Just so you know, the byproduct of over integrating technology systems is how monopolies are formed. By implementing tools to only do specific functions, it is fighting against monopolistic power. That is what the “Unix way” is describing.

In essence people are predictable. If people have a google home in their house, they will most likely be using google for email, searching, and messages, and its all tightly over integrated (IE: the home has access to the email, to the messages, and it integrates it into a single device). For me, I dropped google a few years ago. For other people, they may depend on google services more often, so it isn’t just painstakingly forwarding your new email address to applications, they’ll also loose the integration as well that comes with google.

Generally speaking, to combat technology monopoly’s you want to diversify your applications. You basically want to make a system so complicated no one single software has control over it aka a decentralized system. Octave is a decentralized system, in that packages are developed by members in the octave community. Octave integrates those packages in a server but octave doesn’t have control over those packages. Linux, delta chat, lemmy, mastodon, these are all uniquely decentralized systems with all of them inadvertently following the “Unix way.”

I’ve used it before when trying out IDEs. Its really good, its a no bullshit solution to VS code. If you’ve used sublime text, Kate is similar to that as it is quite minimal.

On a spectrum of minimalisim and memory consumption, you have emacs, Vi, VIM at the lower end of the curve. This is for users to customize or to use the smallest memory footprint, than in the median its kdevelop/Kate sublime, and VS codium, and on the far end of spectrum you have your bloat software VS code and ItelliJ idea.

Personally I’m using Vim for my projects in C, C++, Python, octave scripts, sh scripts, and markdown. I like to keep my memory footprint small which is why I use a text editor over a full blown IDE. I have used amd’s Vitis IDE for embedded systems (which is just a fork of VS codium).

not so much a specific distro. I know KDE has its own graphical updater in the “discover” app store, COSMIC DE also has its own app store. personally I always update my apps through the terminal as its just faster and easier.

Welcome to Linux! Heres your starting package

Whenever you get recommended a text editor, VIM, emacs, or nano will at least be mentioned once, and yes we are in a brutal war so there will be backlash. That said, We can all agree on one thing, fuck IDEs.

Init users will recommend anything other than systemd, and that is another war in itself.

Distro-hoppers will try and justify themselves changing distros when in reality they fucked a package installation and just want to redo everything. They may also do it to try out a new desktop environment not realizing you can just install the desktop environment in a terminal without going to a new distro.

I’ve always said this, don’t switch to a different flavor of Linux because the developers are starting to use LLMs to code it. I would also say don’t jump into a distro that is completely vibe codes.

Quality Information, contrary to popular belief, is becoming more and more scarce; what you could search early 2000s - 2010s you can’t really do now, there’s advertisements now, there’s LLM prompts at the top result, and you have to dig through pages of search results before finding a golden website. Information is being controlled and funneled by google and there is a price associated with that (your data).

I think if a linux distro regulates its AI usage (IE not entirely vibecoded and pushed to the repository ) I don’t see a reason to be switching distros. Again the primary reason why developers are using LLMs to code has to do with the clusterfuck that is of attaining information.

Its not just the exit nodes, you also need to control the entrance nodes to pinpoint people in the network.

That is an expensive arrangement which I doubt the CIA or defense industry would put money towards to surveil people going through the network.

Same here, I started with hyprland and every time I go back to KDE or gnome, I feel like I’ve went back 10 years. I use the base sway package in the fedora spin, and after customizing keybinds it works great.

I was in your same boat a few months back, I stopped at fedora.

However, if I didn’t depend on glibc I would totally use alpine Linux.

“who may not be quite as stubborn as I am” that is the most Linus torvalds thing to say. good to see his passive agressive nature being put in a press release.

if your trying to find an OS that is low on resources, there’s only one option: alpine linux. Yes it starts out as a TTY (no graphical environment) but they do have scripts to install the OS and a graphics environment of your choice.

the one concern is driver support, generally (unless using a popular distro such as zorin OS) driver support for Chromebooks are limited. I’ve tried getting alpine Linux on my Chromebook and can’t because the wifi card would not work for it.

that said, if you’re ready to manually configure driver support for it (which most likely will happen) the artix OS uses about 128 MB of memory. That said, if you have more, Linux will dynamically allocate more for core OS functionality

If you are comfortable using fedora or if you are fine learning about fedora, use fedora.

I personally wouldn’t use Ubuntu with it’s recent controversy in specific the “explicit AI features” planned to be implemented within ubuntu. I’d suggest avoiding it out of privacy concerns even if it runs locally on your system.

the general trend for AI adoption, is to make it accessible for anyone to onboard, and then slowly control the users by (for example) making users connect to their servers to use their chatbot which then they can train, and have a better profile of you.

