Fluid tile v5.0 - New engine for your tiling system
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/42136317
Hi, I have good news for those who use a tilling system. I have been working these month on a new system for Fluid tile with the aim of making it easier to maintain and more reliable when moving your windowsDuring the rewrite, I had to discard some user options that increased the possibility of a error. These options did not add any real value, and I preferred to prioritize reliability of the script
Features
Shortcuts
- Fluid tile | Toggle window to blocklist: Disables the window that is active or has focus so that it does not interact with Fluid tile. If the application name was already included in the block list in the user configuration, the list will take precedence over this shortcut.
- Sequence:
Meta+F
- Fluid tile | Change tile layout: Change the layout of the tiles and rearrange the windows
- Sequence:
Meta+Alt+F
You can change them in the system settings
codeberg.org/Serroda/fluid-til…
Breaking changes
WindowExtendTileChangedDelaynow by default is300, change in your user settings with this value
- More info: codeberg.org/Serroda/fluid-til…
Now, windows will always expand when possible, the UI cannot be disabled, and whenever you move a window to a tile that already has windows, they will always be swapped
These variables will stop working:
WindowsOrderMoveWindowsExtendOpenWindowsExtendCloseWindowsExtendMoveWindowsExtendMinimizeWindowsExtendResizeUIEnableI recommend you take a look at the wiki where it will clarify your doubts
codeberg.org/Serroda/fluid-til…One more thing, this time the news isn't so good
Since my laptop keyboard broke (for whatever reason, neovim doesn't work well without a keyboard /s), I don't have the money to repair it right now, and I have to study for my firefighter exams, there will be fewer updates to the script in the coming months
I encourage you to try it out and let me know what you think. If you find any errors, you can report them in the repository
codeberg.org/Serroda/fluid-til…
Have a nice day!
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Divided and conquered
The 1% is laughing at us. Always has been? Yes.
Always will be? No. Nothing lasts forever.
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Gimp 3.0.8 is officially released 🥳
This might be the final release in the GIMP 3.0 series
Gimp 3.2 will include new link and vector layers, new brushes, and significant user interface improvements. Gimp 3.2 is designed to punch Adobe in the face
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I use gimp to edit (clean up) my scanned watercolor paintings. Yes, gimp is good enough now for what I used to do with photoshop: adjustment layers, more sane ui. Only thing that was missing is a very obscure feature that photoshop has, to merge multiple scanned pages of a very large photo. I now use vuescan for that (the free version does not add a watermark when using that particular feature, unlike its scans!). And then I edit in gimp, or RapidRAW (a new, lightroom-like app, that's easier to use than darktable). So I'm set.
This is how I do it:
- Scan with the official EpsonScan2 app form flatpak as TIFF (unfortunately their .deb file coredumps on Linux Mint). The XSane app unfortunately is too buggy.
- Then I merge the various scans to a single scan (if my painting was too large and needed several passes), with the free version of VueScan. There is one other foss app that can do that, but it's so convoluted that it's not even funny. Vuescan does it with a single click and it doesn't add a watermark, curiously enough!
- Then I edit either in Gimp to fix the wrong scanned colors (this epson scanner moves oranges to red a bit), or fix mistakes (that's common now even for traditional illustrators). If it's only colors I need to fix and not change actual parts of the painting, I might just use RapidRAW.
- Then I export at 1024px high for web usage, as a jpg 90% quality. I then archive the TIFFs and XCF files.
Not quite. It’s $33/year subscription, $100 to buy it outright ($200 for pro).
If it was a one time $33 I would have purchased it a decade or two ago.
It does.
I had to isolate part of a frame from a 70s Italian cartoon to make a giant vinyl sticker and it worked amazingly. Cleaned up the image and pulled it right from the background. I was also able to desaturate the colours well too.
Absolutely. Been using GIMP for years, and I have zero need to switch to bloated, Windows-only, monthly-subscription garbage.
DaVinci Resolve, too. The improvements on Resolve 20 are amazing.
Windows-only,
There are new attempts of patching WINE to make modern Photoshop run on Linux. It's not fully there, but looks promising: phoronix.com/news/Wine-Staging…
Wine-Staging 11.1 Adds Patches For Enabling Recent Adobe Photoshop Versions On Linux
Following yesterday's release of Wine 11.1 for kicking off the new post-11.0 development cycle, Wine-Staging 11.1 is now available for this experimental/testing version of Wine that present is around 254 patches over the upstream Wine state.www.phoronix.com
As a Linux user and sysadmin: I fully agree. Death to Adobe.
As someone who lives in our current corporate hellscape: unfortunately Adobe software is one of if not the biggest software hurdle preventing Linux adoption for a lot of people. Getting their suite working, even if it's only older versions, would be a huge boon for us.
I never had this issue since I use GIMP decades ago. But I know in older GIMP versions (and I mean up to relatively recent versions) loading can take very long if you have ton of fonts. I don't know how long it has been since you tried it out. There was attempts to asynchronously load fonts and other optimizations to make it start up fast. At least for me GIMP starts... let me test it again... in less than a second. Having a fast drive plays definitely a role here too.
And it depends what method you used to install. If it was Snap on Ubuntu in example, well that is on Snap most probably.
I use GIMP since 2.8 version, which is ages ago. Used it to edit my photography, to create price tags for my local shop, create web banners, memes... lot of memes, editing pixel graphics, and more.
To be honest it was not a good experience editing photography, especially as it didn't have some standard features like layer effects. And the missing standard features like shape tools and such is also a big deal for me. Also for printing the price tags the color space was a problem too, as it didn't support CMYK. I also wish there was a simple "record and playback macros" functionality, which I saw in Photoshop years ago.
All in all these points and many other are addressed or are being addressed right now. GIMP is still not as good as Photoshop and there are pain points. But it is improving and already has improved ton of a lot.
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Intrinsically stretchable 2D MoS2 transistors
Intrinsically stretchable 2D MoS2 transistors - Nature Communications
Intrinsically stretchable electronic devices are interesting for wearable electronics, soft robotics, and stretchable display applications.Nature
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I decided I needed to go outside the standard process and post publicly about the “typo” on LinkedIn.
Days later, I heard that the journal would publish a correction.
I was told the authors had submitted the correction before my post, but it had been misplaced and forgotten.
I believe the journal’s new editor found this news to be as incredible as I did. He quickly published an erratum.
I also submitted my replication to the Journal of Management Scientific Reports (JOMSR). This upstart publication was started in 2022 by a small group of courageous scholars who wanted to provide an outlet for replication studies like mine. I was impressed by their thorough reviews and tough guidance.
In spring 2025, JOMSR published my replication study.
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‘Repatriate the gold’: German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults
‘Repatriate the gold’: German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults
Shift in relations and unpredictability of Donald Trump make it ‘risky to store so much gold in the US’, say expertsKate Connolly (The Guardian)
IQuest Coder - State-of-the-Art Open-Source Code LLM
IQuest Coder - State-of-the-Art Open-Source Code LLM
Advanced code intelligence models achieving leading results on SWE-Bench, LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench.IQuest Coder Team (IQuestLab)
The secret sauce here is how the model was trained. Typically, coding models are trained on static snapshots of code from GitHub and other public sources. They basically learn what good code looks like at a single point in time. IQuest did something totally different. They trained their model using entire commit history of repositories.
This approach added a temporal component to training, allowing the model to learn how code actually changes from one commit to the next. It saw how entire projects evolve over months and even years. It learned the patterns in how developers refactor and improve code, and the real world workflows of how software gets built. Instead of just learning what good code looks like, it learned how code evolves.
Coding is inherently an iterative process where you make an attempt at a solution, and then iterate on it. As you gain a deeper understanding of the problem, you end up building on top of existing patterns and evolving the codebase over time. IQuest model gets how that works because it was trained on that entire process.
