So say we all.

Apple is its own thing. It is not fully inconceivable that the feds (and therefore everyone else) would switch to MacOS if Windows became [even more] unsupportable, but I doubt Microsoft can provide Office at even the sad level it achieves on Windows and it would take Apple time to ramp up supply.

Linux is an easy sell unless people are hooked on some application or game that doesn't run on it, then it's hard. The interface is familiar enough now (especially with KDE, but there are some other basically credible options) that they won't have a lot of room to complain so long as they don't have problems. That part is going to depend on the hardware, and IME they will have the fewest problems with AMD CPU and GPU now. If they have Intel it might or might not be OK; if they've got Nvidia they're likely to have a bad time at least sometimes.

Business is increasingly using web-based tools for everything, which is not itselft a bad thing- if only more of them were self-hosted. But either way, this decreases the dependence on Windows. I've worked where there's a few Windows machines for clerical staff, or where there's a Mac for the graphics department. That can be Windows' fate again.

They have to also have the balls to have a winning formula, like put the nerds with successful histories in charge and let them make decisions and spend money. Instead they want to design everything by committee, and everyone wants to have the biggest piece of the pie. The more companies you combine the less successful it is likely to be. See: Every fucking project like this ever between any of the principals you named here.

Do you need high performance or only compatibility? If the latter, you can at least stuff Windows into a VM for your own protection. Only the graphics performance is poor, but the graphics functionality is also poor.

I believe the OS uses less RAM, but that doesn't change application memory use overall. If applications make inefficient use of resources, there's only so much the OS can do to improve that. It's not like iOS where it's on lock, developers are free to do things not-the-Apple-way.

Think this was more about the business side than the execution side.

They can be just fine if Linux desktop is seen as 'acceptable' in the mass market. The operative word being 'seen', not if it should be acceptable, but if people believe it to be.

It's a tall order to shift the perception of the mass market.

If Microsoft screws over their users, and now 'just enough laptop' can be bought from Apple within a price range long deemed 'adequate', then AMD/Intel essentially *need* people to decide they *love* linux desktops, and broadly speaking at this point the mass market is "a device that runs a browser and who cares about OS as long as it's not actively pissing me off".

It actually might go badly for Linux desktops if Windows screws up their market share too badly. Apple does not give a shit about Linux support and so Linux desktop largely lives on the standardized ecosystem in x86 side in part thanks to the separation of concerns between the hardware vendors and Microsoft. If Microsoft managed to kill the Windows desktop hypothetically, might be hard pressed to have any hardware for Linux desktops to run on anymore...

I do have a system I run Linux on successfully with only 8GB, but all I run on it is a browser, and sometimes CHIRP.

My desktop has 64GB and it is what I want a desktop to be, I can run lots of things without swap.

My MiniPC has 32GB and it is adequate. But I can't just run whatever I want. I don't use swap because I use SSDs and I don't want to reduce their lifespans if my system goes nuts.

16GB is a reasonable minimum for someone who wants to do more than run a browser.

This isn't even vaguely close to the truth for AMD, whose Linux drivers are far superior to their Windows drivers, and who is now leading sales in the datacenter. AMD is going to do fine. It's Intel with their shitty Linux drivers that has to be concerned. This is a bit ironic because throughout all history it's been AMD with the shitty drivers and Intel with working ones, so it's just another example of how Intel has fallen.

No one does.

It's brilliant to do what Putin wants? Okay there sport.

Now do America.

Which is an overwhelmingly American institution.

The Reagan-era attacks on education could produce idiots who think the USA is the good guys.

Debian is more stable but also more outdated, it's a tradeoff. I am making it as well (except that I'm using Devuan to avoid systemd) but it's a real drawback. For example KDE is sadly outdated so I don't have config options I'd really like to use.

Because Microsoft is essentially a branch of the US Government now. It's safest to assume that any data which spends any time unencrypted on either their cloud or "your" computer running Windows is also being perused by Microsoft and therefore the feds.

It's possible that cetaceans have a true language. They certainly have something that seems to function the same as a "hello, I am (name)", where the name part differs between all cetaceans but the surrounding clicks are identical. The response clicks also include that same phrase which researchers think serves the purpose of a name.

But we've done structural analysis to death and, yes, all the results are interesting (it seems to have high information content, in the Shannon sense, seems to have some sort of structure, and seems to have intriguing early-language features), but so does the Voynich Manuscript and there's a 99.9% chance that the Voynich Manuscript is a fraud with absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Structure only tells you if something is worth a closer look and we have known for a long time that cetacean clicks were worth a closer look. Further structural work won't tell us anything we don't already know.

What we need is to have a long-term recording of activities and clicks/whistles, where the sounds are recorded from many different directions (because they can be highly directional) and where the recording positively identifies the source of each sound, what that source was doing at the time (plus what they'd been doing immediately prior and what they do next), along with what they're focused on and where the sounds were directed (if they were). This sort of analysis is where any new information can be found.

But we also need to look at lessons learned in primate research, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, to understand what ISN'T going to work, in terms of approaches. In all three cases, we've learned that you learn best immersively, not from a distance. If an approach has failed in EVERY OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCE, then assuming it is going to work in cetacean research is stupid. It might be the correct way to go, but assuming it is is the bit that is stupid. If things fail repeatedly, regardless of where they are applied, then there's a decent chance it is necessary to ask that maybe the stuff that keeps failing is defective.

Because GenAI screws up, and screwing up is less of a big deal for the attacker, but can be a huge deal for the defender.

Attacking GenAI fails and either your attempt does nothing and you are no worse off, or it accidentally trashes a system that you were trying to control or copy data from, but you didn't care about that