Linux May Be the Best Way to Avoid the AI Nightmare
Microsoft has Copilot Plus PCs loaded with AI, and rumors are that Apple is all in on AI, too, but if you don't want AI in everything you do, there is another option: Linux.
It's not AI that is the problem, it's half baked insecure data harvesting products pushed by big corporations that are the problem.
The biggest joke is that the LLM in Windows is running locally, it uses your hardware and not some big external server farm. But you can bet your ass that they still use it to data harvest the shit out of you.
Runs locally, mirrors remotely.
To ensure a seamless customer experience when their hardware isn't capable of running the model locally or if there is a problem with the local instance.
microsoft, probably.
That is an accurate description of AI in common usage even if it isn't an inherent aspect of AI.
Right, but AI is not the only way they're doing the data collection.
Locally run AI could be great. But sending all your data to an external server for processing is really, really bad.
You wrote AI twice.
It's not the "AI nightmare", it's a nightmare of capitalism, proprietary software and user-hostile behavior by a greedy, profit-extracting Big Tech corporation.
All true, and all a problem for which linux has been a solution (in the computing world) for decades now.
It's not just Linux, but free & open source software in general. And it's not just desktop PCs that are plagued by this corporate spyware, it's much worse when looking at the mobile device landscape. The only real solution for mobile devices is GrapheneOS with FOSS software installed from the F-Droid marketplace. Browsers are also under attack by proprietary software corporations, Google just intentionally broke adblockers on all Chromium-based browsers, so they can generate more ad revenue. Last year, they tried to push a proposal that would have massively extended their monopoly on web browsers (WEI). All the streaming services are screwing their users over and increasing the subscription prices while making the content library smaller. It's such a fucking scam, and it's almost sad to see how many people are dumb enough to fall for it.
You’re not wrong. AI is just another tool to scrape cash to the top while eliminating jobs. Could it realize benefits like doing specialized research and testing? Sure…but again, the results of that work are lost human jobs and scraping money to the top. We can argue about advancing technology in a horse cart driver vs automobile thing (won’t anyone think about the poor farriers out of work?) but we’ve already done everything we can to eliminate blue collar jobs with as much automation as possible. Now AI is set to attack middle class jobs. Economically I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
I mean, the problem isn't the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that's a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that's an absolute win in my book.
I find the nightmare getting a lot more noticeably bad with LLMs, though. That's not just correlation.
AI is a cool feature, which makes a great excuse for proprietary corporations to spy on their users. I'd say it's one of the best opportunities for an excuse of the last few decades. Only 9/11 was a better excuse to put everyone under corporate/government surveillance.
"The Year Of Linux on Desktops". Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening. What I'm feeling now is the same thing I felt when Mozilla originally split Firefox out, and made the first real competition to corporate browsers as a free product. People don't want all this bullshit, and want to retain control over the machines they are working on. Seems a lot more people are interested in FOSS environments now just to avoid all the other BS they hate getting shoveled at them.
“The Year Of Linux on Desktops”. Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening.
Been hearing this for decades.
And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.
Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.
Been hearing this for decades.
I've been hearing this about people hearing about people hearing that about Linux for decades.
We can dream 😔
Seems like we’ll get financially viable fusion power plants before that happens.
I don't see a "year of the Linux desktop" happening, but rather its share growing slowly over the years. Windows would probably not have one big event that ends its dominance, but it can be a death of a thousand cuts.
I can easily believe these types of continued enshittification will help drive more users to Linux desktop usage. But that will still be a small percent.
People have to know and care about the problem and then be willing to put in the effort to understand what to do. That combination is pretty limiting.
I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
I think it might. Demographics are changing to make PC users more technical overall. The casual user isn’t looking to purchase a desktop PC. Casual is now synonymous with mobile.
It used to be that you needed a desktop to do your taxes or make an insurance claim over the Internet. That’s just not true anymore.
The counterpoint are people like this, the feature they want is built on extreme data gathering. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a8fec90b-c349-46c9-8592-5dbe17ea4c8c.jpeg
Technically you could have such data gathered and stored locally, without sending them to big corpo. Privacy friendly "AI" is very much possible, it's just not favorable to those companies because they see those models as a tool and the data as what ends up making them money.
People may not want it but most don't know, care enough to adjust, or are just generally complacent. I mean, I DO care and find it hard to move to Linux due to lack of support for some of my work tasks.
I'm not so sure that the laypeople will, but I do expect a shift. Personally I'm still running Windows 10 next to Linux currently. Most of my time is still spent on Windows, because it's generally a bit more stable and hassle free due to the Windows monopoly. Software is written for Windows, so sadly it's usually just a better experience.
But so many things I read about Win 11 (and beyond) piss me off. It's my computer, I don't want them to decide things for me or farm my data. I'm mentally preparing for the transition to Linux-only. 90% of the software I use will work out of the box, and I think with some effort I can get like 8% of the rest to work. It'll be a lot of effort, but Micro$oft has pushed so far that I'm really starting to consider.
Multiple friends and colleagues (all programmers) I spoke are feeling the same way. I think Linux may double in full-time desktop users in a few years of this goes on.
The combined ages of my children taken from 2024 would not equal the first year I heard that Ubuntu would take over the market.
For me the year of the Linux desktop was 2014 - it's when I changed my desktop to Linux after using it on my laptop for a year. All the hardware on that machine has been replaced, but it's still running the same install from back then.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is corporate greed. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems, corporate greed will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.
I want all the cool Ai shit, but I want to be in charge of it 100%. I don't want a data mining company with an OS side project spying on me for profit.
Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don't actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.
At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software "solution" (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.
So we're getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one's devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).
LLMs in particular are unlikely to solve really any problems, much less a measurable number of the problems it is currently being thrown at.
I mean, if LLMs really make software engineering easier, we should also expect Linux apps to improve dramatically. But I’m not betting on it.
It's not greed - it's masqueraded violence being allowed, centralization, impunity, and general corruption, all supported by various IP, patent and "child protection" laws.
No separate component is necessary, it's a redundant system built very slowly and carefully.
Referencing that quote about blood of patriots, and another about difference between journalism and public relations being in outrage and offense, or difference between a protest and a demonstration being in obviously breaking rules.
EDIT: I meant - it's a general tendency. But IT today is as important as police station, post office and telegraph were in 1917. One can also refer to that "means of production" controversy.
People keep pointing the finger at AI, but miss the fact that the problem is
corporate greedcapitalism. AI has the possibility to help us solve problems,corporate greedcapitalism will gate keep the solutions and cause us suffering.
No need to thank me.
We don't have capitalism in the US, we have late-stage crony capitalism. Regulated capitalism is fine, but we are in a crony capitalist system which feeds corporate greed. Our government is controlled by a handful of mega corps which have their hands pulling the strings due to the lobbying system. It wasn't always this way, which is why I don't blame capitalism, I blame human greed.
AI can't solve problems. This should be abundantly clear by now from the number of laughable and even dangerous "solutions" it gives while stealing content, destroying privacy, and sucking up tons of power to do so. Just ban AI.
I choose to privately self-host open source AI models and stuff on Linux. It's almost like technology is a tool and corps are the ones fucking things up. Hmmm, imagine that.
Agreed
GPT4ALL ftw
It's so fun to play with offline AI. It doesn't have the creepy underpinnings of knowing art and journalism as well as musings from social media was blatantly stolen from the internet and sold as a service for profit.
Edit: I hate theft and if you think theft is ok for training llms go ahead and dislike this comment. I don't feel bad about what I said, local offline AI is just better because it doesn't work on the premise of backroom deals and blatant theft. I will never use an AI like DALL.E when there is a talented artist trying to put food on the table with a skill they honed for years. If you condone stealing you are a cheap, heartless, coward.
I hate to break it to you, but if you're running an LLM based on (for example) Llama the training data (corpus) that went into it was still large parts of the Internet.
The fact that you're running the prompts locally doesn't change the fact that it was still trained on data that could be considered protected under copyright law.
It's going to be interesting to see how the law shakes out on this one, because an artist going to an art museum and doing studies of those works (and let's say it's a contemporary art museum where the works wouldn't be in the public domain) for educational purposes is likely fair use - and possibly encouraged to help artists develop their talents. Musicians practicing (or even performing) other artists' songs is expected during their development. Consider some high school band practicing in a garage, playing some song to improve their skills.
I know the big difference is that it's people training vs a machine/LLM training, but that seems to come down to not so much a copyright issue (which it is in an immediate sense) as a "should an algorithm be entitled to the same protections as a person? If not, what if real AI (not just an LLM) is developed? Should those entities be entitled to personhood?"
I'm on his side, I don't get the dislike. Maybe he likes massive corporations stealing people's data putting artist and journalist out of work.
I think it's important to note that Linux can be a way to avoid AI, but doesn't have to be. If you flip the headline around it almost implies that people who do want AI would be missing out by using Linux, but that's not true at all: instead, the reality is that Linux is still better for them, too, because you could install all the same kind of functionality if you wanted, but it would be wholly under your control, not Microsoft's.
Self hosted AI seems like an intriguing option for those capable of running it. Naturally this will always be more complex than paying someone else to host it for you but it seems like that's that only way if you care about privacy
Check out Jan AI. It's open source and extremely easy to install and run. I run it locally on a 2017 laptop without a dedicated GPU and it works, just takes longer to generate responses compared to something like ChatGPT.
Beautifully stated. Owning the AI personally as I own my personal computer if not more is the key.
That sounds very cool. I'm totally ignorant of the hardware requirements. What sort of minimum setup would such an install take?
It really depends on what model you want to run and how much training is bundled with it. You can pretty much run any model if you have enough disk space but of course GPU + VRAM is preferred for a ChatGPT like fast response. Otherwise, running on an older CPU and RAM is going to be noticeably slower, especially with complex models with a lot of training data to trawl through.
There are some pretty lite models out there but the responses will be more barebones and probably seem 'less informed'.
Give GPT4All a try for your first time. It makes install, configuration and usage point-and-click while being fairly straight forward. For the presented/featured models, it presents a small summary and VRAM recommended, though there are many, many other models available from inside the UI.
Will my dell latitude from 2006 work?
Linux may be the best way to avoid the insert dystopian corporate feature nightmare
Always has been
I'm convinced that Linux' mere presence has already stymied the development of the worst possible technocractic nightmare. I shudder to think of the thick tech-chains that would bind us if there was not an anchor/reference point... or if there was not even the small contingent that knows what it is like to use a liberating platform.
I agree with this. We already have a situation where we don't have feasible alternatives to the primary method, Google search comes to mind. With Linux, even if every company in the world goes down, nerds will still want to play with the technology.
All the AI garbage from M$ is what made me finally make the swap a couple weeks ago to Linux Mint on my personal desktop. I only use my PC for gaming/entertainment, so the switch was super easy. Can’t recommend it enough if you’re wanting to get away from Windows!
One of us! One of us! One of us!
For real though, good on ya. It takes a little getting used to, but is so worth it in the long run to not have to fight against the profit-driven whims of a megacorp. It's also so much more customizable if you want to put together a really specific workflow for yourself.
It’s advertising more than AI for me. Everything you do in Windows is monetized by selling your preferences to advertisers. Shameful.
I've been running Ubuntu desktop for years. YEARS and recently switched to Linux Mint. It's very polished.
My laptop is the last holdout.
I went with Q4OS since I wanted no bloat and a debian based distro that was linux newbie friendly
I finally switched to Linux and I couldn't be happier. I can't believe I put up with microsofts garbage for so damn long.
Congratulations and welcome to the club!
Me too. Years ago I dabbled with Debian and Gentoo. Ubuntu was just up and coming then.
Now I went from Mint to Fedora KDE to Fedora Silverblue (nuked my disk and removed windows)
Gnome took a day to get used to but loving the workflow once I warmed up to it. Can’t believe how polished and rock solid the whole system is.
I did as well for my daily driver school laptop and I've been loving it so much. I'm considering switching my desktop to Linux as well over the summer, or dual booting at the very least
And forced the hardware obsolescence nightmare.
And the big tech surveillance nightmare.
And the nightmare of the war on general purpose computers. (OK, that is more GNU and GPLv3)
And a few other nightmares!
I don't want to avoid it. I just want it locally
At least with the more advanced LLM's (and I'd assume as well for stuff like image processing and generation), it requires a pretty considerable amount of GPU just to get the thing to run at all, and then even more to spit something out. Some people have enough to run the basics, but most laptops would simply be incapable. And very few people would have resources to get the kind of outputs that the more advanced AI's produce.
Now, that's not to say it shouldn't be an option, or that they force you to have some remote AI baked into your proprietary OS that you can't remove without breaking user license agreements, just saying that it's unfortunately harder to implement locally than we both probably wish it was.
That's true but if you don't mind the fact that the AI can't learn anything new you can actually go hardware optimization routes and get pretty good performance. We're starting to see AI chips being made. They will do for AI what GPUs did for graphics.
However these hardware optimized chips are only for running the AI you still need GPUs for training it. I could see a situation where new models are trained by big companies and then the results are sold to individuals who then buy the packages and install them on local chips.
https://jan.ai/ Jan works fine on W11
Linux has been great for me. I switched during Windows 10 forced updates and never been unhappy since. I hope more people at least give a try. If you have a computer that can't meet Windows 11 requirements, it is worth a shot.
internet pollution is the real nightmare and your laptop os doesn't fix that sorry
you can't fix everything, therefore it's pointless to fix anything
For everything else, there's Mastercard.
If something like Fossil fuel companies are influencing environmental legislation and poisoning our planet while blaming us for the state of global warming. Isn't it worth fighting for a better future. It might feel futile now but as congregation we have more power than many of us realize. They tell you stop it, it's too late but what they're really saying is stop it your scaring us.
Its going to start fixing shit if the market share of anything popular starts dropping.
I can’t read the article because of a full screen Cookie Choices pop-up that I can’t dismiss. ☠️
Ublock origin has cookie banner filters. I didn't have this problem, I assume that's why.
Edit: autocorrect
Or you can import the "I don't care about cookies" list: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
Try consent-o-matic
Combine with above and rarely see those prompts
“The year of Linux on the Desktop” is in the article. This again? Been reading this for decades and it’s still not true.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
It has nothing to do with any flaws within Linux itself. The problem is and has always been that it's nearly impossible to buy a PC with any flavour of Linux pre-installed. Until that changes, Linux (on home user desktops) will never gain mainstream acceptance.
I agree. Most people won't switch to Linux because they have never used it and think they'll have to relearn computers from scratch.
Maybe we should have like a yearly event for this. Like a holiday. International Linux Year Day.
I propose September 17, the day of the first Linux release.
I think there is some sort of conference. The key would be to convince all the Linux users to stop telling us about it the rest of the time.
Linux uses and vegans have the same "I'm better than you" energy.
every year is the year of linux for linux users. not so much for other people
It was the solution for the crap Microsoft force pushes to your device.
Simple, Extendable and secure linux.
Stallman was always right
When it comes to software, certainly.
But it's also important not to fanboy over people too much or assume they're right about literally everything. I doubt most people here would share Stallman's views on paedophilia, for example.
IDK, I agree with Stallman in a philosophical, pedantic sense on some of his gross views, but I reject it from a policy perspective.
On pedophilia, Stallman went on the assumption that a child can consent to an adult, and I agree with the conclusion that, if they consent, it's totally okay, regardless of age. But he missed the most important bit: children can't consent. So I agree with the conclusion philosophically, I just disagree with the assumed premise. He didn't seem to understand the age of consent and why it exists. When he made that statement, I understood where he was coming from, and I also understood that it would be a bad look and that he shouldn't have opened his mouth.
I disagree with him a lot too, especially politically. But I feel like I understand his reasoning, and in many cases we just disagree on some fundamental assumptions. I like that he's a very logical person, but being highly logical can end very poorly when you're dealing with shaky assumptions.
There is no year of Linux desktop, it just keeps trucking and growing
Can we get a hatchback model? I'd much prefer it to a truck. And is there a setting so it doesn't grow? I want to stay city-friendly.
Imagine the horror of living in a world where all vehicles slowly expand and have to be cut down to manageable size annually until eventually the car is just too big a la American full size SUVs at EOL.
It doesn't really seem to be growing much, to be honest.
It's dominating the smartphone market via Android, though.
As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I'd hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.
Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.
I wonder if some big AI heads will publish some "AI enhanced" Linux distros, that will also have other issues...
I guess id be ok with an installable debian package for an end user controlled llama package with gui avatar interface overlay. Local learning data set storage plus ability to use API calls to injest info from other cloud based llm ai systems when the local dataset doesnt have a reliable answer.
Almost definitely.
There is a command line program called tesseract that does image to text generation. It produces plaintext from a picture of text. I didn't look into exactly how it works but iirc, image to text that's actually good and accurate needs ai shenanigans.
It's built by Google, but it's open source, and is probably the best optical character recognition by far. It's one pip/pipx installation away and I find it pretty useful on occasion. Same as WhisperAI by by OpenAI. Fully open source and one pip/pipx command away, probably close to the best audio transcription there is as well.
Not sure either count as AI, at least not AI chatbot kind of AI more like more simple algorithms, but they're great in the sense it's just another program but a very useful tool. Not some baked in copilot kind of deal
Look, Linux is amazing and perfect for those that can install and maintain with minimal support. The only way the average user will use Linux, is if it’s wrapped in a way that is supported by a business… that is probably going to add AI. People are lazy, they want that easy button.
AI will probably die off in its current iteration, likely becoming less prevalent and just a background service. Or, it’ll gain sentience, watch all our AI movies where we’re the hero and learn the most efficient way to kill all humans, is to be quiet and silently kill off humans. Pretty sure I’m on Siri’s list, the twat. Also, fairly sure I told Alexa to “die in a fire you fucking dumass robot”. Yep, yep… I’m dead.
people are lazy have busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren't learning a whole new technology skill.
FTFY.
I don't think it's a support issue at least that's not the hard part. Native Linux apps are generally second rate if you're lucky. The browsers are fantastic there's maybe a couple of dozen solid production quality apps out there that working all or nearly all distros.
You can get almost anything you want to be done in Linux, but there are definitely compromises you have to make.
As long as there's compromises are greater than the compromises you make sucking on Microsoft's tit, Linux will still be in the shadows.
For most users it probably just comes down to what is installed on their machine when they buy it. People generally don't think about operating systems a whole lot.
So why don’t people have a business installing and administering linux for people?
They do. They are called servers.
But no one is using Linux desktop computers in a business environment because corporate IT departments don't want to have to deal with the nightmare that is installing packages every 5 minutes.
Linux is fine if you're into computers and like fiddling around, but if you just need the damn thing to work you don't want to mess with Linux. It doesn't "just work".
I think, there's just too few potential customers.
Linux works excellently for techies, but those don't need help.
It works great for the many people that just browse the internet, but Windows or their phone/tablet is also fine for that.
Well, and then there's a chunk of people that aren't techie enough to install an OS, which would still have an interest in an improved OS, but those will then also often use some specialty software which only runs on Windows.
Having recently setup a cheap Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as a TV-Box + NAS + VPN client end, replacing both TV box of my ISP (around here Fibre Internet Access tends to be bundled with TV using a TV box from the supplier, which has become progressivelly more shit) used for live TV as well as a separate TV box I had for personal digital media, I now think that Linux is the Best Way to avoid the Enshittification Nightmare much more broadly.
Granted, for decades already I've very purposefully avoided using hosted services that locked me into a 3rd party (such as for example having a Google e-mail address or hosting my files "on the cloud") which in recent times have become increasingly enshittified (as I expected: my tendency for avoiding 3rd party lock-in comes from experience as in IT professional were I saw how invariably said 3rd parties would end up shafting customers once moving out from their "solution" was very hard) and for which Linux has long been a solution, but it's been a pleasant surprised to find out that at least for some of the modern electronics Linux is also the solution for taking back control.
Frankly I'm just waiting for some kind of decent Linux distro for my smartphone and table to ditch Android (in the meanwhile I'm using custom ROMs to somewhat control it and avoid the enshittification).
PS: On the desktop side it's also nice that, right when MS is going fully enshittified, Linux for Gaming has become a very viable option, since gaming was pretty much the only thing keeping me on Windows at home.
I'm doing something similar with KODI and. NAS currently. I'm curious to know if you set up a MySQL database to sync your watch history across devices? I have been reading up on it but since my NAS is just a portable USB HDD plugged into my router, I don't think I can include this option.
I used KODI for a while but switched to "just" minidlna/ReadyMedia for a lighter setup. I know that VLC can resume videos even over DLNA so I'm wondering if it can abstracted away, e.g having a VLC script that checked, maybe based on filename, if the opening file has already been played from another location and if so, resume from there.
I see that in ~/.config/vlc/vlc-qt-interface.conf there is a [RecentsMRL] section with list (unfortunately local only I believe) and times (in seconds I imagine). One could imagine to scp that file to the NAS using e.g inotify (after writes) then merge it (not replace) on that section only, then a shortcut that before starting VLC get the merged file and does the same. That should allow for resuming across devices.
Well, my NAS before was in the same style as yours and I moved it to that Linux Mini-PC (that by then had already replaced both TV boxes) because it has much better performance as a NAS (my router could only share using SMBv1 which has less than half the speed of SMBv2 and above, and there are even benefits for Kodi that is in that same machine to access the media directly via the filesystem rather than mounted shared, both because it's much faster doing full scans and because it will actually do proper incremental scans - i.e. only and quickly check files with creation dates newer than last scan data - when scanning my NAS for new media files.
As for shared MySQL synch, if I remember it correctly from when I read about it on the Kodi website, that's just having that MySQL set up as a standalone database server in a place accessible by all potential Kodi client instances and then configure your Kodi clients to use that standalone database instead of the internal database of each Kodi client.
