Plus everybody is like ‘it’s the same thing, no learning curve’ but then I start reading up on it and uhoh, learning curves :p

Exactly this. I tried podman, as a “container” newb, based on the idea that it’s a (better) drop-in replacement for docker, but it didn’t work. My quick attempts to resolve it went nowhere, and there were no instructions for the container I was trying to spin up for podman to explain the differences required.

So, in frustration, I decided to try docker and it just worked.

Good enough for me, for now. I still prefer the idea of not having a daemon running with root privileges, so I’ll likely move over to podman eventually, but I only have so much time to waste tinkering with my setup. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

This was my thought, too, especially with how stable Linux traffic is relative to other OSes.

It might just mean that more people are web scraping, and that web scraping is easier/cheaper on Linux.

The Steam numbers are more interesting to me, as a measure of consumer usage, since they should mostly represent people actually using their computer.

PornHUB puts out annual usage stats, too, but idk if they include OS. (When I used Reddit, their stats would come up on dataisbeautiful frequently enough to come to mind years later—they had some interesting stats, like average visit duration and that the most Republican states were the most likely to search for gay and incest porn, but I digress.). Would bots make up a high volume of traffic for them? I imagine not, since there’s little economic value in scraping it (to train LLMs, in particular — I think it would poison the training data rather dramatically!)

When you’re vibe coding, you need to narrate long prompts, including things like “And remember not to hallucinate or make any errors.” All that is a lot faster to say than type.

Clearly, you’re not vibe coding, and your job will be (checks notes) automated away by someone with a #grindset.

/s, in case that wasn’t obvious.

The contrast between the Ubuntu and Arch lines slayed me.

I use Arch, btw.

It’s tightly interconnected with accessibility because alternative input systems, like eye gaze input, macros to expand text, and other accessibility tools for alternative input hardware all friends in the same types of window-agnostic input interacting. (Similarly for output hardware, I think?)

Like, custom text replacement with XCompose breaks because of how Wayland “silos” programs, which is why ~/.XCompose files only partially work in KDE Plasma. If Wayland/KDE fully implemented accessibility tools, then it would be possible to solve all of these problems.

Or, at least, that’s my layman’s understanding of the situation.

There was a fantastic blog post about accessibility problems with Wayland, but I think Wayland is upstream of KDE, isn’t it?

In other words, do you know if what you’re suggesting within scope, or is it upstream? Or maybe it’s both, and KDE and Wayland both need changes to enable proper accessibility?

I don’t know enough, but I’ll see if I can track down that blog post and post about accessibility. Worst case, it lets KDE devs know that accessibility with KDE/Wayland is a major issue for many users.

Edit: I found the post: My Accessibility Stack and the future on Wayland

Have you ever run into difficulty with needing to authenticate with chip+PIN? Like while traveling?

That would be my big concern with this; it would make it very difficult to pass a PIN check, to say the least!

Super cool idea. I might just try it myself and see if I run into issues.

I was thinking about this, and there are two easy workarounds, I think:

1. If possible, get a second active card in the same name. Ideally, a full-identical cloned card. Not sure if this would be allowed, but if not…
2. Add another authorized user to your account and never give them the card, then just dissolve that card for tap payments.

But, in either case, I do think you might run into a different issue: automated fraud detection sometimes requires me to chip+PIN, even for transcribed below the tap limit. This has happened to me when traveling. I don’t think there would be any way around that, and if you then fail to authenticate with chip+PIN, it’s reasonable to think that the bank would lock your card for contactless payments until you successfully authenticate the card again with chip+PIN. (To be clear: this is only speculation; not sure if that would be an issue in practice.)

So, I suspect that whether this would work or not might depend on your institution (or maybe jurisdiction?)

Stremio was the big one, but maybe I just didn’t try hard enough.

Getting Wine/Bottles working with a niche work remote desktop streaming app was a huge pain, too, while in CachyOS it’s 1-click to get it all set up from the Hello app.