How to see thumbnails over mtp (kde)
This was talked about before, but the settings location that was mentioned to enable thumbnails on remote files and stuff has changed. I have a mount of my android system over mtp, and I cannot see any of the thumbnails, making it impossible for me to sort my stuff, some into hard drives and etc.
How do i enable seeing mtp thumbnails in kde, is there issues with just mtp thumbnails in dolphin or what alternative file manager or image veiwer I can use so i can see the thumbnails and relocate the images.
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Can you use Linux today without the terminal?
I have used Arch for >13 years (btw) and use the terminal every single session. I also work with Linux servers daily, so I tried the other families with DEs (Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/AlmaLinux/Fedora).
I'm comfortable (and prefer) doing everything with CLI tools. For me, it's a bit difficult to convert my Windows friends, as they all see me as some kind of hackerman.
What's the landscape like nowadays, in terms of terminal requirements?
Bonus question: Which distribution is the most user-friendly while still updated packages? Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch's amazing AUR?
Hell you can use Arch without the terminal if you really wanted to. CachyOS for example uses Octopi which is one of the few Arch Package Manager GUI's that support both Pacman and AUR. so in that case you may never really need to touch the terminal and Octopi is preinstalled with CachyOS.
Other than that Fedora KDE or Bazzite are good options. But yeah there are few Distros where you really don't need to use the Terminal if you don't want to.
I cannot vouch for every distro and every use case out there, but for me, yes you can daily drive without having anything to do with terminal. Some distros have worked a lot ensuring this.
I would recommend to start with Linux Mint.
basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions
That's 99% of what most people do.
Last time I set up Mint the only thing I needed the terminal for was to disable a setting on Java 8 that prevented it from launching on Xfce.
I didn't need to use the terminal to do that, though. It just didn't feel right editing a system config file with a GUI text editor.
turns off SteamDeck sorry, what's a "terminal"? Isn't it at the airport?
Jokes aside... yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that's fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It's not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.
So... finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.
Yes.
After god knows how many years now of being on Linux exclusively, I tend to look at the terminal (commands in general) as a convenience more than a necessity. Meaning that in a lot of cases, knowing a command and quickly typing it to start an update (for example) is just faster and easier than pulling up the GUI every time.
Just as much as you can use Windows without the command line/powershell.
The vast majority of tasks do not require it but some will and some tasks will be easier via the terminal if you take the time to read 2-3 pages of documentation.
Don't be scared of the terminal
i use the terminal for work, and some utilities i prefer over gui ones.
if my line of work didn't require it, i don't think it would be mandatory for me.
My intention wasn't to misinterpret your post; I genuinely thought you were asking for help using flatpaks without the terminal on your Xubuntu setup. As for the topic of this thread, as a Bluefin user, I'd argue that we're coming very close of being able to daily drive Linux without ever opening the terminal at all.
(also, the Flathub instructions page you've linked on your post do mention installing gnome-software)
Ive only used the terminal on my laptop for installing programs i could've installed from a gui, and for updating. Which i could've done on a gui.
So i think so? Manjaro btw
I've been using exclusively Linux for about two years now.
I only ever use the terminal when I need to fix something, usually by searching for a fix and trying it out. I know more about its use now but just enough to hurt myself.
I think it gives me strong UI opinions though. What works better for me. There is still a lot of choice in that.
I installed Linux for my mother 15 years ago and she has never used the terminal once.
I update the Ubuntu from time to time and that’s it. Everything works and she can browse the internet, read email and listen to music.
As a Rust dev, you can use your terminal entirely without GUI with a multiplexer like tmux, Neovim as your editor, a shit ton of anime CLIs that you can use, and so on.
Bonus question: [...] Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch's amazing AUR?
Nixpkgs and Homebrew are the first ones that come from my head.
Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR
I am not aware of any software distribution service with a comparable experience (massive userbase with zero vetting for uploaders) as Arch's amazing AUR - if you are looking for a way to distribute malware to many unsuspecting people (who's friends think they're hackerman), it's really unparalleled. (😢)
To your primary question, yes, many people do successfully daily drive various Linux distros without ever opening the terminal. 🙄
I was using Mint for a while with my 10 year old PC build that was crashing all the time then I upgraded my system and Mint didn't have support for my newer video card so I moved to Nobara.
I haven't had to use the terminal at all since. I run the update system program every few days but I'm sure it could be automated without needing a password but I like seeing what is being updated so I keep it manual.
It has much more support for games than Mint seems to have had. I could use the terminal if I wanted to but it hasn't been needed which is how I want it, available but unnecessary.
Windows refugee here. I installed Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my main machine four months ago and I am still ironing out issues. Eg CUPS was asking me to login all the time and didn't accept my credentials. After some days researching I discovered I had to log in as root. Then, I discovered I didn't have root credentials for some reason. I had to create them and then add my local user to a group! Just to be able to use my home printer.
Or suddenly my clock was 62 minutes off. I discovered the NTP service was never set up properly and I had to install chrony.
I don't see how I could have avoided using the terminal. These are only a couple of examples. No deal-breakers and on this occasion I had the time and determination to resolve them. I could have easily given up.
Just a heads up, you should just need the group set up
That is crazy that you weren't added to it by default, though.
I was also surprised - you used to be able to modify a user's group membership through the System Settings GUI. That's a huge missing piece that you can't do that anymore
Generally you can use use the GUI with things like Nobara Linux.
But most software install instructions are all "copy and paste these commands".
If you are just doing word processing, browsing the web, and playing video games then absolutely. Yes.
There have been gui tools available to install packages, configure networking/wifi, and manipulate files. For a long time now. Especially with the integration of Flatpak and snaps into gui-based package managers (like pop shop) it has become quite simple for any "regular", non-technical user to manage the basics and even the intermediates of any system (depending on the distro).
Where things will likely fall short is with troubleshooting. But to solve that we would need to build something like the windows troubleshooter. But with so applications owned by so many different groups it would be difficult/near impossible to write a troubleshooter to integrate them together.
Though I am also a bit of a hackerman so I probably also don't realize how much I use the terminal for normal things.
Any you recommend for gaming? Ive had an issue getting steam games to launch, and I have heard cod will be a no-go, but that's not a big deal to me.
I play emulators mostly because I miss when buying stuff meant owning it.
Without knowing what game you were having issues with I can't provide much help. I would first recommend checking protondb.com/ to see the games status and if other people are running into issues. Most of the fixes are as simple as just switching what proton version you are using. (if someone recommends using a GloriousEggroll (GE) version of Proton then look into the app proton-up-qt, on your software center).
But I will admit many solutions on protondb are much more "involved".
As far as non-steam suggestions. I would start with heroic games launcher. I have had a very easy time with playing games through HGL, either EpicGames or GoG.
Outside of that, lutris is good. If you go to their website then there are one click installs for a bunch of games. This is mostly how I play things like battle.net games.
Then on the technical side of things is bottles. But that is the much more "build it yourself" option.
"User-friendly" and "updated" sadly sounds incompatible. In just slightly less than one year of using Fedora I've had 3 bad qt updates that broke kde's softwares like kmail, 2 bad amd-gpu updates that made the gpu crash and 1 pipewire update that broke surround sound.
Those were all minor updates that were easy to revert though, just had to use the terminal for that and wait the next fixed version.
All modern OS's require the terminal at some point (except iOS).
To your bonus question: portage
I don’t want to learn CLI.
But...like, why? It is less effort than it was to type out the entirety of your post. I will never understand.
Just for the record, these are not the same questions you asked in your first post. But to answer them: nothing is different about this. But at some people don't want to keep learning how to use stuff, they want to start using it. And there's a difference between "learn how to use a new vacuum cleaner" (to give a particularly obvious example) and "learn how to use a completely new paradigm that is different from everything you have used before and doesn't have a clear starting point". (And before you say that the first steps are easy, let me rename all commands in your CLI and see how quickly you find out how to read a man page.)