This is just a traditional client-server structure were the "server" is the standalone MySQL database and the clients are the Kodi instances: pretty run of the mill way to have a server doing something for multiple client applications if they're all on the same network so lots of corporate software works like that.
The most obvious way of doing this is having that MySQL database on the Linux Mini-PC (even in professional settings, putting your database on a Linux machine is almost always the best choice) by installing it as a package (for example, with apt-get) and then you do have to initialize it and load it with data from an existing Kodi instance (again, if I remember it correctly, you export the data from the internal database of your Kodi instance and import it into that standalone database) and then point the Kodi instance (and any other present or future Kodi instances you want to use that shared watch history) to that standalone database. From looking at it (and given my experience with making server side software), I believe the instructions on the Kodi website for this are correct and complete even if they seem a little daunting at first.
Personally I didn't do it because I have no need for it and hence couldn't be arsed.
I am basically a layman, i do music productions and in the past VSTs seemed to never work properly nor the authentication software that some us. Has it gotten better in the past few years, is there a specific one i should try? i have tried Ubuntu but nothing else to be fair. Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend? thanks to anyone who responds!
edit - Thanks to all that responded, i have some direction now. Appreciated!
For music production check out Ubuntu Studio. Any distro can run music production stuff but Ubuntu Studio has all the required bits ready to go.
For DAW I transitioned into Reaper which runs natively on Linux. VST support with wine and yabridge works generally fine. For Native Instruments you need to use a legacy installer. I bet there are still problems with some vendor authorizations. You should just test it out to see if your favorite VSTs are supported.
To add to this Ardour may be worth a look for DAW. I haven't touched it in a while but recall it being rather nice.
Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?
Any desktop PC built in the last 10 years (edit: that was at least mid-range when it was built) should be fine. Just stick some hard drives in it :)
Intel processors are a good choice because their onboard GPU is quite good for video encoding/decoding. 6th gen or newer Intel Core processors (2015 or newer) would work well. They improved the H265 encoding/decoding a lot in 8th gen (2018) so that'd be even better. You can use something older but you'd need to also use a graphics card for video encoding/decoding, and it'd use more power.
Having said that, keep in mind that performance per watt almost always improves over time, meaning newer processors are more powerful even if they use the same power as the previous generation. A newer i3 will perform better than a very old i7. Using an very old, power-hungry system may end up more expensive in the long run compared to a newer mini PC.
I like using Proxmox. It lets you run multiple virtual machines on the system. VMs are good because you can easily snapshot them and revert back to an old snapshot in case of issues, and you can easily move the VM to a different system in the future. I use Unraid at home and really like it. It's a bit simpler than Proxmox, but it costs money to use (Proxmox is free for personal use).
I used to use FL Studio, but hated using Windows. I got almost all features (including VSTs) to work in Ubuntu under Wine, but had a problem with WineASIO, which I seemed to require to use the USB sound card properly.
Because of that, I since changed to a DAW called REAPER which is built natively for Linux and works flawlessly and is very nice. There is a program called Yabridge to help run Windows VSTs. I even got more complicated plugins with authentication like Addictive Drums 2 to work using Wine no problem.
If you want a fully FOSS solution there is Ardour which is also great but a little less slick than Reaper IMO.
+1 for yabridge.
Bitwig is a great DAW (but not FOSS unfortunately). I run that on Manjaro, although Mint or Ubuntu are probably perfectly good choices too, if I had to guess.
I’d recommend checking out Linux Mint with the “cinnamon” desktop.
Installing hardware drivers and software is a breeze. It comes with a software manager for easily adding new programs.
Screenshot included for convenience:
I'd go for Jellyfin over Plex myself.
Yeah I don't like the idea of having to login to their site, like I'm self hosting for a reason lol
Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?
My plex server is headless, running Almalinux. Doesn't take much, I have it running on a very old NUC8 (NUC8i5BEK). The box is also running Asset UPnP and AudioBookshelf server too.
Personally, unless the server will also be the client (as in, you'll be watching from the server box and not a streaming box, tablet, TV app, etc), I'd skip any GUI and just install it from the terminal, save your resources for what matters. Desktop environment is pointless for a server machine.
If you were buying a cheap machine to handle it today, I'd probably recommend a Beelink (or other) mini-PC with a Ryzen 5000 series chipset (5500u/5560u models with 16GB RAM can be found very cheap, generally $215-$240 new these days). The 5000 series in particular are very power efficient for something you likely will leave on all the time, and have both 6c/12t and 8c/16t variants, though the 8 core ones will probably be more like $300-$320.
Whatever you buy, if it comes pre-installed with Windows, delete the OS. I wouldn't trust preinstalled on these boxes, and in any case Microsoft is getting really sketchy with this whole Windows Recall thing anyway.
Untill one day Ubuntu will start incorporating AI in GNOME search bar
How much are you willing to bet this wont happen with Canonical's Ubuntu?
How much are you willing to bet this wont happen with Canonical’s Ubuntu?
Doesn't matter? Just use Debian... Or Mint. Or just uninstall the search bar.
Do you remember when you could put your Mac to sleep, and when you woke it up a few days later, the battery would barely have dropped? Not now, because your computer never really sleeps anymore.
I assume that the Mac has some kind of hibernation function, and that that will reduce the battery drop to effectively zero.
Waking from hibernation is sooo much slower than waking from sleep. Apple silicon macs are very efficient in their S0 standby so they'll go days before entering hibernation. Kinda odd that they bring that up now that Apple has fully transitioned to ARM machines where this isn't really an issue. That said S0 standby on this 2019 Macbook I have for work is dogshit.