Canonical never mentioned that, in fact they mentioned quite the inverse. but any implementation of an AI chatbot, Tech companies aren’t doing it because of how revolutionary AI is. The AI is the product and your data is what they want.

I’m not saying canonical is pursuing that initiative, but that’s generally how it goes for most tech companies. Don’t take my word for it, ask yourself, “what service does Ubuntu provide? what financial backing (sponsorships) do they have?” I’ve looked far and wide and the only thing I’ve found is, they offer a free OS install as their consumer grade product, and a subscription service to their enterprise network that is clearly not a sustainable business model (from an engineering perspective) for a multi-thousand employee company.

i’ve used both void and alpine before switching back to arch. Alpine is great, but it doesn’t support glibc and that compatibility gave me issues installing applications on my laptop. Sure I could setup chroot or a contanarized environment but void offered both options glibc and musl.

does he have the video’s research published?

there is no such thing as a gas powered computer. Maybe they meant a gas powered plant that would transmit electricity.

there is no gas powered computer, that’s the equivalent of saying I can make weed out of plutonium.

I can’t even look at the page because these corporate shills have to track me one way or another, it’s probably just coorporate propaganda.

well I could give you a solution, generally with x86_64 architecture they use a lot more wattage than macbooks, m-chip SOC’s (system-on-chip) utilize about 30W of energy whereas just a modern x86_64 CPU utilize 15W. which means you have a 15W overhead for your GPU and memory generally speaking.

So the entire reason your getting less battery life is OS required applications for it to function, and you. So if you minimize the amount of wattage (ideally building a linux system from scratch) you can optimize it to consume less resources.

I did this with my personal laptop, installed arch and mangoWM, didn’t even bother with a display manager or network manager (still use iwctl). on idle it uses about 600 MB, and I’ve beaten the m1. my point is not to compare or benchmark the macbook, but to just show you that you can maximize battery life with a little tinkering. So long as you are comfortable doing it.

I have used pop_os and cosmic DE it should be noted that is a beta version of pop_is, which means there are plenty of bugs, which means there are still a lot of optimizations. the fact you could get 12 hour battery is kinda surprising especially with a nvidia GPU.

so people reasonings are, that if you don’t use all memory then it’s just going to waste. which is true, but you also need to take into account the applications I use, ~10 GB of memory is used when i run vivado/vitis synthesis and bitstream.

the second thing i was going to add is, Do you know what also makes ram redundant? when the laptop is fucking dead. Which is ultimately why I’m trying to optimize it resource wise to extend battery life.

that said, i’ve optimized it to where I can beat the m1 macbook on idle. again, not something that is a benchmark, but to say an engineering student beat a trillion dollar company. I continue to smear that in apple fanboys faces as just a massive “fuck you.”

ontop of other user comments where it boils down to trust in the maintainer and code reviewers of the project, another reason depends on the use case that you plan on using your Linux system. for example, if I were to setup a nextcloud server, i’d generally go with alpine for it’s lightweight design, or Debian for it’s stability. I wouldn’t necessarily use Kali Linux, because with those features it also uses a lot of resources for it to function, and I don’t need that for a server.

in terms of my personal device I generally build those from the tty and add other modules (like DE, utils, etc…) to give it more functionality. Much like my servers I like to have my laptop optimized – take as minimal resources as possible – which is a rather controversial take after seeing users bash at me that I’m not taking advantage of all my memory. anyways, I don’t think there is a specific distro that has everything that I want. I want a system that works that doesn’t use 2 GB from the DE alone and that is accomplished by adding the modules myself.

I don’t trust any other sub-distro other than myself. I generally go with one of the corporate base tty installer (arch) and I build the system from that. I’m not going to switch to say cachy OS for it’s aesthetics, or ease of use, I couldn’t really care less.

yes, and I couldn’t really care what it was intended to be used for. clearly I could still use it as a WiFi utility posts installation.

As per the arch wiki it says “iwd is a wireless dameon for Linux written by Intel.” “The core goal of the project is to optimize resources utilization by not depending on external libraries.”

the point of why I’m using it is for that exact reason. it does the same thing every other WiFi GUI/TUI out there. unless there is a vulnerability/security risk of using iwd, I couldn’t really care less about the other options, even if that means manually configuring enterprise and public networks.

mangoWM. my workload requires a lot of resources like vivado/vitis. the more resources I have available the better. I’ve no where near customized my WM (FFS, I’m still using iwctl to configure WiFi), that said it does run great, using about 560 MB on idle.