On my CachyOS desktop, I use Docker images for a couple things: my mesh wifi network controller server (Omada) and for ripping Kindle books to .epub with a specific Windows setup that still works (I need to read with TTS and Kindle broke native Android TTS when they implemented their own shitty TTS option, so I .epub everything.)

I don’t think I use any other containerized apps, aside from my work Windows VM (which is only required for SharePoint integration in Explorer.)

Not parent poster, but this is a detailed explanation for the big ideas.

Not OP, but this is a fantastic answer, and I wish I’d read it before installing Deb on my wife and friend’s computers!

I use CachyOS, but decided “bleeding edge” would be more of a nuisance than help for them, so opted for “very stable”, then immediately ran into challenges trying to get apps, and needed to get containerized apps for everything. I should have gone with something Fedora-based or just stuck with what I know, CachyOS.

Right, like what’s the ROI of a million computers switching from US-based for-profit Windows to Linux?

Funding open tools/tech/research is exactly the sort of thing that governments are best equipped to do, relative to private sector/individuals. Millions of dollars is a rounding error relative to government licensing costs to proprietary software alone, even ignoring the downstream benefits for the rest of the economy. And if we had lots of money in open software, it would attract a lot more talent to make it even better for the rest of us.

lol, are you me? Our Signal chat is ⅓ chat, ⅓ grocery list, and ⅓ my wife’s notes to herself.

I’m loving Logseq. It’s the open source software I support monthly. It (plus what I learned from “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte) changed my life. Having a low-barrier (daily journal everything) place to dump everything (easily discoverable later with back-linking tags) helps me manage my ADHD.

I highly recommend it. Once you wrap your head around the idea that the daily journal is where you dump just about everything, it’s pretty smooth sailing. (The daily journal automatically dates everything, then the pages themselves automatically pull a reverse chronological feed of every time you wrote about the thing, and queries allow for more targeted, dynamic searching, like all tasks due in the next week, or all tasks for the project, etc.)

The headlines focusing on AI layoffs are still mostly missing this, too.

The real reason for layoffs in tech are from a quiet recession that’s hidden by circular AI cashflows, correcting for inflated staff count from COVID overenthusiasm, or to free cashflow for throwing more money into the AI pit. (Or all three, of course).

AI doesn’t reduce headcount; it just slightly increases the efficiency of skilled workers to do simple, mundane tasks—and even that requires careful oversight or it’ll inevitably fuck it up.

But skilled workers are quick at mundane tasks… it’s just boring. So it’s not really generating much value, even in the best case.

And the sloppening is showing us all the downsides.

The house of cards is going to come tumbling down soon, and it’s going to be a lot worse than the 1999 dot com crash. I heard that OpenAI needs to pay big bills for datacenter expansion in the fall with money they don’t have—I don’t have the source for it, but, if true, that could be the domino that triggers the crash. Circular cashflows between highly leveraged companies makes the entire chain as fragile as the weakest link.

An 80% market correction wouldn’t be outside of historical norms. Hold onto your hat on the way down!

The Year of the Linux Desktop isn’t literally when it gains 50%+ marketshare, it’s the point in the adoption S curve where it’s moved past early adopters and enthusiasts and is starting to be picked up by mainstream users.

That’s literally happening now. 2025/26. It’s happened. (Past tense).

Now we’re in the “watch numbers go up” phase of the S curve, wondering when the second derivative will go negative, as that will signal peak adoption speed.

When it was new, I got a lot of “Certainly! …”

Like, come on, mate. You didn’t even read the first sentence before submitting.

The Mozilla numbers are wildly inflated. They were effectively just advertising for Anthropic’s mediocre LLM with that blog post.

CachyOS would be my recommendation; it has options to get a kernel with the closed-source drivers automatically during install, iirc. I bought an AMD card, so I have no direct experience, but I’d expect the least friction with it, even compared to Bazzite or other gaming-focused distributions.

VB is still great. I use it to fully automate a lot of Excel-based tasks, like looping through thousands of Excel files to pull values or update spreadsheets with new features.

Sure, there are more powerful tools, but VBA is built in and works really well for some tasks like that.