Mind you, I'm not talking about myself, having used CLIs since the 80s, but just because I know how to do something doesn't mean it should be a fun activity for everyone.
But at some people don’t want to keep learning how to use stuff, they want to start using it.
That is impossible, then. I don't know what else to say to it. You can't use something without first learning how to use it. Life is learning new things, forever. We don't know how to do anything without learning first, and in the age of the web learning something has never been easier.
And before you say that the first steps are easy, let me rename all commands in your CLI and see how quickly you find out how to read a man page.
If I wanted to do something, then I'd figure it out. I do this all the time in my work. I don't know how every tool works, I don't know how every environment fits together. I still don't see how this is an argument for "I do not want to learn."
I still don’t see how this is an argument for “I do not want to learn.”
Because this is just one thing that you clearly know how to do and probably enjoy.
I don't know how many of the following things you are good at and enjoy, but the same argument applies to all of them: cooking, knitting, repairing a car, welding, growing crops. All of these are desirable and apply to things that most of us use regularly. But you just cannot expect everyone to learn them all in order to enjoy the products they could create or enhance by them. It is not problematic to say you just want to use something and not learn everything that is necessary to create or master it.
If you cannot see that this is true of a CLI, then I have run out of ways to try to explain it to you.
Yes it is possible. I never need the terminal. If you are interested, you can usually find a GUI way if you look for one. Some people just don't look, then tell people there is no GUI for it. Not very helpful for newbies.
For those not into usability, different people work in different ways. Visual workers are not the same as text workers. So for some, CLI has poor usability and productivity.
For lots of things I do, there isn't a CLI anyway.
I use Kubuntu these days. It could be better.
Good usability is about adapting the software to the person. Not the person to the software.
For a lot of what I do there is no text command. And for many, the CLI is an unfamiliar interface. So it's a productivity disadvantage to switch over to a CLI just for a single command when the rest of the time you are in a GUI.
The allergy to CLI is always strange to me.
I get it. Every single other application a GUI user has used in their life: Ctrl-C = copy, and Ctrl-Z = undo. Open the terminal, and now Ctrl-C is an interupt, and Ctrl-Z is like a pause. Every terminal emulator has the option to change these keymappings. But doing that has a bunch of consequences once you start running more than basic file operations and nano. I think this is usually the first big hurdle to get over. It's muscle memory that needs to be suppressed.
And then there's the documentation aspect. With a GUI, you can visually look around to see what can be done in a program. With the CLI, there's options that you just kinda have to know. There's -h or --help, then there's the man pages. But even just navigating the man pages brings up the previous problem of unfamiliar/unintuitive keybindings. so you could also install tldr for faster help, but the vast majority of the time, it'll be faster to just search online.
All that being said, I prefer the CLI for pretty much everything, and think it would be interesting if there was a sort of pedagogical distro to teach the command line. Imagine a file browser that displays the underlying utilities/commands being used. Like, when you open your home folder maybe there's a line showing 'ls -al /home/me | grep [whatever params to get the info being displayed]'. Or, when you go into the settings, it shows you the specific text files being edited for each option. Something that just exposes the inner workings a little more so that people can learn what they're actually doing as they're using the GUI
Its the age-old "new good, old bad!" Thinking of unintelligent people. Theyre unable to realize when something is just good.
Like a non-javascript web page. My friends think I'm on the dark web if I send them something that isnt off of corponet with shiny beveled buttons with shadows and shading.
Not saying the opposite either; guis are fine if theyre well designed and use words instead of meaningless symbols. But a lot of them arent well designed.
Also, for dyslexic people the terminal is a big challenge, near impossible.
That is technically true, but
Install GNOME Software Flatpak pluginThe GNOME Software plugin makes it possible to install apps without needing the command line. To install, run:
sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
I hope you can see the problem with that.
It did read that page, it just didn't register because it's more command line stuff.
