When the internet was new, hip and cool in 1997 it was the best way for a poor student to really get knees deep into networking and hosting. I just haven’t seen much reason to try anything else.

I did use OS X for work when doing iOS development a few years.

And in a perfect world I’d rather run a UNIX certified operating system. Linux support is just so good at the moment that I can’t really be bothered.

YTA

I have. Tempo is a bit abandoned. Tempus has momentum and android auto support.

I self-host my music with Navidrome, play it with Tempus on Android.

I can agree with most of the points in the thread. Especially the forced use of AI where it makes no sense.

I’m a software engineer going on my second decade in developing media streaming technologies.

LLMs are useful in my day-to-day work. They speed up development a lot, but I do realise that I am getting disassociated with my codebase. I know that the individual commits are on a level that I would’ve written myself, often even better. But I don’t know the codebase as intimately as if I actually wrote it myself. The cognitive load of reviewing two other people’s AI-assisted code is also very taxing.

But, we can hate it as much as we want. Pandora is out of her box, and it’s better to get ahead with it than be left behind.

No, it needs a lot more babysitting than 4.5 does. 3.5 was on the same level of mistakes, at least on the quants I have to use.

Running qwen3.6 27b through llama.cpp.

It’s about as capable as sonnet 3.5.

I use it for light scripting, but real coding is done by cloud models.

I’m also using it as the brain for my Hermes agent. It sends me digests of news, subreddits, chats that I’d like to read but don’t have time for. It does a great job researching things on the web for me, too.

I don’t miss windows, but I do miss sitting in the same era computer labs with either the university’s own flavor of red hat, or SPARCstations.

The internet was a lot more fun 30 years ago. I guess partly because it felt like magic, and after a degree and some decades in the industry the illusion is gone.

Also, it used to be about sharing pictures of your cat or listing your favourite books. Now everyone is trying to either sell you something or source everything about you to be able to sell you something with more accuracy.

As I recall it’s pretty hi-tech, too.

Hardware permitting it’ll emulate every path your friend might take, and correct itself to the correct timeline when it gets friend’s input. Lag-free for everyone.

I’m coming from the past, back when the distribution came on two HD diskettes named Linux 0.99b. It was a gradual change to come to the point where you could just assume that you’d have a good time on Linux. I guess static kernel modules was the starting point, and even then it took years. Remember, We’ve only had loadable kernel modules since 2011.

linux-on-laptops.com was invaluable before making a purchase.

ARM is a different story, mostly hindered by not having any universal way of booting and detecting hardware.

400€ in 2006-money is 600€ today. Starlabs used to have a cheap model, but I guess it’s hard for anyone to be in the budget segment with RAM prices these days. I bought a huawei matebook a few years back for about 600€ - they’re sold with Linux pre-installed in China, but not here. But that means that stuff is well-supported.

In my mind the landscape is quite a bit better than 20 years ago. You’d have to pick and choose a model that worked well then. Chipsets are usually well supported by the time they are in laptops today.

The Microsoft tax has been under pretty heavy NDAs lately, but it wouldn’t surprise me if M$ were paying to be pre-installed. They’re in the data mining business, not operating systems in 2026.

But yes, we’re all still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop.