Linux May Be the Best Way to Avoid the AI Nightmare

Long term Linux (mint) user here. As you say, Linux came a long way and for me it's perfect.

I'm thinking about switching to Mac. Not because of the software, but because of the hardware. A few years ago I got a MacBook from work, and that hardware just blows away everything else on the market:

- Awesome battery life

- Awesome sound: doesn't sound like any other crappy laptop speaker

- Awesome touchpad: I now don't take a mouse with me because this thing is so good

I didn't find any laptop that comes even close to this.

Last time I brought this up, people suggested things like "Just use a headphone". Sorry I don't want to use headphones when I can use the speakers.

So please, if anyone knows hardware that comes close to a MacBook, please let me know.

>push from OS makers (...and Apple) to increase margins via including tracking and ads

I'm not sure I see much incentive with macOS. They might make a few dollars from ads but less than the hundreds of dollars they make when someone buys a macbook because they don't like the ads in windows. I've noticed zero ads pushed to me by the os in ten years of mac use. Also googling just now has them as the US's most profitable company making $100bn last year so I doubt they are desperate to change their strategy by shoving ads in.

> OS makers (here mainly Microsoft and Apple) to increase margins via including tracking and ads into the system

Not sure I see it on Apple. macOS is free. There are no ads in it.

I don't see ads on Windows either, unless you mean bloatware.

Can your grandmother use it, though? Without you setting it up, I mean.

what I said in another comment: as long as you cant buy a PC with Linux pre-installed easily this will remain a small minority OS.

> Almost all games via Steam (Proton) work flawlessly aside from some Ring-0/anticheat stuff. Most apps work great with Wine. If you're not using exotic hardware the drivers are rock-solid for almost all use-cases.

This has been one of the problems with Linux on the desktop since the beginning - 90% isn’t good enough, the last 10% matters.

Obviously the kernel and portions of the user space are good enough, hence the success of ChromeOS and Android, and all of the problems are surmountable via throwing money at development like Valve is doing with gaming.

As it stands you can’t recommend Linux to most people without an asterisk beside it and it will never grow to be a real competitor until that is fixed.

Honest question: do Apple and Microsoft currently capture passwords in a password manager, health info, SSNs, and the like?

I'm sure they do if you push them to their cloud drives or use their password managers -- which is somewhat applicable, but that's not what I'm referring to. I'm just not sure how panopticon-y they are when it comes to the actual content I type out or view in the browser.

This is true for everything now a days. People collect limited edition things speculating they will be collectibles in 20 years, they jump on new programming languages and try to develop the first libraries so their name can be attached to the de facto CSV parser for the language, they try to get on new social media platforms early to become the next influencer etc.

The world is a lot less naive then it used to be

> AI however, went from something most people had never heard of to full-speed exploitation.

To be fair, the timeline goes a bit further back. Markov chains had their moment in group chats a decade ago, it's hard to find a communal IRC room without someone's Markov bot lurking around. Then came BERT and GPT-2, both of which had their innocent days of getting finetuned into somewhat-usable form. After GPT-3 was the "oh we can sell this" moment, and all the cutesy, semi-efficient research that was being done got sidelined so people could make their own ChatGPT-killer. That is the disturbing part to me; so many people (OpenAI included) abandoned efficiency for marginal gains. This seems to be the trend going forward, likely exacerbated with GPT-5; we're going to need bigger boats (servers).

Look how crypto started: people interested in it mining on their own when that was still possible. Meanwhile for most things AI its not some upstart hacking at home but due to the demand for compute from the getgo, someone who needs funding and therefore has to play the game as its being played.

I think the difference is that crypto requires a certain leap of faith to imagine its utility. But a language model doesn’t. So if you’re someone who doesn’t really care too much about the technology for its own sake, there’s still a descent chance you can imagine a use case for one.

> being used by profiteers trying to milk it for every last dollar

Not just this, but also enshittify service, spam content, increase spying and in general disempower users.

> I'm happy with one caveat: If Microsoft 'recall' is not opt-in so is forced on me I'll switch to Linux, which I like too. It's not as nice as Windows imho but it works.

At this point it's opt-out.

Every minute you spent not switching from Windows is a minute you spend endorsing their inevitable coup against your agency. Why wait? Why live in fear of that happening?

Thank you for stating this. I've found this particular article tends to have a lot of Luddites, perhaps they see it as a career threat or have a case of the green eyed monster https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-Eyed_Monster_(disambig.... I honestly don't understand it.

I sarcastically posted this is akin to using Windows 3.11 Vs a modern multitasking OS and we should do that because humans can't really multitask, and it was unsurprisingly downvoted perhaps because it went over people's heads.

AI gold rush is just like the internet gold rush or the file sharing gold rush, and it'll settle down with the marginals vanishing, leaving local models and the big players.

Those who don't embrace will be left behind, like COBOL Devs of the 80s as newer languages came about (mostly VB and Java) and took their banking jobs (I've seen this first hand, and not ironically I've seen this start to happen with Java as a language now and the "old guard Devs", of the generation I am now in, but this is off topic).

