Veraxus

ChatGPT 4o is the top dog right now, by a lot.

Nonsense like this is why I no longer use Ubuntu (or anything else downstream of Canonical, or anything with Snaps).

I use mine daily… primarily as a monitor for my laptop.

Now you might think that’s dumb, but I can go sit outside in the backyard, park, beach, coffee shop, wherever and work on a big, totally private, crisp and clear, glare-free anywhere monitor. I can bring it to the in-laws or on trips and even use it as a monitor for my Steam Deck. Or I can lay in bed or on the sofa or on a lawn chair and use the Steam Link app to play games from my PC.

Taken purely as a private, portable, omni-monitor, it’s absolutely worth the price for me.

As an AR/MR/XR device, it has some MAJOR software problems. Honestly, it makes sense they’d pause hardware development… it’ll be a couple years before there’s anything worth upgrading and they have a long way to go on UX, gestures, inputs, and even basic real-time object recognition and tracking. I bought mine knowing it was a Development Kit and planning to use it to get ahead on AR development experience, but I hit major roadblocks so frequently I’ve just about given up on every interesting use-case I went into this with.

VisionOS 2 is a baby step forward, but Apple has a long, long way to go before it makes sense for regular people. Heck, they aren’t even including all the cool new AI features in VisionOS 2, and it’s the one device that could benefit from that stuff the most.

So, yeah… it can still be worth it to certain people with specific use-cases, but I think it’ll be a solid 5 years before the software and hardware can reach a “normal consumer” level of quality and value.

This whole “for-profit owned by a non-profit” paradigm needs to globally crushed right the fuck now. It should never have been allowed to happen and should not be tolerated.

I blocked Reddit via PiHole and configured Kagi to never show me Reddit results. When I left that cesspit, I spent a week running scripts to ensure all of my nearly 20 years worth of content was overwritten. I’m here because Reddit can DIAF.

“Mozilla acquires ad company”

FTFY, linuxiac.

…for now.

• See above convo about acquisition by Canva.

Regulatory capture go brrrrrrrrrrr.

I do like their laptops, but for literally everything else: the fact that I basically don’t own my own hardware.

I can’t install or distribute my own software without Apple’s arbitrary approval. When Apple decides it’s done supporting the products, I can’t even install a different OS like Linux because the hardware is completely locked down… they become paper-weights.

That is not how ownership is supposed to work.

Same. We got a super limited deal well over a decade ago that they ran for a single Christmas. While our bill has gone up ever so slightly in that time, the extra cost is all due to misc “fees” rather than the base rate, according to the bills.

I think they’re playing the same game OpenAI is. Nonprofits can “own” for-profits.

No, it’s not rational or ethical or reasonable, but it’s a thing, because Capitalism gotta Capitalism.

That explains the Pi 5 pricing. They started the enshittification early.

Oh fuck. I didn’t realize they’d been bought… let alone by another god-forsaken cloud-subscription-based business model.

Affinity is as good as dead.

Debian. Hard to get more stable (to a fault, even) than Debian.

Affinity really needs to start making official Linux ports. It’ll work in Wine, but is a bit janky.

Fair. In that case I’d recommend openSUSE.

I try to avoid things with Red Hat or Canonical stink on it (which is why Kubuntu and Fedora are out)… and it’s more friendly than something more barebones like Arch.

Debian + KDE Plasma

Thank goodness. Such a useless technology.

Scratch that… it’s not useless, because it’s great for scams and fraud. It’s actively harmful.

Of course.

But why would you want to!?

No, but it’s the only one that big corporations know/care about… primarily because of MS’s aggressive “look, it’s basically free and TOTALLY the same thing, we promise” marketing strategy.