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Comment Re:17 Years! (Score 1) 18

> it still doesn't seem like a meaningful improvement over KDE 3.5.

Have you tried LXQt?

On Debian just install it and uninstall connman and it's pretty good for most tasks, especially low-spec devices.

Comment Category Problems (Score 2) 22

Some neural nets have been good at solving sticky programming problems. Whether finding game cheats, doing voice recognition, modeling proteins, or other tasks humans haven't done well at.

But an LLM is more of an information retrieval tool, so tasking it with clever algorithm design is asking the wrong tool the wrong question.

Then there are the people who complete in programming challenges. In high school I would sometimes stay after to do the ACSL competition tests - no big deal, the school was a five minute walk, and it helped my buddies who wanted a high team score.

Then they implored me to go to DC on a trip for a national competition our score qualified us for. This seemed so bizzare to me as a fifteen year old kid - I could stay in a run-down motel and take tests this weekend or go camping in a state forest with friends. I let them down, in a way, but the ask was totally alien to me.

I have nothing at all against people who enjoy such things but it's a subset of the algorithm minds.

So we now have the results of some competitive coders vs. the wrong tool for the job.

OK, mildly interesting, but does it tell us much?

Comment Re:same same. (Score 1) 214

Ubuntu LTS has "Pro" offerings that take it out that far, and Windows isn't free, so it seems fair to include their paid expanded support.

The reason I wouldn't use the RHEL/Alma/Rocky is that I am impatient for new features, but if I was a "I don't care I want to run this for 10 years", then I'd run it on my desktop. I think this is mostly the reason enthusiasts dislike them, which is an opposed concern to "not supported long enough". RHEL10 recently released based on Fedora 40, where desktop enthusiasts are running a Fedora edition a whole year newer.

For Fedora, the "click here to upgrade" is pretty similar to the Windows "click here to upgrade" experience. Unless you get adventurous in ways you couldn't have gotten adventurous in Windows.

Comment Re:Yeah but... (Score 1) 214

As a Fedora user, sometimes you have a period of software instability when they push something not yet baked. It may be for a reason, but that reason may be nearly impossible to discern.

It's not news because the community is broadly used to it and they generally accept it as the cost of getting stuff faster.

Fedora is not as bad as it used to be, but they are really aggressive and inflict oddities from time to time.

If I were really bothered, I could go run something extra conservative, like Debian Stable or Alma Linux, but I prefer the fast-ish delivery of Fedora even accepting that sometimes things can go a bit south.

Comment Re:same same. (Score 1) 214

What LTS editions only do 5 years? I just checked SUSE, Ubuntu, and RHEL.

RedHat is up to 13 years, with the the first 5 years being "full" including releasing for brand new hardware and backporting as needed with another 5 years of "you can keep running it on the hardware you have, but we aren't promising support for new hardware" and another available 3 years of paid extension. Note that Windows 10 pretty much went "maintenance" with the release of Windows 11, so the RHEL lifecycle largely imitates the Windows lifecycle.

SUSE is a bit more generous on paper, but roughly this is about all the LTSes.

However day to day users are not interested and go for the options that favor rapid delivery of new capability, so people don't talk about them as much.

Comment Re: Um (Score 2) 134

Exactly. Even if a technology might have a shot at being desirable, I often see seller interests trample the value and then the seller surprised that the customers didn't go for it after they did absolutely nothing to cater to the user base.

One company I worked at had this persistent issue and a strong warning sign was that they just absolutely worshipped the fictional Henry Ford quote about customers just wanting faster horses and the inventor knowing better than the customer about what the customer should want.

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