A handful of ones, mostly just what I run on my home systems, but I also have a Windows 10 and 11 iso for archival purposes, and just in case I have to run a Windows VM for some obscure reason in the future.

Likely because at this point, it’s an almost impossible standard to hold for an open source project.

“AI code” is a very vague term. What if somebody used an LLM autocomplete in their IDE? What if they used an LLM to summarize and parse documentation, but wrote all the code themself? What if they generated the initial code with an LLM, but then heavily modified and tuned it by hand? What if they wrote the initial code by hand, but used an LLM to debug or optimize it? What if they wrote all the code by themself, but used an LLM to write unit tests and modify documentation?

If you’re against every single example I gave, that’s fine, but many if not most of these would be nearly impossible to tell if somebody had done it. Project maintainers are already spread extremely thin without also having to be AI detectives. Many/most large projects have already banned AI slop contributions, but that only stops the most obvious and lowest quality vibe coders and agentic bot spam.

The truth is that a large portion of devs are using LLMs in the kinds of ways I described earlier, right, wrong, or otherwise. Some distros are leaning into the hype, others are just quietly doing their own thing.

If you want to steer clear of explicit AI inclusion, I would just stick with distros that aren’t bragging about implimenting those kinds of features. Check their main project page, check their official blog if they have one, look at the lead maintainers’ github/lab pages and projects and see if they are big into AI stuff or not.

At this point, that’s probably the best you can do.

Wow, my prediction was pretty close. 7 months ago, I predicted that the Steam Machine prices would be $800-$900 for the 512GB model, and $1,000-$1,200 for the 2TB model.

That was in the middle of memory prices going vertical, and I still got down voted to hell by people claiming that they were expecting $600-$800 tops…

Honestly, with how bad memory has become even over the last 6 months, and the increased brutality to the market done by tariffs and the oil supply shock, I’m actually surprised they were able to hit $1,049 for the base model.

The hard truth: It’s an acceptable price within a piss-poor market. The harder truth: It will sell out extremely fast and won’t restock likely for months.

When Framework announced their new Framework 13 Pro line laptops last month, a lot of people balked at the price. $1,500 was the cheapest pre-built model, and DIY was basically the same price, unless you already had some components. The pricing for higher tier specs easily climbed to $2,000+

Still, they sold out of every model for the first 6-8 batches in a few days, and barely 2 months later, they are sold out to batch 15, with an expected delivery in October.

The K-shaped market is further becoming a reality. The people that have the money to drop on stuff like this, are happily dropping it. And the people who can’t afford it are getting left in the dust.

The scumbag oligarchs have created the cyberpunk dystopia, and most of us aren’t going to be living up in the shiny skyscrapers…

I’ll have to try again, it’s been rough the last few times I’ve tried.

I’ve thought for a long time that if a FOSS project wants to use Discord as its primary community center, they should build it on Matrix and have a bridge to Discord as a secondary.

That way, they get the larger reach and visibility of Discord for more of the normie crowd, without compromising their core FOSS user base and forcing them into proprietary solutions.

I personally think that general consumers will never use LLMs in any significant number. I think that LLMs will exist in two distinct spaces, FOSS for devs and other technical people who want to run there own infra locally - and B2B for everything else.

The few big AI companies that manage to last will be selling access to their models for much higher prices. Probably similar to current proprietary commercial software like VMWare, SolidWorks, VEEAM, Splunk, etc. Companies will pay hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars per seat depending on the niche offering and amount of usage.

Suppose that a company developed an LLM that is trained & tuned specifically to do legal work, and suppose it produced work that was around 95% the quality of a typical paralegal. If that company charged $6,000 a year per license to work on their platform, that’s expensive, but if you’re a small firm with say, a dozen full time lawyers, then for the yearly price of a single average paralegal, you could have each lawyer using that software to do most of the work that the paralegal would have done. I can see those kinds of applications happening more and more.

This assumes though that LLMs will continue to improve at a significant rate for a long time into the future, (5-10 more years) which isn’t at all obvious, and there is some evidence that it’s already starting to hit a ceiling.

There are other ways it might work, like if there is a method of compression that is discovered that reduces the necessary RAM and Compute needs by 2-3 orders of magnitude. So models that are considered very large today (100-300 billion params at full quality) might be able to run effectively on a single 32GB GPU that costs a few thousand dollars.

So the cost to run these models is reduced immensely, and a single small data center could run enormous models with 1,000,000+ context windows for tens of thousands of users at once.

But that cuts both ways, which is something that any AI company is going to have to deal with. Once small free models get good enough to do the vast majority of a task, a user is going to start weighing the cost/benefits, and the prospect of just buying a box and throwing one of these models in for a few grand will be very appealing.

I think there may be a good market out there for “AI boxes”, compact computers designed to run a tuned LLM, set up with a little special sauce so the interface is user-friendly, etc. Companies could sell these with support contracts to legal firms, indie Dev studios, startups, small government agencies, etc.

Idk, it’s so up in the air right now, and everything is constantly changing so fast. It’s impossible to predict where things will be in 6 months, let alone 6 years from now.

Yes, absolutely, science in general is necessary for any kind of desirable civilization. Space exploration contributes a massive amount of knowledge to scientific research and betters the human race.

But it shouldn’t be a playground for billionaires to plan space hotels for ultra-wealthy clientele. Public works for the public good, for the betterment of our human race as a whole, not just for the super rich.

Same, I’ve paid/donated far more for my FOSS than I ever did for proprietary software.

Insert the super fancy Tux for donating more for the FOSS than you would have paid for the proprietary software 🤴

Gaming PC - Nobara (Fedora base with lots of gaming-specifc kernel optimizations baked in.)