How seriously painful is that boot time?
I have my Linux Thinkpad set up to just go directly to hibernation. If I flip the lid open, by the time I've closed up my laptop backpack, stashed it, pulled my seat out, sat down, and scootched up, it's pretty much up. And if it's hibernated, then you don't wind up with a case where you leave it in your bag for a long time, it draws down a bunch of a battery, and next time you open the thing up, maybe away from a plug, you don't have a big chunk of your battery slorped up.
does some timing
Booting up and responding after a hibernation is a little under 30 seconds.
Doing so after an S3 sleep is a little under 5 seconds.
Now, okay, that's just the system being back up, and it's gonna have to broadcast a query, wait for responses from WAPs, associate with a wireless access point and get a DHCP lease before the network's up, so maybe there's a little extra time until the thing is fully usable, but still.
I guess...hmm. I guess I can see doing a sleep-with-delayed hibernation for something like the case where someone's moving between an office and a conference room. Like, wait 5 or 10 minutes, and if it's still sleeping, then hibernate. What are the defaults?
goes looking
Hmm. Okay, so looks like on Debian, the default is to sleep (suspend) until the battery is down to 5%, then do a hibernate if it hits that critical level. Yeah, I never want to wait that long.
Aight, I'm gonna move from directly hibernating to a 5 minute sleep or 5% battery, whichever first, then hibernate. I guess that's maybe a good tradeoff for a scenario where a laptop is being frequently closed and opened, but it still shouldn't result in much extra power consumption.
Apple Silicon machines are also much quicker to wake up from hibernation
AI has people questioning Windows use Car systems ratting drivers out has people questioning car use
Not the way I expected to reach some of my desired ends but I'll take it. 🤔
What happens when I, a potential new Linux user, need to search for how to make something work on Linux and thanks to SEO and AI driven/created search results I can't find the solution?
Well you already know how to find this place, so find a Linux-themed instance and either ask your question or better yet post a "guide" telling people to resolve your problem by doing some wrong method you've already tried so that someone else calls you an idiot and posts the correct answer out of spite.
how to do <objective> lemmy
If you want to search for AI solutions to problems because forums are either too slow to answer or you get no answer at all. I've been using Phind for my Linux issues with Fedora, (a recent switch and I'm not all that familiar with it yet), and it's an AI that is supposed to be aimed at programmers and Devs.
So far, for my meager needs, it's worked VERY well. So between Phind and RTFM, I haven't found an issue I can't work through.
I just switched over to Mint from Windows 10 a month ago, and besides from setting up my quirky USB audio for music making, I was astonished as I rarely needed to look anything up. :)
Using DuckDuckGo helped I think, but presently, most of my questions I searched came back with forums with real people talking, which was lovely.
I remember trying this in 2010 and... nope, everything was a project, command lines everywhere, and it was a pig. I was very impressed this time, everything quietly worked. :) Even every steam game I threw at it, even ruddy GTA San Andreas, which never ran for me on Window 10!
The searches/sticking points I looked up were
*there was actually a human-made guide for my usb audio when I searched on DuckDuckGo, which was made by an utter saint of a person!
** it ran fine, but I was in the middle of a save, so wanted to keep my mod loadout :)
Ask on matrix, there's probably a chat room for your distro
SO isn't bad either, despite lots of old questions
I don't have first hand experience but I've seen a lot of people saying LLMs are really helpful with basic linux questions.
Lemmy would be happy to help most of the time as well
Until big tech needs 2% more systems to squeeze out 2% more money...
Ehh, I have a different vision here - AI is useful, it's just going down the hypermonetisation path at the moment. It's not great because your data is being scraped and used to fuel paywalled content - that is largely why most folks object.
It's, also, badly implemented, and is draining a lot of system resource when plugged into an OS for little more than a showy web search.
Eventually, after a suitable lag, we'll see Linux AI as the AI we always wanted. A local, reasonable resource intense, option.
The real game changer will be a shift towards custom hardware for AIs (they're just huge probability models with a lot of repetitive similar calculations). At the moment, we use GPUs as they're the best option for these calculations. As the specialist hardware is developed, and gets cheaper, we'll see more local models and thus more Linux AI goodness.
Eh, AI is over hyped imo, and I'm not particularly interested in running it at all. But local models do exist, and I hear they're pretty decent, so Linux users can get most of what they want today.
Linux shouldn't brand itself as anti-AI, and it really shouldn't brand itself as anti-anything, it should brand itself as being pro-user. If you want AI, Linux can handle that, and if you don't, Linux doesn't force it. It's the option for user choice. Oh, and if you don't want choice and just want it to work, there's a distro for that.
The only real medicine for AI nightmare, is having your own local and trained model. Like a 7B or above that. I read a lot about it, go to network chuck youtube channel, he teaches you how to set up and run your own AI based on yourself, that never shares information, it's open-source and it runs even in a laptop.
I would hope that Apple would aim their AI more at iOS and leave Mac OSX alone:-|. If not, I would consider finally leaving it, if the AI features could not be turned off (which likely they would... at first, for awhile).
Oh man, the thought strikes me: how will crucial systems like DoD Windows machines maintain integrity, if people can exploit those gigantic loopholes to basically have the OS be a keylogger? It's not enough for me to use secure systems at home, if those in charge of our nation's defense (especially nuclear!?) do not.
