@rl_dane

Linux is primarily a tool for fortune-500 companies first, and end-users like thee and me, last.

Given the fact that most Linux contributors are on a corporate payroll, no surprise.

Computing as we knew it, is dead. The future has been robbed from us.

@jns

OBI-WAN: That boy was our last hope.
YODA: No. There is another.

I mean, there's always the BSDs, Haiku, heck, the Commodore 64 is back, so anything can happen. ;)

@rl_dane Hah :) Haiku gives me some hope. They do actively resist the ai nonsense, so far,...

The c64 might be the better way to go :D

Anything that needs to be general purpose enough to work with modern hardware is always going to be disadvantaged by having to reverse engineer proprietary drivers and hardware.

There used to be enough people to somewhat keep up with that, and some shift in mentality at the manufacturer side to be a bit more reasonable with providing open drivers and/or documentation, but in the past few years or so, none of that is true anymore.

I am seeing projects long considered stable fall apart due to losing maintainers left and right, and projects that are still alive get flooded with new developers pushing bad practices as if it were a personal crusade. The software landscape in general seems to be slowly unraveling into complete dysfunction.

Sticking with an as-simple-as-possible stack where all parts can be maintained by one person seems like the most reasonable way out of the mess. (there's more capable options other than a c64 these days though ;) - reviving something like Wirth's project oberon on a somewhat more modern fpga would be a fun start.. )

@DrInterpreter @jns @rl_dane It seems so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQPNyQmvOIQ

@DrInterpreter @AnachronistJohn @jns

@AnachronistJohn @jns @rl_dane I'm looking for an AI-free, secure OS that will let me pretend to be on Windows when I need to and still run ad blocking Chromium browsers, Zoom and solid free video editing.

I think all three major BSDs can run Chromium. I know for certain #OpenBSD can, pretty sure #FreeBSD can as well. My experience with #NetBSD is very limited, though, but probably.

As far as zoom, I'm afraid that's currently out of the picture on the BSDs, to the best of my knowledge. They used to have a web app, but I think that's gone, as well.

Among the Linux distros, Gentoo seems to have a pretty strongly anti-AI stance.

@rl_dane @DrInterpreter @jns chromium build time:

@AnachronistJohn @jns @DrInterpreter @AnachronistJohn

3 hours, wow. XD

That's actually pretty fast.

I wonder that time (1) doesn't have a "total billions of instructions executed" mode, or something akin to it.

Or something like processor-seconds.