Wow! BeOS mentioned. Hello, fellow old person. While you read this comment, imagine two towers of green LEDs, gently rising and falling, based on the complexity of each word while we just Be, together.

Now let’s remember why BeOS actually failed: Illegal contracts from Microsoft to prevent PC vendors from selling PCs preloaded with BeOS. Be, Inc sued Microsoft and settled out of court for $23 million and I remember that moment, thinking, “That’s not enough!”

Microsoft destroyed BeOS. Not any sort of market condition or natural state of economics. The whole, “let’s turn it into an appliance OS” thing was a last ditch pivot in an attempt to save the company. It was doomed from the start.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2003/sep/07/microsoftpays

Aside: Just like Palm’s WebOS which also tried to pivot into an appliance OS. Except in that case, that OS was destroyed by sheer incompetence on the part of HP’s brain dead CEO: Carly Fiorina. To this day, she’s still tarnishing her image by associating with the Trump administration. Very pro-Nazi.

If you ever want to point out an obvious example of how CEOs aren’t any smarter than anyone else and normally only get the job based on nepotism and industry incest, she’s the perfect go-to!

This is why web browsers like Firefox need their own AI. Local AI for not only creating summaries but for detecting bullshit like this.

Yes, creating summaries is kinda lame but without local AI you’re at the mercy of big corporations. It’s a new arms race. Not some bullshit feature that no one needs.

…and burns people’s homes down due to lack of safety features.

…and children choke to death from easily removable small parts.

…and people get electrocuted because of a lack of warning label telling them not to use it in the bath.

RVA23 is a big deal because it allows the big players (e.g. Google, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more) to avoid vendor lock-in for their super duper ultra wicked mega tuned-to-fuck-and-back specialty software (not just AI stuff). Basically, they can tune their software to a generic platform to the nth degree and then switch chips later if they want without having to re-work that level of tuning.

The other big reason why RISC-V is a big deal right now is energy efficiency. 40% of a data center’s operating cost is cooling. By using right-sized RISC-V chips in their servers they can save a ton of money on cooling. Compare that to say, Intel Xeon where the chips will be wasting energy on zillions of unused extensions and sub-architecture stuff (thank Transmeta for that). Every little unused part of a huge, power hungry chip like a Xeon eats power and generates heat.

Don’t forget that vector extensions are also mandatory in RVA23. That’s just as big a deal as the virtualization stuff because AI (which heavily relies on vector math) is now the status quo for data center computing.

My prediction is that AI workload enhancements will become a necessary feature in desktops and laptops soon too. But not because of anything Microsoft integrates into their OS and Office suites (e.g. Copilot). It’ll be because of Internet search and gaming.

Using an AI to search the Internet is such a vastly superior experience, there’s no way anyone is going to want to go back once they’ve tried it out. Also, in order for it to work well it needs to run queries on the user’s behalf locally. Not in Google or Microsoft’s cloud.

There’s no way end users are going to pay for an inferior product that only serves search results from a single company (e.g. Microsoft’s solution—if they ever make one—will for sure use Bing and it would never bother to search multiple engines simultaneously).

Vegan Linux users can compile their own protein from source.

Their purity level is so high that they can kill -9 anyone wearing a leather belt with just a glance.

What counts as “social media”? Steam is social media by most definitions.

It’s called dogfooding and it’s what you’re supposed to do to improve your product.

Total market share is irrelevant. What matters more is total users.

If you make a product and there’s a million people on a platform who could buy it, the costs to port that product (and support it) need to be low for it to be worthwhile.

If the total number of people on that platform increases to 10 million, now the cost to port/support becomes more like a minuscule expense rather than a difficult decision.

When you reach 100 million there’s no excuse. There’s a lot of money to be made!

For reference, the current estimated amount of desktop Linux users globally is somewhere between 60-80 million. In English-speaking countries, the total is around 19-20 million.

It’s actually a lot more complicated than this, but you get the general idea: There’s a threshold where any given software company (including games) is throwing money away by not supporting Linux.

Also keep in mind that even if Linux had 50% market share, globally, Tim Sweeney would still not allow Epic to support it. I bet he’d rather start selling their own consoles that run Windows instead!

One thing for certain, Microsoft will not stop using Copilot to develop their software in house.

You’re wrong, but I think you’ll be OK with that because the reality of the situation is actually hilarious:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/865689/microsoft-claude-code-anthropic-partnership-notepad

“Turns out Copilot sucks so let’s just use our competitor’s superior product but that’s no reason we can’t keep foisting the inferior garbage on the masses!”

Having Sonny Boy listed as a “masterpiece” has me shaking my head. Much in the same way I shook my head after watching Sonny Boy.

Sonny Boy is an anime you recommend people watch to mess with them.