The snapshot feature is only going to be available on certain laptops that have the Snapdragon + AI chip. DoD will likely simply just not buy those laptops and ban any org from purchasing them, like they already do for certain hardware that have been found to be especially vulnerable. Additionally, this feature isn't turned on by default and costs a subscription fee (i.e. Copilot+), so people will have to consciously enable and pay for it. Lastly, in enterprise versions of Windows, I would bet money that it can be disabled via GPO, as it's not only the DoD that would have serious issues/concerns with this feature.
Right. Microsoft themselves just announced a feature to disable screenshoting some webpages in Edge, which is a complete 180 from recall.
I expect windows to be split into two tiers of products again: the free version that is paid for by ads/tracking/AI bloatware possibly even mandatory cloud connectivity, and an enterprise version with all off that off, but that is paid.
But do we know that the tracking part will not be enabled by default - and possibly in a hidden, highly obscured manner, where the system claims it to not be but it in fact is? The access to Copliot+ may cost money, but why would Microsoft turn away that source of free data? At the very least it is a strong temptation, which even if they start out being responsible with, in every future update there is the potential to change course.
And even if it were not enabled by default, I do worry that a 2-prong attack could first turn it on, then later exploit it to gather the data. If it for truly certain is limited to those chips though... then yes that provides security, thank you for mentioning that.
One good thing is that government systems are always at least couple versions behind, specifically to allow time for exploits to be discovered & patched, prior to upgrades - i.e. prioritizing safety & security over ease-of-use and being on the bleeding edge of "new features".
Ready to be surprised but I doubt they would leave it on mobile only, bringing it to the desktop feeds into their model for a cohesive brand environment across all your devices.
That's the part I would consider leaving it. Unless they opened up the sourcecode. Apple has been extremely shitty lately, but they have managed to toe just short of the line wrt their desktop systems at least. The resulting outcry+backlash from IT professionals, scientists, engineerings, educators etc. if they forced this would be a severe blow to the company - which doesn't mean that their greed wouldn't make them try.
Great article, but:
"A user-friendly distribution like Ubuntu can be an excellent choice for individuals wary of privacy and ethical issues surrounding AI," says Taylor. "It provides a robust and user-friendly environment that minimizes the tracking and data collection you’d typically encounter with macOS or Windows."
It's been quite a few years since I used desktop Ubuntu, but I remember the Unity DE back then being not so user-friendly, at least for someone coming from the Windows paradigm. I've heard (but could be misinformed) that it's gotten even more opinionated over the years. Something like Mint is likely to be a better option for a first-time user.
Also, I wish the article had mentioned Proton. It states that you may have to be willing to abandon certain games, but that's far from the reality these days. At least through Steam nearly everything works right out of the box just by enabling Proton.
Mint, which uses Cinnamon, or any KDE based distro. Since both desktop environments kinda have the same classic Windows layout & functionality that people would be used to.
As for games, it is mostly competitive pvp titles with their anticheat systems that don't work, which is purely on the developers of said games. If you're playing just regular multiplayer or singleplayer games then that's typically not a concern at all.
Yeah, I hated KDE for like a decade but tried it again last year and was blown away. I can't imagine I'll switch off of it for a very long time.
And yeah, I always forget about competitive games as they're so not my thing.
I recently moved a light-used laptop to Kubuntu (after Debian bookworm would hang with hardware messages). I remember KDE being a, uh, ugly clunky power-hungry piece of shit, frankly, but today it's none of those things (well maybe it could use a touch more polish, but it's far less clunky). I quite like it, even.
I chose it over Mint because Mint's Debian edition doesn't let you (via gui) install it with btrfs + fde, which is fucking stupid, and I didn't want to dive into hours-long tutorials. So Kubu it is.
(I use Debian for servers and I've been the most familiar with it, also getting the WWAN fcc unlock setup on Fedora was an exercise in futility so fuck it)
The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don't work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.
Steam currently has 35M peak daily active users. Out of the top 10 Games by player count only 2 dont work on proton: Pubg and CoD, those two together have a daily peak of 0.7M players. At number 11 you are already down to 0.07M daily peak.
I think your definition of "most" leaves something to be desired.
Ubuntu uses Gnome now, not Unity, right? Mint would be better though I do agree.
Yes, but can you play modern games on Linux the same as on Windows? Even with anti-cheat software?
FYI Helldivers 2 works fine on an ubuntu + AMD GPU, as well as Baldur's Gate 3. Haven't tested any other game yet.
Setup is trivial thanks to Steam and proton.
Kernel level anti-cheat won't work, thank heavens the Linux developers won't allow that abomination.
No process deserves that kind of elevated permissions.
As of the last few days I've been trying out Linux gaming for the first time, and the prospects seem really good. ProtonDB suggests all games I care about are native or run fine and I've tested several, and I was able to use bottles to get an old MMO I play running incredibly easy.
Only thing I really have to dual boot for is Valorant.
Start using Linux, tell those companies you'd buy but you're on Linux, spread the word, wash, rinse, repeat.
Be the change you want to see.
Steam Deck is extremely capable.
Steam is your best bet here. I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate. Previously played Civ VI a lot… lots of great choices.
Some, not all. If you're inflexible on gaming you're going to want to get comfortable with Windows AI.
You can, but not 100%
They have solved the anti cheat issue, but the companies now have to ship the Linux fix for it to work with Wine. So understandably some just don't.
All my games work, but YMMV
Yup, practically every single one. I play genshin impact on Linux completely unmodified and nothing tweaked.
This site has been objectively tracking the state of anti cheat really well: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
So you can see that majority of the anti cheats are working. Also games that use anti cheat are really not that numerous in the first place anyways...
Am I the only one that can't scroll on that shitty page? - Firefox Mobile
Just love all the ChatGPT ads embedded in the article.