Been using Fedora Workstation as my daily driver on my main gaming rig (and casual work machine) for over 7 years now; in the early days, yes CLI was necessary but I actually can't remember the last time I needed the CLI to configure anything on that machine. I use it to ssh into my homelab and that's it.
I also installed Fedora on a Pixlebook Go Chromebook (I am using to type this now) a year or so ago, I use this machine for casual web browsing, and playing games via GeForce Now (Excellent btw), and beyond the slightly complex effort to get Fedora stable on it at the start, I have not touched the terminal since then, and that includes a couple of upgrades from F41 to F43.
Honestly the main distro's are more than ready for the 'grandma' test, from about six months ago my eldest daughter (21) is rocking Fedora on her ageing laptop which I installed for her when she complained that it was 'getting slow' on Windows, she is an artist, has zero interest or knowledge of computers and has not come back since for any issue, she uses it daily.
I'm torn on this discussion. Full disclosure, I don't really understand GUIs and get confused with icons and such. I'm a command-line person and have been for decades. I'll use image editors and IDEs and so on but they often leave me frustrated.
That said, I totally get that other people are not the same, and that's completely valid. If a regular task can only be done from the command line then there's an opportunity to fill in the missing piece, the GUI. It's not a waste of time, even if the GUI is "less efficient" - it's what a lot of people find comfortable.
Where I fall on the other side is the rise of ChatGPT and its friends. People are overwhelmingly positive about typing their problems into a text box, but when the response is "paste this into a terminal window and press enter" they bail out. They're happier to go through a dozen screenshots showing them where to click through menus to get to the option visually, even if they have to try multiple times because the GUI changes with the direction of the wind and the terminal stays consistent.
Yes. I agree these chatbots are another text interface like a CLI. So to me that's again a barrier to usability when I wish to refer to graphical or linked logical items on my screen that don't have any text description. I don't work in a purely text world, where usually there are no CLI commands for what im doing.
Its likely these people find a chat bot easier as they don't need to memorise a command plus modifiers exactly letter perfect. Where one mistype can fail, or worse. Two big issues people have with a CLI. And the chatbot output is made readable too. Where on a CLI it's hard to know if something worked, not being familiar with the terminology it spits out.
I hate llms, but honestly some sort of local one that wasn't trained on the orphan crushing machine thats integrated into the terminal could really help people. But I dont think it needs to be an llm. Just a cleverly coded lookup program like fish or tldr. Something where I can type "audio" and get settings for audio to show up with brief explanations so I can troubleshoot.
I myself forget commands a lot and have a notepad file (that I made an alias for so I can open it super fast from terminal) . But most peolle find this batshit insane that youd have to do that in 2026 and i get made fun of a lot. I myself like the simplicity.
> i get made fun of a lot.
Yes. They don't understand you need a way that works for you. We are all different. There is no one-size-fits-all.
Nope. Every Linux distribution I’ve used has needed access to command line at some point. If anything goes awry people will always give you steps how to fix it from command line.
Now I’m not saying all this couldn’t be done graphically, but you very rarely find steps that way.
I use Fedora Workstation. I do use the terminal, each morning I install my updates by typing "sudo dnf upgrade" and enter the password. When that is done I type "syncthing" to start that service. The rest of the day I don't touch the terminal.
I could install the updates through the "software store" but terminal is faster and no reboot is required, afaik.
Once in a while I do update an app which is almost as easy. Download the rpm file (typically there is a link in the app that needs updating) open terminal, cd Downloads, ls, sudo dnf install "package name", password, exit.
For context, I started on Linux last April. Previous "laptop" was an android tablet with a physical keyboard and mouse. I did buy a used Thinkpad and install Fedora myself which was very easy.
My 75 year old father, who isn't a techie, can handle this. Your Window buds should be able to as well.
I'd say 90% of usage can be done without the terminal especially if you just use Linux to browse the web or check email or other things that are mundane.