Back on topic, Linux will go the privacy route, Microsoft and Apple possibly the sales and analytics route, but regardless of the negative side, people will be able to achieve their work and goals faster. I use ML day to day, and for me my personal use case is to have 2 FE developer AI on tap. These have been https://github.com/wandb/openui and ChatGpt 4o.

Eventually I expect the former to be the more capable and use just that, but who knows, either way my FE Dev time (I'm not a FE Dev) has been cut from weeks to hours. Good luck to any average developer without FE skills beating that.

Linux is better but you shouldn't compare it on aesthetics. The AI nightmare will be more fun, beautiful and easy to use!

Linux will always lose against others when it comes to liking how it is. UX, UI, "it just works" windows and macs win.

You should never ever expect someone to prefer it on only aesthetic or usability grounds. You will never like it.

But this is NOT why you should choose Linux. Linux is for Freedom, customisability and privacy.

With enough investment of time you can get something you will like but you need to choose and use it first. With enough investment and customisation it's possible to get it to be superior in usability but you need to choose it and use it and live with it. You will like it but only if you choose it over liking "better" alternatives for non superficial reasons.

(Note: For some non technical people Linux may be able to be simpler and better UX aesthetics and to use if configured properly)

Sadly yeah. I managed to install it both on my mom and dad's computers. I didn't push them, they were genuinely curious and sick of having to remember their Microsoft account to do some stuff on windows. They have been running Linux Mint for 2 years and quite happy about it. But I hope they don't constraint themselves due to this, I don't watch their everyday use, but I know that Linux is not always easy on the non tech savy people.

A couple of vendors experimented with offering it out-of-the-box. But normal people aren't looking to play politics with their operating system choice, they're trying to get work done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI

Imagine if a clothing designer came up to a construction worker and told them that the fabric grainlines on their clothes were poorly aligned, and that they should buy something else. This topic is the software equivalent of that.

But also, technically speaking, most computers already have Linux preinstalled on them, it's just called something different: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/

You can, from Dell

Linux should be something you have to do yourself

Agreed. Even knowing that, just yesterday I was surprised to find my M1 MacBook Pro still had 28% battery after more than a month on standby. When I closed the lid it was at 60%, so that’s less than 1% per day. Very happy with it.

I use an m series mac. Half the time I come to it the next day to open the lid its already warm. No clue what is keeping this computer out of sleep.

Apples making a shit ton of money selling all of us expensive ram upgrades that we happily buy.

IF the authors Mac is managed by corporate overlords he might be right about the battery. They are stuffing so much security and monitoring shit on there now that I feel like I'm running a spyware and toolbar riddled xp box. Even an older Mac without the corporate crapware is snappy.

Yeah. This is absurd. And, as if the reason for this “degradation” isn’t for user-centric functionally, and that the functionality can’t be turned off. This is just “old man yells at cloud”.

I agree LLM powered search is useful, but I'm not sure it's the best for learning or reference. I still read quite a bit of man pages. Maybe I need the killer turnkey local LLM setup to roll up and convince me of what I'm missing.

DON’T use AI to learn the command line. It hallucinates way too much. A simple rsync command can wipe your drive.

I know it’s sort of a joke but I’m serious, read the manual

> if you move to Linux and you DON'T use AI to help you learn the command line

Most people can use Linux for what they want without ever looking at a command line, or at least without having to look at it any more than you need to in Windows.

I'm really curious about AI and the terminal. Do you have good tools to recommend ?

Speak for yourself, Linux runs AI just fine when you want it. The big difference is that I get to choose where it lives, not my OEM (who let's face it, doesn't care how AI is implemented).

Sign me up for missing out. I also don't use native DirectX, first-party filesystem drivers, Office 365 or Dropbox/iCloud. I'll happily add AI to the list, if I have to.

I don't really get what part of the bandwagon Linux users will really miss out on at the OS level? It's not like you can't use stuff like github copilot and it's really only a moderate productivity boost in many cases.

missing out is a feature. Microsoft will infest its OS with AI driven ads faster than you think

What's to miss out on? Experimenting with or even building useful "AI" tools? Nope. Not missing out on that. There's Ollama (and a bunch of other) local (your machine, not someone else's) "AI" model runners native to Linux. There's also a ton of great Python libraries which connect just as happily to a local "AI" instance as they will to a remote API. Much "AI" research already happens on Linux. Using other useful tools other people have written? Nope. Not missing out there either. Same reason. Tons of great tools already exist to run "AI" assisted tasks of various kinds natively on Linux connecting to a locally running model. All that stays securely on my machine / network, and doesn't "phone home" (as can be confirmed by reading the source code of the open source "AI" tools by anyone with a bit of programming skill / knowledge). The difference is that I control when and how it runs, what it does, where it gets data from, where that data flows to, etc, etc. Not Microsoft or Apple, nor anyone else. Me. That's about the only way I can trust current "AI" to be used properly and safely.

We need another AI winter to get these dudes off the train.