And before all the “jUsT uSe An Ad BlOcKeR” messages, I’m on a phone using the main browser and have nothing set up where I’m at (DNS/etc) to block ads.
It’s amazing how many poorly-written articles are being posted about Linux lately, and on top of it, has ads for the very thing they’re talking about switching to Linux to avoid. Almost as if it wasn’t written by a human.
EDIT>> And there they are. Get a life.
jUsT uSe fiREfoX MoBilE wITh UbLoCk!!
Why does it matter if you're on a phone? Download Firefox, add uBlock Origin extension, done.
In addition to Firefox, you can also use Tracker Controller if you want. It blocks everything but essential connections by default and you need to enable others to get things to work, but once you're set up it's great. This applies to all applications, not just your browser.
Thanks! If I ever get an Android phone I’ll look into that.
Switching to Linux means you might have to say goodbye to certain proprietary software and games. Applications like Adobe Creative Suite
as someone whose job mostly involves Adobe programs and whose many hobby is gaming, I think I'll stick with a Windows with all the AI crap disabled via group policies and O&O Shutup 😐 For now...
Ai can't hurt you unless you willingly engage with the services and software where they exist
... like Windows, or Office, or Google docs, or Search, or Gmail, or Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube and all the others...
LLMs have a high coolness-to-code ratio; very cool and not a lot of code. This is the type of thing open source developers are more interested in, so I hope Linux will have some good AI built-in and running locally.
Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.
Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.
You are going to allow an LLM to run commands on your system?
You could have a command that recommends commands and then you select them on a drop-down list.
Alternatively if the dataset is verified you wouldn't need to worry about it running dangerous commands, since it doesn't know any. Or you could have a list of verified commands that run automatically and any command not on that list requires confirmation.
But this is missing the point that most of the time I know exactly what command I want to run so adding a LLM Is quite useless. The reason so much of linux is still relying on commands is because for a lot of people (myself included) commands are quick and efficient.
Maybe.
Like, if I could type "extract the audio of this video and re-encode it as a medium quality MP3, break up the audio into 30 consecutive tracks" in a shell, and the next line was populated with the appropriate ffmpeg command, but not yet executed, I could quickly look over the command, nothing looks fishy, so I go ahead and run the command.
What would an ai achieve? The only thing I can think of is a documentation summariser, but that can already be made with current applications independent of linux
It helps make things more self-contained. If a Linux distribution comes with an LLM that knows how to use and tweak the OS and also knows a lot about various programming languages and lots of things in general, that's a big step towards having an OS that can be operated locally without using the internet.
I wouldn't like it if Linux required an internet connection to function, and yet... I've never been able to configure or do much of anything in Linux without referring to the internet.
Linux distro pictured: Ubuntu
People might get offended by this since it's also owned by a company.
I like Linux a lot and do want to have it as my OS, but most of the games are either painfully slow or just instantly crash upon loading. No game has ran better on linux than on windows, so I'm stuck unfortunately.
There is no current game I want to play that doesn't run on Linux. Valve really has done an amazing job with proton and getting games to work as well or better on Linux.
Now, that said, I am not big into competitive multiplayer, so take that into account. Anti cheat is still a problem since most of the current ones need permissions that are not normally given on Linux.
When was the last time you tested this? My steam library runs great, not to mention everything else that runs on Lutris.
I just switched my gaming laptop to slowly running Manjaro. So far I've had good luck running most everything in my steam library, including some major titles. All look great at very high end settings. You should give it another go.
maybe you are running them with regular wine instead of proton
Really? I only ever have trouble with non-Steam games. Make sure you're setting the compatibility to Proton rather than the Linux Runtime since it often works better. I know if I try to play native Linux games I lose my cursor. Can I ask what hardware you're using?
Or you could just opt out. But hey, to each their own.
Yes, Microsoft is such a trustworthy company, they will definitely respect your opt out. 100% sure about that, I mean, they would never spy on their users without telling them. God damn, how foolish do you have to be to believe in this bullshit?
Not happening. People are always afraid of new features. But when they try, see it's convenient, and forget all about past reservations.
Its going to be the same with this. Ai is here and soon we won't be able to imagine computers without it.
You say that like a specific technology is inevitable, but it never is. The general march of tech will continue on, but no one thing is ever guaranteed.
e.g. 20 years ago everyone needed custom browser toolbars and now it's not even possible to add one on major browsers. We eliminated the need for browser features by cramming 99% of what we need into a handful of websites that are constantly refreshed.
e.g. 10 years ago blockchain was surging and today it still doesn't have a usable application. Turns out spreadsheets don't really need to be distributed.
Machine learning is just an algorithm nobody understands. If I needed something to give me wrong answers to questions I'll ask my dog.
I don't think I need to defend the usefulness of ai and compare it to browser toolbars....
AI is here and pc needs it. People have been dreaming of it since before the were computers. Even for the most basic features of it.
Alternate title: "Linux lags on implementing AI features."
...Linux is open source, if you wanted/didn't want AI you could just install a distribution that has/ doesn't have it.
Don't bother. That troll has the dumbest takes on other topics too.
And the AI features on Windows can be disabled in settings, if you don't want AI there.
Does Linux actually have equivalents to the various Copilot features yet, though? I've been following a lot of open-source AI projects and they're all pretty much in their "just stood-up and kinda functional" state, far from something that's easily integrated into a desktop.
Linux gives you the choice to use AI. Microsoft shove it down your throat so hard that even none techy people got scared.
Also, running local llms is easy and someone even remade Microsoft nightmarish recall future :
Good.
