Specter

Nice argument you’re having with yourself there, buddy. Seems like you have quite a lot to pour out.

I don’t have any affinity for China, but I also don’t like the gratuitous hate they get all over the internet, nor the reduction of Chinese people’s experience to work drones (what you’re doing).

I had hoped that Lemmy wasn’t gonna be like that, but alas.

I’m sorry you live with so much gratuitous hatred in your heart and I pray you can recover some day.

Actually it’s the other way around.

The internet is all about “China Bad” so calling it China Battery is a way to depreciate this obviously positive discovery.

I am trying to get away from the philosophy actually 😅 in the end what matters is how these tools are being used, not so much their inherent characteristics.

Can you envision a world where AI chatbots will be used to lead you down certain political beliefs (e.g. capitalism good, socialism bad) product recommendations will be made based on how much brands are willing to pay for ad placements, and your psychological state will be measured and molded to the interests of the AI owner? I can. It’s also already happening.

It doesn’t really matter whether it’s the Machine or the creator.

The point is, AIs can be programmed to lie, much like Grok does. And if they can be programmed to lie, then they are not reliable for anything at all. We are going through a decent period where AI can be used for a few things reliably, but even these will surely be enshittified.

I… literally thought you were OP. But anyways I respect your decision. Have a nice day.

Not gonna lie I’m really struggling to sympathize with OP right now. People are trying to drag him out of the doom and gloom and OP just keeps moving the goal posts into a position that nobody can defend.

Frankly, this could be a post complaining about how Macbooks don’t support Windows. Yeah, they don’t, there are multiple options out there though that do, but OP is not interested in them. They want to go back to a time when stores sold hardware that they can no longer sell, and think this post can do it vengeance. Seriously it sounds like a Reddit post. I thought I ran away from there to avoid these types of posts but alas.

The average person. I’m going to repeat that because apparently you missed it. The average person isn’t buying used computers from enterprise resellers.

The average person is most definitely buying second-hand laptops they can afford from Facebook Marketplace or similar, enterprise-grade or not.

It’s not about Linux not being supported. It’s about barrier to entry.

Linux inherently has a barrier of entry by virtue of having essentially zero manufacturers selling hardware that ships with Linux installed. However I don’t understand why you think price is a barrier of entry. If the majority of laptops are priced from 300 euros up to 4000 in some shops, then that’s what customers are willing to pay. I don’t mean now with the AI boom making everything more expensive either, I mean for the past few years this has been the market. Common people buy new from stores, or buy second-hand.

My mother is not buying and installing RAM. My mother would not know what to do if she had driver issues on Linux.

This issue is not specific to Linux. The used market is flooded with Windows laptops that no longer support windows 11 well due to only having 4-8 GB ram. Same with 8GB Macbooks.

I don’t know why you’re pretending that shopping for an older laptop model is only a problem for the average person if you want it to be Linux compatible. Also your grandmother doesn’t have to do anything. She, like the average person, can take her laptop to a repair shop for servicing and upgrading.

This said, you’re not the average person. You already went the extra mile by installing Linux on devices that don’t ship with from factory. Further, you’re specifically interested in small devices when the average person wants bigger screens, you want your device to be underpowered when the average person wants them as powerful as possible in a slim form factor without compromising on battery. Your rant has nothing to do with what the average person wants, your rant is, sorry to say, a completely self-absorved rant that just shows you’re mad your niche preferences aren’t supported by the Linux community, or the world consumer preferences as a whole.

“The sacrifice of staying on Linux after 20 years”

I mean honestly could this title be any more self-absorbed?

I would ask if you’re a Debian user (or use a Debian-derivative), but what even is the point when I already know the answer.

Everything you just said can be fixed by buying Thinkpads. All of them are supported because some companies use Linux at an enterprise level. Until those corporations disappear, Linux will never stop being supported on them. I see a lot of doom and gooom that is frankly unhelpful especially now that the Microslop monopoly is clearly breaking down and there is more potential for Linux than ever before.

Yogas are supported by Linux AFAIK but touchscreens might be a problem.

