I’m not a fan, but thats extreme. The Ubuntu desktop will boot to the DE on half a gig of ram, and can open basic desktop apps with 1 or 2. Its the websites, containered apps, and more complex applications that Ubuntu is worried about UX disappointment from naive users (which is their segment). Windows 11 requires many times that just to get to a desktop and open a text file in notepad. They are not the same.
All of the default software that comes with the Ubuntu desktop will run reasonably well with 2Gb. Its the websites and electon apps (i.e., websites) that will make it swap. That and modern users that want to keep dozens of programs or websites open -which users 10 or 20 years ago may have known not to do.
Which is exactly what Ubuntu is doing. The desktop and even most native desktop applications that come with it will run just fine with 1 or 2GB of ram. If you used it like a 90s computer for 90s computer tasks, it will work fine.
In practice, however, users will open a web browser to some “modern” websites or a couple electron apps and have a very bad experience.
I will have to yield to your experience then. I mainly thought of it as a naive type of sensible argument, given people were not all that concerned about tracking and particularly browser fingerprinting. I guess back then, the main thing was web developers who used flash needed to check for it. But those people were anti-open web back then and deserved to be ignored by the browser makers.
I am guessing you were strongly in the open web camp back then. I am glad we sort of won that particular battle, even if we lost so many others.
Save yourself the brain aneurism from watching anti-science 1990’s “perpetual motion” bullshit and look up “wood gasification (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator)
Its not some secret or “free energy”. It is just converting energy from wood in a 2 step process -instead of burning it directly for heat, you extract the flammable gas, which is a more flexible energy source (and can be used in internal combustion engines like generators). Its been around for a long time. The Nazi’s even tried to run a tank on it.
Today, many large scale “biogas” reactors use similar mechanisms, though they typically use bacteria to produce gas rather than heat from partial combustion, which allows them to work on things that don’t burn cleanly, like garbage or sewage. I know a hobbyist that built a traditional combustion-based wood gasifier generator- it worked, but was a lot of work to keep the gas flowing and engine running. No free energy, you still need the (bio) fuel.
That might have been a sensible argument 20 years ago. Mozilla has spent the last 5 or so slowly stripping most of that out for “anti-fingerprinting” without breaking website layout.
Yeah, the description is misleading because anyone reading it is thinking desktop software. But… hear me out. I know that all the surveillance capitalism companies do this, but in this case it is literally pairing what is mostly corporate IT policy data (browser, hardware, OS, and extensions) with employee name, title, and employer. That does technically fit the definition of corporate espionage, and I am always open to getting more people -especially people with some levers in government- onto “our side” of the Internet privacy conflict.
Keep an eye on https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
Of all the permanent and irreparable things big corporations are doing to our world, I struggle to really put this high up. Yeah it sucks, but it provides a useful service and they naturally degrade. If anything Im more worried about all the pollution from them burning up in the atmosphere. If they stop launching them, the sky will be clear within the deccade.
There will be some meetings with oems, and gold things dropped on his desk, and the exceptions will start being handed out. Same as always.
Companies have always complied with legal warrants. They can challenge them, but they literally cannot refuse. Thats why companies need to actually collect less data on their customers, or protect it with e2e encryption.
Generally speaking, the consumer market has been entirely eclipsed by business to business sales. The only entities with expendable cash are businesses.
Automation has always been about de-skilling to cheaper, more abuse-able labour, and not about actually eliminating work. This goes all the way back to the broad looms and the luddites. There were still loom workers in the new factories - its just that they were children who could be worked to death for pennies.
They make everything more expensive. Power, water, ram, storage, and now the used book market will shoot up in cost as millions of books are shredded.
The Internet is still distributed, it’s the ownership (and thus also the command and control) that is super inbred. Cloudflare, Google, Aws, they all have hardware distributed in every city.
You are describing urgent vs important. Fire fighting is always urgent, but in many ways, janitorial services are often more important to your daily life.
All these MBAs that learned about the advantage of first movers in school and have so little domain knowledge they operate 100% on “we just cant be late to the table”
I am explicitly against the use case probably being thought of by many of the respondents - the “ai summary” that pops in above the links of a search result. It is a waste if I didn’t ask for it, it is stealing the information from those pages, damaging the whole WWW, and ultimately, gets the answer horribly wrong enough times to be dangerous.
It has a separate llm chat interface, and you can disable the ai summary that comes up on web search results.
Honestly, dont take anyones recommendation. It takes 10 minutes to create a bootable USB for a Linux distro once you get the hang of it. Try a handful of different “easy” distros and desktops on a Saturday morning and pick one that seems to work well on your computer and that you find you like. What you find intuitive isnt necessarily good for another, etc. A little time invested in shopping will pay off later (which is true for a lot of things).