Jokes aside, there are quite some good uses. Both extreme sides on this topic (those with money who abuse tech, people and planet, as well as those who just want to hate everyone who even dares to suggest that AI could be used positively) are just so god damn loud and obnoxious.

Perhaps AI being useful to uncensor porn ends up being the smallest common denominator we can agree on to be good. 🍆

It’s equally frustrating to talk to people who’re completely entrenched in the Enthusiast / Activist section. The utter disconnect when it comes to what’s viable for most people is annoying to deal with sometimes. Statements like “Everyone who is able to read can easily learn to use Arch Linux” or “Everyone can flash their phone” do give me headaches. Was there, did both, wouldn’t recommend to my less nerdy family.

Well, following that (not fully wrong) logic everything until enthusiast level is useless since it runs on Windows and often not degoogled Chromium. And (given the meme doesn’t contain /e/OS, iode, ShiftOS or Linux Mobile anywhere) anything until activist that happens on mobile phones is equally useless since it runs on Apple/Google Android.

I’m more annoyed about “Linux” as a whole being sorted into “Enthusiast”. Using your Steam Deck in Desktop mode, buying a brand new Linux laptop for +600€ or even installing and using Linux Mint really isn’t as enthusiastic anymore. :D

Arch-based distros do have the nvidia-dkms package available, works great in my experience. Linux Mint and Ubuntu got a dedicated driver utility for this. Debian provides a “nvidia-driver” package. OpenSuse provides it via YaST, or manually in a dedicated repo.

Does it work as good as having the driver pre-installed? Hell no, those nvidia drivers are gosh darn awful in nature. We can just hope NVK can completely replace them asap.

That’s a horrendous approach since probably two decades. They shouldn’t slack so hard.

From the top of my head I can think of a few reasons:

• Better feature support (HDR, better fractional scaling etc)
• Better integration (specifically Gnome)
• More complete graphical settings
• Quicker adoption rate
• Wayland support (X11 is pretty much dead at this point)

Aside from RAM (of which most machines do have plenty by now) there isn’t really too much overhead these days. In fact battery usage on Gnome and KDE with Wayland is usually better than with X11.

Oh, that way around. Yeah, more software is using Nvidia CUDA although you can run increasingly more stuff via ZLUDA. Also more and more software comes around supporting ROCm or just uses a vulkan layer. In the end the biggest struggle is to install either CUDA or ROCm drivers, both can be lretty annoying to install depending on your distro. For local AI apps just use the ones supporting ROCm. Haven’t gotten into trouble there so far.

Generally yes, if you use any modern card. Older ones might require to switch to an older driver (before “amdgpu” there was one called “radeon”, by default any distro I know comes with the modern amdgpu). There are also two AMD GPU generations (I think HD7000/Rx 200 and Rx 300) that can be a little bit nasty as the driver change happened around that time, those sometimes need manual intervention.

Anything newer (RX 550 and higher) pretty much always work without any hitch or additional steps required.

nvidias just better when it comes to actual software support

Lol no.

Yeah, afaik it’s exactly one of the cards that require manual intervention or a switch to the radeon driver. Bad generation to run on Linux.

From a UI/UX point of view Gnome is excellent (very subjective of course, it’s a matter of taste - obviously this sparks endless discussions). There are very good arguments to be made about the organisations behind it and the tech that powers those DEs.

Gnome devs have a clear vision of what Gnome is supposed to be: simplistic, designed for touchpad and keyboard, not mousy-clicky, and staying out of your way.

Nobody questioned this.

People install it, miss stuff they are used to from traditional desktops like Windows or Plasma, and bolt that back on using extensions from third parties.

Like the Extension feature intends it.

They install those extensions from a different source than Gnome itself (Gnome from their distro repos, extensions from the website).

Even those you can install from some distro repos can cause your whole Gnome DE to crash. However this isn’t even the main problem; the point is that it’s able to crash your DE at all. If they did it correctly only the bad extension would crash. If that doesn’t work for some reason, the whole extension layer/API may crashes without taking the DE with it. If something phenomenally bad happens your DE should crash but, as the absolute minimum, your open applications should still keep working so you can save things and restart things gracefully. What you just did is blame the extension devs again.

And then they complain when those third party add-ons from a different source aren’t perfectly integrated or in sync after an update.

It’s about your computer (well, everything graphically) crashing, not some small problems. Get your facts straight.

Seems to be an organizational thing, at least some who try to work with- or are part of the Gnome Foundation mentioned this. Apparently KDE e.V. got a way more flexible structure with work groups, easier ways to propose changes etc. while Gnome gets awfully stuck with their panel/council structure (not sure which one is the right word in english).

When mentioning the problems with extensions (rather furiously since I just lost some work again and installed KDE) I was told both: Go on an create a PR, but also that “this was discussed and a panel decided against changing anything”. Obviously no one will waste dozens, if not hundreds of hours of their time even just creating a Proof-of-Concept for sth. like an extension API if some authority already decided that nothing is supposed to be done about it.

As long as your Gnome environment can’t gracefully crash without taking absolutely everything with it (like with KDE or other DEs) there’s no way in hell anyone should use Gnome on computers where actual work is being done, let alone something critical.

Not selling with Linux preinstalled.

Apparently either Ubuntu or Fedora. Given you even save money it’s quite a good offering; although you may get better repairability or hotline support with one of the others.

Lol, no? System76 does have gaming-capable devices and Pop!_OS will absolutely get you there, but neither was designed “around gaming”.

To answer the original question: System76, Tuxedo and Slimbook do sell gaming-capable devices. Others might do as well, this isn’t a complete list.

I simply don’t know any vendors in Japan, Australia, India etc., but feel free to provide some!

That’s not true! Some of them are Tongfang devices. 🥴

It’s true those companies have to overwhelmingly work with ODMs, doesn’t necessarily make the devices shitty though.

Still not shipping with something.

The Software isn’t fully there yet for mass adoption (Your mileage may vary, but the general expectations for a modern daily driver are pretty high), at least not for anyone but enthusiasts and developers. If there’s something like a PinePhone 2 it will probably yet again designed to be relatively cheap despite low production volume, so as many potential developers as possible can afford one.