You post is long but is not very clear, the commenter above is correct. What exactly is your grievance? That Linux does not support your ancient laptop? Or it does not support the laptops (let’s face it, tablets) that YOU want?

Unfortunately resources are scarce in the Linux community, so labor needs to be allocated where most people are (AKA using hardware from the last ~5-10 years, not 30). And Windows surface tablets are extremely locked down.

I’m sorry that you can’t find people who want to continue supporting hardware so old people get nostalgia when they hear its name (eg. Pentium i586). It seems to me you’re not willing to do it either.

Ultimately you’re reducing to hardware a phenomenon that also involves software. Realistically who can run modern computing operations (such as web browsering) on a laptop with 3-4 GB RAM? The answer is nobody. Not comfortably, at least. Browsers take easily 3GB of RAM with just a few tabs open.

As for all laptops being bulky… this is the consumer preference. I don’t like it either but we can barely fault manufacturers for producing what consumers want to buy. I see this trend on phones as well, for me smaller phones are the best thing but the market moved towards bigger screens, heavier phones. And you want underpowered devices? If you could have a slim and lightweight laptop/tablet, wouldn’t you want it to be as powerful as possible? This doesn’t make any sense from a consumer perspective.

Lastly, if you want whatever machine you buy to last longer, then ironically you should learn a thing or two about hardware so that you can replace parts yourself. You don’t have to become a genius, just follow some steps on YouTube on how to change RAM, add SSDs… and yes, Thinkpads especially older ones are great for this since many parts are non-soldered. Apparently this year they are also launching a new one that is way easier to open up and replace parts with their removable keyboard.

I really don’t understand the EU.

While the US has Trump threatening Denmark’s sovereignty, threatening to pull out of NATO, making up lies about the EU being created to screw the US, have multiple US billionaires and his whole administration lobbying EU countries to degrade EU unity, the EU goes out in full bend-over mode to whatever the US wants.

Want every EU citizens Medical data? Go ahead. Want to regulate our industries? Why not. Want us to implement Chat Control? Fuck it, we’re all part of the same Epstein class anyway!

I’ll never forget how in university there was this girl I was flirting with (it was mutual) who got upset and broke off contact when I let the streak with her on Snapchat drop lol. This was after I installed Snapchat just to talk to her, too.

Blessing in disguise, in hindsight.

Right.

“We hate capitalist oligarchs which is why we are moving to another oligarch-owned platform.”

It’s all so tiresome.

Thank you for the thorough technical explanation, it is clear there are challenges for devs and I understand why the pushback exists now.

As an end user these are things I haven’t felt, are essentially invisible to me so I never felt the need to run away from systemd.

Thanks again.

I’m aware, I just don’t care enough about this particular beef.

Systems works well for me, and in order to get my configuration up to what it is today on NixOS (what I need it to be) I’d have to install multiple proprietary/non-free software/drivers on Guix anyway.

In a roundabout way I’d end up in the same spot.

It’s not really mandatory, but I take your point.

I guess it’s the choice between many minor programs running in tandem, potentially only held together by a few maintainers, or an init system that unifies all those programs under one flag, with multiple maintainers including corporations, but the chance for it to get enshittified.

I personally have no choice of init system since I use NixOS. But I also don’t necessarily think the death of the personal computer will come from an init system, it will sooner come from hardware becoming unavailable/too expensive for individuals to buy (basically what we are seeing happen now).

Okay, other than “I believe it’s against the Unix Philosophy” and “hypothetically it will become bloated”, is there anything else worth knowing?

I should have clarified that the list above only makes sense if you just want your machine to work because atomic distros aren’t great to tinker with (except NixOS), but let’s face it, moist people are not tinkerers do what they need is exactly what atomic distros offer.

At this point The Great Firewall is looking more like it’s protecting people from this AI slop. I have no idea how websites are in China, but I think I would be okay with Europe raising a great firewall against US owned companies.

The damage US far-right influencers (along with Russian funding of local parties) is doing in Europe cannot be underestimated.