Personal laptop - Linux Mint

Business laptop - Linux Mint Debian Edition

Junk/Test laptops - Void

Home lab main hypervisor - XCP-ng (Highly customized Fedora under the hood.)

NAS - TrueNAS (Debian under the hood.)

Virtual servers - Mostly Debian, but a few Alma Linux VMs to get that RHEL experience. Ubuntu Server for my self-hosted gaming servers.

Steam Deck - SteamOS (Valve’s immutable spin of Arch.)

1. Typically, but not always. Some trans women are biologically intersex. (This also depends on how you define “biologically male” which is not totally straightforward.)
2. It matters in some contexts, not in others. Their physician should know, because various hormone treatments cause different effects in people’s bodies, and certain health conditions effect biologically male or female people differently too. That’s nobody else’s business but the patient and their trusted medical providers. As far as their dignity, opportunities, and general acceptance, it doesn’t matter. Trans folks deserve the exact same rights, opportunities, and acceptance as anybody else.
3. Usually people who bring this up aren’t acting in good faith, so I don’t engage with them. On the rare occasion where somebody is genuinely curious and wants to learn, I answer them in the same way as I am doing right now.
4. Because the word “woman” denotes multiple concepts, like the word “parent”. If a child is adopted at birth and is raised by a couple, the child and their community will refer to those people as the child’s parents. This is not a false statement, because the word “parent” doesn’t only mean the direct biological progenitors of a person. Parent also is a social role, hence the verb form “to parent somebody.” This is also why we have the terms, “biological parent” and “adoptive parent” to add additional information when it’s necessary.

Trans women are women in the sense that they are filling their society’s sociological role that surrounds the expected concept of a woman. That will be different depending on many factors, and will have many different aspects including their pronouns, fashion and clothing, voice, makeup, hair, activities, and so forth.

Just like any other woman, they will chose which social roles they desire to fit into, and which ones they don’t, and all of that is completely acceptable.

Curse USB and networking, purge that unclean heresy from your computing! Embrace the third temple!

Wish they handled it better, but I knew about this a while ago, and the price is more than reasonable.

A decade without a price hike is extremely generous, especially at how cheap their plan was.

They are a FOSS company that makes a fantastic product I’ve been happy with for years, I’ll gladly pay less than $2 a month to support them. Their server code is licensed with the AGPL, the strongest copyleft license there is, which gives me a lot of confidence.

Worse case scenario, they enshitify down the road, we are protected via the open source implementations. We’ve seen this many times in the past, Red Hat > Alma & Rocky Linux, Citrix Xen Server > XCP-ng, Terraform > Open Tofu.

Pay for your open source software, folks 💖

That’s a big one too, should catch lots of malware in that!

Yeah, those two look like they should be studying for their civics midterms, not cosplaying jackboot goons.

Tomb is a great little app that can do the same.

Tomb app

The Mullvad integration allows you to use Mullvad as your VPN for internet browsing while still being on your tailnet.

So normally, running two different VPN services can cause a bunch of problems, if it even works at all. Tailscale’s Mullvad integration fixes that.

Tailscale by itself is an overlay network. It’s literally a second network that your computer is connected to, but instead of it being a physical network with wires, switches, and routers, it’s a virtual network, a network that runs as software.

So imagine your computer right now at home. You plug into your router, and you have a local IP address, something like 192.168.1.20 right? If you run ipconfig on Windows or ip a on Linux, you’ll see your network adaptors listed with what their current IP address is. So if you’re running Windows, you’ll see your physical network adaptor listed with the IP address of 192.168.1.20

When you install Tailscale on that computer and log into your account, then run that command again, you’ll see a new network device listed, and it will have a totally different IP address, like 100.89.113.14

That is your Tailnet IP address, it works just like your “normal” IP address, but instead of it being a physical Ethernet adaptor on your motherboard and plugged into your home router, it is a virtual adaptor (software) running on your computer, connected to the Tailscale network, which has servers all around the world.

When you install Tailscale on a new device, say an old computer that you are using as a Minecraft server. That computer will get a new IP address on your tailnet, say 100.94.65.132

Because both of those machines were added by you to your own Tailnet, they can see and talk to each other by default. Meaning you could run a ping command from your home computer to your Minecraft server’s Tailscale IP, and it will respond.

Because this runs on the internet through Tailscale’s servers, you can do this from anywhere. That’s the “VPN” type functionality you are talking about. No matter where your home computer is, you can still access your Minecraft server because it is on your Tailnet, just as if it were still plugged into your router right next to you.

This is how I access my entire home lab from anywhere in the world. For example, I have a Jellyfin media server (like Plex) that I have a bunch of movies, TV shows, anime on. It’s running Tailscale and is on my Tailnet. I have Tailscale installed on my Android smartphone too.

So if I am staying at a hotel in another state, or visiting my family on the other side of the country, and I want to watch a movie or show that I have on my server all the way back home. I just run the Tailscale app on my phone, then open the Jellyfin app and I see all my home media right there on my phone and can watch it flawlessly. Even though I am at my parent’s house, on a totally different internet connection, 500 miles away from my home.

No, Tailscale is an overlay network. In it’s simplest form, it can act as a VPN. But it does much more than that.

Tailscale installs a virtual network device and allocates IP addresses to any device you install it on and sign in with your tailnet. Think of it as a virtual meshed LAN that runs on top of your physical network.

Tailscale becomes your control plane and provides advanced access control options for all your users and devices.

I use Tailscale and share out that server machine’s tailscale IP with just my gaming buddies.

But if you wanna live dangerously, you can port forward from your router to your internal mumble server.

I’ve got a Mumble server running on a little Linux container in my home lab.

Easy to set up and configure, very stable. Nothing special, it does what it is supposed to do, be a low latency, stable voip system, and it does great.