I don’t know… Friday I installed Linux on my dad’s “new” Thinkpad T495.

I tried to go with Gnome. It’s supposed to be the user friendly one, right?

First thing I want to do is change the charging limit of the battery to 80%. It’s not impossible to replace the battery, but it would be nice to not blow it too fast.

After 20m of trying and failing I switched to KDE, where the whole thing was 3 clicks.

And even if I didn’t know how to do it, the systemsettings window has a search function that will get you the right option in a split second.

I found switftkey rather buggy, and stopped using it as soon as GBoard added decent multilingual support, so I really can’t remember the key placement. All are pretty heavily customizable, I’d be very surprised if you couldn’t get them to a state where you’re comfortable.

Which one of the three I suggested?

FUTO is definitely a bit more resource hungry. Try Heliboard, you need to add a separate library to enable swiping, but it’s definitely way lighter.

AFAICT their license does not fulfill the OSI definition and is therefore ineligible for inclusion in the main F-Droid repo.

They have their own F-Droid repo:

https://app.futo.org/fdroid/repo/

The repo is also pre-included in clients such as Droid-ify, which I use anyway because I like it better than the official client.

FUTO Keyboard is hands down the best option.

If you have philosophical objections to the FUTO license, then your options are Heliboard and Florisboars. Heliboard is currently better, but Florisboard has promise.

All the girls that just do not exist because of selective abortions?

Put in a SSD and you’ll be surprised how far it can get you.

My father is still using a 13 year old 14" Dell I gave up 6 years ago. He’s even using it with windows 10, and having a SSD it works almost bearably well. They keyboard broke, and with the laptop not being Win11 compatible, he asked for an upgrade.

I got him a 6 year old Thinkpad, but I’ll install Mint and give him a VM for the few SWs he needs Windows for.

As an empiricist I cringe at any statement given with 100% certainty.

That face is so Dutch I can practically hear the accent.

If you want to start playing around immediately, try Alpaca if Linux, LMStudio if Windows. See if it works for you, then move from there.

Alpaca actually runs its own Ollama instance.

I can actually use locally some smaller models on my 2017 laptop (though I have increased the RAM to 16 GB).

You’d be surprised how mich can be done with how little.

There’s an argument to be had that it is a little harder to censor on Lemmy, and also I expect that it does not e.g. scan all PMs by default to detect >!!<spam as some big techs might.

So, if tech savvy people are harder to fool (but it’s definitely not impossible, see Cory Doctorow’s recent post) but the cost of spamming is a little lower… maybe it still works.

Can’t even tell if serious or what.

You can totally do it with the GPL as well, as long as you own 100% od the copyright. Of you accept a patch, and don’t get copyright attribution… You’re stuck with the GPL forever.

I love how your first example was AUR.

I use arch BTW.

That also depends a lot. Often (e.g. on Fairphone) the stock ROM may lag behind way worse than e/OS.

So if a user has reasons to avoid a Pixel, or just wants to improve their privacy without replacing their device, e/OS may be a marked improvement even on security.

There is surely a tradeoff at some point…

But noone says you can’t lose both!

Last time I had a PC with an optical drive, I used the built-in features of Dolphin, and using a different software for metadata. If you use KDE, it’s hard to find a good reason to do otherwise. It will usually get metadata from CDDB, but on the other hand for metadata It’s really hard to beat Picard or Beets.

Beets will also scrape the lyrics and add them to the metadata, beside acousticbrainz goodness, multiple genres from Last.fm, and more. Picard will do most of this as well.

investment in stabilizing Linux enough to make it a feasible alternative

Do you care to elaborate? If I had to write a list of reasons why Linux might not be ready for your average cubicle… Stability wouldn’t be one of them.

And those are the night for beans n tuna.