Ubuntu LTS is only five years, and Linux Mint tracks that. I wouldn't really recommend RHEL or Alma or Rocky to a new user for a desktop distribution, and wouldn't generally use it myself. I can't comment on OpenSUSE.

I use Fedora, but that requires an annual upgrade, which isn't really that difficult to do, but it's not something a new user would find easy to do. Certainly the people I know that I've installed Linux for wouldn't.

What distort? We're running Ubuntu LTS on workstations, and we keep the updates rolling, and have no significant issues. Generally when we want to do feature updates, we don't do in-place upgrades at all, we just build a new image and roll it out. We want complete control over new feature rollouts, including any major new upgrades of key software like LibreOffice.

And honestly, that's pretty much how we were managing Windows prior to beginning the migration. Updates in general are always a risky business, and I've seen upgrades in every OS I've worked with since Windows 3.1 go horribly awry. I've baked Windows systems, Linux systems, BSD systems, and even had to finally give up and reinstall my M1 Mac because the major release upgrade worked about 90%, but there was enough peculiar behavior that it just wasn't worth trying to track down.

In all cases in an enterprise environment, regardless of OS, you don't want feature updates, significant changes to functionality, or installs of major version of updates to software. When it comes to that, you're working in a lab environment, rolling out to a few users to test stability and interoperability, and then pushing them out to all the workstations. This isn't a Linux thing, this is just how an IT department stays sane and doesn't screw up the whole organization's workflow.

There are only a few circumstances I can imagine where LTS support over three or four years would even be desirable, and most of those are pretty niche use cases dealing with specialized equipment or legacy systems. In general, whether it's Linux, BSD, Windows or even MacOS, it's always better to do a full reinstall with the new OS. Heck, by the time Windows Server 2003 went mainstream, only madmen were doing in-place upgrades on domain controllers. The better solution was always to build a new DC and then decommission the old one.

All my worst upgrade disasters in any OS came from in-place upgrades just fucking everything up. At best, it left a lot of old cruft hanging around, at worst it rendered a system almost unusable, and it was usually a bit of both.

The way I'm rolling out Debian and Ubuntu at work these days is just working images. Sometimes there's some funky hardware that requires after I clone an image that needs some intervention, but generally it just works. New images are generated every six months, or when a new release has been tested, rinse and repeat. In the business world you don't give a crap about anything but quick up time, and I have a stack of spares in a closet that get refreshed regularly, and when something blows up, you grab one off the shelf and move on. New OS upgrade, new image.

You say that you are well aware but what you write suggests strongly otherwise.

It's also not a model because unless you plan to demolish existing housing and rebuild it with better insulated walls there is not a lot you can do to improve wall insulation. In addition, as someone living in a very well insulated house I can tell you that you absolutely do need airconditioning - the great insulation we need to get through Canadian winters is a liability in the summer because it traps the heat generated inside the house. After about the couple of days of hot weather without air conditioning the inside of the house gets up to the upper 20's and does not cool off until the early hours of the morning even with all the windows open thanks to the great insulation.

Rooftop solar does work well - I think we will probably get some installed the next time we have the roof re-done since the lifetime of solar pannels is comparable to shingles. However, it takes about 14 or so years to recover the cost so it's not not exactly going to deliver savings quickly.

The current AI systems have some definite use cases, but right now outside some very narrow areas (such as some customer service oriented jobs and some of the more basic programming jobs), the efficiency increases are too small to reasonably justify reducing headcounts based on them. Seems like a good way of identifying areas where management is on a hype-train which can cause real damage to the companies and the quality of their services.

I think the problem that the two of you are having is that you do not understand how these "AI" algorithms work and are actually seeing them as "intelligent" when they are really not - they are complex text predictive engines: all they do is calculate the best "next word" in a sentence based on their training data. They have no idea or understanding of what they are saying hence, if they say they are a doctor, therapist, lawyer etc. it is merely because, based on their training data, that's the "best" set of words, given their training, to respond to a query with.

Now, if everyone unerstood that there would be no issue with people using them since anytime they made a claim that they were some sort of expert we'd all know they were completely bullshitting us - like an actor in a film where we all know they are not a real doctor, lawyer ot whetever the script says they are. Clearly some people, such as yourselves, do not understand that about "AI" chatbots so a potential solution is to clearly label the chatbot as such so we are all on the same page when it comes to understanding its output.

If we all know that the output cannot be treated as true then it prevents harm. Nobody should follow the advice of a chatbot claiming it is a doctor in the same way that we do not follow the advice of a actor in a film claiming to be a doctor. So it is not that I want to protect any "superintelligence" it is that I know it is no such thing, indeed that it lacks intelligence -- although it can pretend very convincingly, but nevertheless it can be a useful tool to copy edit documents, summerize content etc as long as you treat the output with care and stick to things the "AI" is good at which is basically text manipulation.

It's not me that it needs to be explained to but you. The reason that you know an actor is not a real doctor, lawyer etc. is because of the context that they are making the claim in. They may hand out advice or suggest a treatment etc. in the play/film but you know they are just pretending because of the context....so...and here is the part you seem to have trouble with...if we clearly label AI chatbots as fictional then we make the context the same for them as an actor in a film.

No there are not - perhaps in the US but not in the rest of the world because we understand the difference between reality and films/TV...and that does seem to be your problem here so perhaps disclaimers really are needed in the US. Regardless they would be easy to add - just put a popup screen before you access the chatbot indicating that anything the chatbot saiys may be a complete fabrication and nothing should be trusted as being correct and there you go. I really do not understand why you are having such a hard time grasping how this would work.

Pages of instruction are not the only thing that matters. Lots of humans don't learn well from simply reading instruction sets. And since ChatGPT doesn't have a good visual representation of the board, this is equivalent to trying to teach a human who has never learned to play chess to learn to play without a visual board and only able to keep track of moves based on the move notation. Even some strong chess players have trouble playing chess in their heads this way.

No it was not - thank you for making the _exact_ point that I made i.e. that context matters. If we clearly label AI chatbots as fictional, like a film or play, then people's expectations should be the same as a film or play i.e. if the chatbot says they are a doctor or a lawyer then they know it is not true, just as they would with an actor in a film.

As to Red Hat being a traumatized company, well they are now very successful and profitable. It's time for them to get over the trauma. Besides, although they put in a lot of work and polish, their product is based largely on the work of others, so they are hardly in a position to accuse Oracle of playing unfairly by using GPL'd code they worked on.

No, you misread what I wrote. "Any version" refers to the version of the GPL. GPLv2, GPLv3, or whatever. Nothing to do with the version of the software package.

Put another way, whether the code in question is GPLv2 or GPLv3, the right to redistribute the source code is that same.

Poor choice of words on my part. Sorry about that.

Obnoxious snark aside, it appears that you are missing the point. Yes, ChatGPT is trained on a large fraction of the internet. That's why it can do this at all. What is impressive is that it can do that even without the sort of specialized training you envision. Also, speaking as someone who has actually taught people how to play chess, you are to be blunt substantially overestimating how fast people learn.

You shouldn't be surprised that it will try. All of the major LLMs are wildly overconfident in their abilities. I'm not sure if this is more because they've got human reinforcement to be "helpful" or if because they are trained on the internet where there's very rarely a response in the training data of "That's an interesting question, I've got no idea."

Sure. No one says they have to make their SPRMs or github repo for the spec files publicly-accessible. Where they crossed the line, though, is in contractually preventing their clients from being able to exercise their rights under the terms of the GPL. As a Red Hat customer, you can go download the SRPMs just fine, but under the terms of your contract with Red Hat, if you distribute those SRPMs to anyone else, that is grounds for termination of the support contract. This is at odds with any version of the GPL, which applies to a lot of Red Hat's packages. This is the fundamental problem and it's been going on for decades. Only recently Red Hat began to talk more tough about it, even threatening some clients with compliance audits.

All that said, I think AlmaLinux's approach is the best one for the "clones." No damage, just community value added.