I'm so tired of the AI hype.
Can we start solving real problems please?

#NoAI

Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:

Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.

Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.

I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.

By the way, I know a lot of folks struggle with mental heatlh in various ways, so:

Know that the fact that people interact with you at all, and are part of your life even in very loose ways, means your presence matters and you're irreplaceable.

It won't always feel like it, but people do appreciate you. Most just don't know how to express it very well, and no one really does a good job of teaching that. I'm no better than anyone on this point.

But really, whatever community you have is irrefutable evidence that you're not alone. They're the ones that will appreciate you.

There's no incentive structure to Fedi. Nobody follows you just to increase some metric or trick you into following back to win some game tied to capitalism here. They follow you because you're interesting or cool. Or both.

This probably doesn't help with the myriad other, more material causes for your suffering. Money be damned.

But you'll never be alone if you don't want to be. And it can get better.