Mint or Fedora would be my first choices. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for my own computers but I think those others are better for people new to Linux. In my experience Fedora does a good job of combining up-to-dateness and stability. Mint is less up to date, but close enough to Ubuntu and Debian that loads of the help materials out there will apply to it.

The pledge, organized by Film Workers for Palestine and published Monday, initially featured 1,200 signatories, including filmmakers and actors: Yorgos Lanthimos, Ava DuVernay, Boots Riley, Adam McKay, Olivia Colman, Mark Ruffalo, Riz Ahmed, Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Emma Stone, Andrew Garfield, Harris Dickinson, Guy Pearce, Jonathan Glazer, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Abbi Jacobson, Eric Andre, Elliot Page, Payal Kapadia, Joaquin Phoenix, and Rooney Mara.

Kind of seems like Paramount’s loss. Oh well, they may not have the actors but at least they have Larry Ellison and an unwavering commitment to genocide.

Your title still says “Kagy” instead of “Kagi”.

You can talk horsepower and dogpower all day, but I won’t really understand until you convert it to bananapower, for scale.

Maybe for them. But for governments in general the point is that age verification is ID verification and it means everything you do online or on any electronic device can be surveilled and tied to your real identity. And that makes political dissent a lot harder to organize without being shut down.

That’s my thinking but I suspect it probably does this anyway.

I suspect “yes” comes with strings attached, which is why I’m sticking to the other option. But it’s likely I already agreed to the strings when I agreed to my company’s demand that we use Teams.

Also I don’t want to give some manager at Microsoft the satisfaction of adding my click on “Yes” to their stats.

Every single time I open Teams it pops up a dialogue asking if I want to try Copilot. There’s no “No” option, just “Yes” and “Maybe later”. If you click “Maybe later”, it asks again the next day. One day they’ll just assume “Yes” and not ask.

And this is at work for a company that has demanded we jam needless AI into all our applications.

Sometimes companies gradually reduce the usefulness of the free product to incentivize people to pay. They may do this.

I think legally this suggestion makes you a pirate, a thief, a terrorist and a mass murderer.

The best possible scenario is that they’re just using it to entice people to pay for a premium subscription and will leave it that way. But the chances are that once they’ve pulled enough people in with the offer of free software, they’ll alter the deal.

So they’re planning to hook people in with freebies then boil the frogs a little slower.

Github Copilot is somewhat useful for programming (or it feels useful when it cranks out some boring and routine code to my specs - not sure it actually saves me time though because I always review it all), but of course Microsoft have given a range of products all the same name for maximum confusion, as they do. The Copilot in Windows may be rubbish for all I know. I haven’t ever felt the need to press the button.

It’s like gambling the entire US economy on Clippy.

Affinity has been the best alternative to some of the key Adobe tools for a while now, and it was a one-off payment of about $200 for the whole suite, which was good value. Now it’s “free” I’m just a bit worried. Sure, it’s not exactly a subscription but where are they going?

It seems reasonable for now: you can use all the tools except the AI stuff for free, so it’s still (I assume) as full-featured as the last Serif version of Affinity was. And if the AI stuff is not done locally, then that costs them money to run so fair enough that they charge something. But we don’t know what Canva plans to do with Affinity. Will the tools be gradually hollowed out while more and more features go behind a paywall? Will they start filling the desktop software with ads? What will they do when they judge that they have poached enough of Adobe’s users? Will they brick your software if you close your Canva account? I don’t entirely trust them.

Everyone expresses this frustration with Linux, but I’ve used it alongside Windows for years and it’s Windows that has caused me by far the most headaches. I think many people would be pleasantly surprised by pretty much any mainstream Linux distro.

Do you even have a general computing license, citizen? Have you even been through the vetting process?

Or just sending them takedown requests that Google acts on by default.

We could see back in the 1980s that corporations were becoming more powerful than governments. And that power imbalance has only continued to become more extreme since then.