Any normal person that watches it will step away at the end thinking, “WTF did I just watch‽”

Unrelated: Demon Slayer is worth watching. The hype is irrelevant.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of cool and useful stuff you can do with KDE Plasma (and Kwin).

Another tip: Did you know that KRunner (Alt-Space) can do unit conversions? Type Alt-Space and 10cm or something like that and it’ll give you that value in inches.

Another: You can bind shortcuts to mouse buttons like Ctrl-Alt-Right (click) And Ctrl-Alt-Left to say, switch desktops right/left.

You can type Ctrl-i in Dolphin to filter files. So if you’re looking at your enormous downloads directory and you want to see all the .png files you can type Ctrl-i, png and it’ll only show you files with png in their name.

KDE’s “get hot new stuff” framework works with Dolphin “actions” (context menu file handlers) so you can go into the settings—>Context Menu and click on “Download New Services” to browse tons of free scripts/tools that let you do things like file conversions, write disk images to USB drives, get checksums, etc.

I actually made a personal script that converts videos to looping .webp files (or just sets WebP files to loop forever). So I can right click on a .WebP, .webm, .mp4, etc and it’ll run ffmpeg on it in the background.

Every decade since 1999 (the year of the Linux desktop—for me) I spend a few weeks trying out all the hot new shit in terms of desktop environments. I’ll switch to Gnome for a few days, get disappointed at how much I miss from KDE, and then try one of the newer ones like Cosmic. Then I’ll play with the latest versions of the classics (xfce) and marvel that they still make you configure everything in a single file or they still lack basic shit that normal people want like a clipboard manager.

All the actually useful or just plain really, really nice/handy stuff is built into KDE Plasma. I’ve been using so many of those features for so long, I can’t fathom having to go back to a world without say, being able to navigate the filesystems on all my other PCs via ssh:// (and other KIO workers).

I remember when KDE 2.0 came out and it added support for kioslaves (now called KIO Workers) and it completely changed how I viewed desktops. That was in the year 2000. How is it that literally nothing else (not other FOSS desktops nor Windows or Macs) has implemented the same feature?

It’s not just the file manager, either. I can access ssh:// (or any other KIO worker) from any file dialog! The closest thing is shared drives in Windows but even that isn’t nearly as flexible or feature rich (or efficient, haha).

Then there’s the clipboard manager (klipper), Activities, and a control panel that lets you customize everything to extreme degrees. It even supports fractional scaling and has supported that since forever. I remember when they introduced that feature over a decade ago and it still blows my mind to this day just how forward thinking the devs were.

Monitors since forever have had a different X DPI than the Y DPI. Yet only the KDE devs bothered to both query the monitor’s DDC info to figure that out and set it correctly when the desktop starts.

There’s other features that drive me nuts when I don’t have them! For example, the ability to disable global shortcuts on specific windows. So if I’ve got a remote desktop open to my work I can send Super-. (Win-.) and that’ll open the Windows emoji picker in the remote desktop instead of the KDE one (locally). And it will remember this setting for that application!

I can make any window I want stay above others temporarily to take notes, enter values into the calculator, or just turn any window into something like a HUD (you can control any window’s transparency on the fly!).

It even supports window tiling! A feature most people aren’t aware of. Like, if you’re already running KDE, why bother with a tiling window manager? You’ve already got it (though the keyboard shortcuts to manage the tiling layout in real time are lacking).

TL;DR: KDE Plasma is the best desktop in existence across all platforms and this is easy to prove with empircal evidence.

Wait until you see Gen Alpha’s spending on alcohol!

Comcast—in the top ten of the shittiest companies of all time that no one wants to have to deal with—is surprised that their “new” deal of, “be slightly less villainous, and expect all our problems to go away” isn’t working.

Also watching Frasier for the 27th time.

This doesn’t count as “seeing a psychiatrist”!

Kunon the Sorcerer Can See is also an absolutely fantastic anime this season. It looks like a typical low-effort, power fantasy anime but it’s actually got some of the best writing I’ve seen in ages!

My other thoughts on this season: Cursed VS Curses is a total shit show but Plants VS Ninjas is a decent continuation of the first season.

Does anyone actually watch these Bang! Dream shows?

What The Fuck are they even spending the money on? They made a great headset (for the price) and have an app store that’s bringing in ~$2 billion/year.

Given, they have an absolutely terrible, locked-down OS that gets in the way more than it helps, but it’s still OK-ish enough to make loads of money.

I guess it doesn’t matter, since Valve is about to take over the entire VR gaming market with the Steam Frame. A VR headset running SteamOS is just so vastly superior to the locked-down bullshit that runs on the other headsets, it’s no contest.

If only we had Gun Maintenance 101 in public schools. Americans are issued “Baby’s First Glock” at birth as part of the APGAR-USA-USA-USA! test and then… Nothing.

Bismuth oxyselenide? You mean it can cure both indigestion and get rid of dandruff‽