with some dialogue.

Assistants - if you take your news feed or morning brief (or most anything else), they can present the information in a more human way. It can curate, summarize, or even make a feed interactive with conversation. They can even do fantastic transcriptions and pretty good image recognition to handle all sorts of media

There’s plenty more, but here’s the thing - none of those are particularly economically valuable. Valuable at an individual/human level, but not something people are willing to pay for.

The tech is far from useless… Even in it’s current state, running on minimal hardware, it can do all sorts of formerly impossible things.

It’s just being sold as what they want it to be, not what it is

Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows

When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors

He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.

It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.

I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better

My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so

Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk