This is unironically a huge issue, and it’s just fascinating how the psychology of pricing and valuation works.

Semi-large company needs something. They make a budget for €100k and start looking at different alternatives. They find alternatives a) €120k, b) €80k, c) €15k. I bet you they’ll try to ask their superiors to expand their budget in order to buy the premium €120k solution, and they will not in any way consider the €15k one.

Come to think of it, it goes beyond software as well.

My biggest issue with PDF it’s hard to read on screens. On top of that PDF forms are notoriously buggy, tables are almost impossible to machine-read without specialized software, and even copy-pasting can be a hassle.

I get that print will continue to be a thing to some extent, but I don’t think that business or government documents need to be typeset with static pages. I think it’s time we move on to a much simpler standard that is made for free-flowing text.

PDF has also been problematic as a standard format, since it referred to proprietary features up until 2023.

I have a Pixel 9 Pro because when I bought it it had the best camera that you can could in Europe. I tried the best iPhone and Samsung phones at the time and Pixel was for sure better, especially in low-light conditions.

Only Huawei has better cameras (by a fair margin as well). I’ve never experienced that it feels slow or underpowered, but maybe that’s the case on paper.

I think lots of people would care if it had a fair algorithm. Tinder is hated for several reasons, but that’s probably the main one.

Add to that the beauty of bookmarklets.

It’s silly that IT departments forces us to resort to techniques used before browser extensions became a thing, and it’s ironic that it’s because they don’t know how to code, but here we are.

Digital sovereignty. Even Europe is looking at replacing Windows now. I know that attempts have been made before, but there are stronger pressures now and there are better alternatives for Windows-only workflows.

Most new apps are web based nowadays. Many companies are even ditching the desktop Office apps now (which is insane for its own reasons, but still). Engineers under 40 prefer Python over Excel. Word is good for WYSIWYG printing, but with a small government program it should be possible to make that irrelevant quickly and ditch PDFs along with it.

I’m hopeful.

I think what Trump loves the most is to hold power over people. In a weird turn of events, protecting Mamdani really put his circle of sycophants in their place.

So KDE Plasma is just a graphical environment that you can use on any distro. It’s my preferred desktop environment, but Gnome and XFCE are famous ones, and lots of nerds/programmers love i3 (a tiling graphical environment which encourages you to use keyboard only).

So when choosing a distro, we’re looking at other qualities.

A Linux distro is basically a collection of tools that constitute your OS. The most notable difference between distros is package managrment – how do you install new packages?

This might sound weird but the reason is that open source software comes with tons of different options that can be toggled before compiling to binaries, and at the same time we need our ecosystem of software to play nice accross different packages. They often depend on each other! So that’s why different philosophies split the community into so many different distros.

When installing new software, you essentially run a specific command from the terminal. Your package manager (which is a core part of your distro) then downloads and installs all dependencies. There are graphical tools to help beginners with this, but in fairness I think you should be prepared to learn to use the command line to search for applications and install them. You won’t avoid the terminal as a Linux user.

A really common distro is Debian. It’s the basis for tons of other popular distros, including Ubuntu. My problem with Debian is that they are a bit conservative, which means that they’re often slow with rolling out updates for KDE.

Since I’m also a KDE Plasma person, I run Neon https://neon.kde.org/ which is based on Debian but focuses on rolling out stable updates for KDE packages.

I do not recommend starting with a hobbyist distro like Gentoo, Nix or even Arch if your focus is productivity or gaming. If you want to learn about computers, then those distros can be incredibly rewarding, but they are time-consuming. Go with something Debian-based, or alternatively OpenSUSE or Fedora.

Regarding your other questions, you likely do not need to swap out hardware. But some graphics cards have poor support for Linux, so research your model in advance. You can also try running a distro of your choice live from a USB stick (most distros support this). It’s slower than running from hard drive, but you can get a feeling for what works out of the box and what may need further configuration.

Many games will not work properly on Linux, at least not without extensive tinkering. If you’re serious about certain games, I’d say Windows is unavoidable. I detest dual-booting but if you only have one computer then it may be your only option. However games that work on Deck should work fine on any Linux machine.

Hope this helps.

That’s not nearly enough skin for my enlightened tastes, I think we may need to ready the machetes.

It’s wild the things they accuse Russia of. My favorite is when everyone was convinced that Putin blew up Nord Stream 2, and now everyone thinks it was genius statecraft from Ukraine.

I was under the impression that the real costs are associated with training the models, in the belief that they’ll arrive at a self-improving AI that will explode in functionality and basically become the most valuable asset on the planet, especially for governments and armies. In the meantime, you offer services to users at a loss, in order to gather unique data that isn’t open to your competitors.

That’s what excuses this level of investment.

The best thing to do is just start with whatever you already have. An old gaming rig, laptop or Raspberry Pi, doesn’t matter. Each will present some technical obstacle that you need to overcome (for example keeping the laptop going when the lid is closed). That’s part of learning.

Self-hosting is a hobby where we gradually learn more. Experimentation is just as important as reading the docs.