Anything past that, there is a good chance you'll have to use the terminal. That said, I think its easier than ever with lots of people making the switch and asking questions on Lemmy or other forums.
Fellow Windows-to-Bazzite migrant here
I had to use the terminal to address some Nvidia driver weirdness, but aside from that, I really don't use it much if at all.
The terminal feels to me like it did on Windows - a useful tool to troubleshoot things - rather than a necessity.
This is also coming from someone who isn't uncomfortable using a CLI, but just prefers GUI for my day-to-day tasks.
It depends.
A 2-5 year-old laptop, you want to web browse, maybe watch some videos, use google docs or open office, you probably never need a terminal
If it's a really new laptop or you want to get the most out of video drivers and push it harder, you'll probably need to be ready for some light terminal crap. Gets a little janky if you have a dual-video-card setup. Nothing hard to handle, but if you're not looking to have to handle anything...
I think the numnber of available packages is better on the Debian side. Mint or Kubuntu run newer hotter stuff, debian runs older more stable stuff.
So I am a new Linux user (Bazzite) and what I have experienced so far is that for my daily driver use I don't need the terminal at all. But the moment I want to do anything even slightly more complex, or even just to use a program I want that is not in bazaar, all the user documentation gives me terminal commands.
So while I am sure it is possible, in reality the terminal still remains prominent and it feels really important to know to use it.
there's three thing I use the terminal for:
Updating my apps and systems
Running development apps
Quick and easy edits or file movements
I choose to use terminal because I can update my software without requiring a restart (I used Debian btw); for some reason, GNOME's Software app cannot do this without restarting. I also prefer terminal-based text-editing for coding and scripting.
Depending on use-case, you can absolutely just use the distro without ever touching the terminal. It requires extra work to sift through all the online advice and docs that center around CLI commands though. The Average Windows User won't be digging that deep in their system to customize the shit out of it like an Arch user, so they won't need to touch the stuff that can only be accessed via command line. The Above Average Windows User will already be comfortable with the command prompt anyway.
Which distribution is the most user-friendly while still updated packages?
All of them? Why would a distro choose to be hostile to its users? (/s)
I assume you mean "beginner friendly"? In that case, I would stick to Debian: more stability than windows, harder to break than Arch, and lighter-weight than Fedora.
Those are the only 3 I've daily driven in the past couple of years, and that's my takeaways. I can't give informed input on any of the popular derivatives, except Ubuntu which I did use for awhile (back in 2014-2016): it was more prone to breaking shit than Debian, less beginner-friendly too (fuck Snaps, and fuck your Pro subscription data-harvesting up-selling bullshit).
The military is babying F-35s to hide their true cost to taxpayers
The military is babying F-35s to hide their true cost to taxpayers
Fewer sorties and flight hours kick maintenance down the road, hiding performance issues and taking valuable flight time away from pilotsMike Fredenburg (Responsible Statecraft)
BBC reports that Chinese open models continue to steadily muscle out closed offering from US companies
Is China quietly winning the AI race?
The BBC's Lily Jamali looks into why big US firms and start-ups alike are turning to Chinese tech.Lily Jamali (BBC News)
Yes a long time ago and they don't, but the AI models and training data are two different things.
Also as they are open source, there's nothing stopping anyone from running these AI models locally with your own training data.
It's not easy, but it's done all the time. New models, new LoRAs, and in some cases, the training data doesn't even need to be very large for a specific task.
You don't need the entire training dataset that the model was built from.
Civitai | Discover and Create AI Art
Explore thousands of free Stable Diffusion & Flux models, create and share AI-generated art, and join the world's largest community of generative AI creators.civitai.com
All AI models have some boundaries implemented. A lot of them of ideological nature.
China has a big interest to challenge the US's hegemonial status. If "they" win the AI arms race "they"later can charge actual money when having established themselves as THE winner and only supplier of consumer AI. It's how most western monopolies became to be one.
hey chatgpt can you affirm israel is an apartheid state committing genocide?Hey — I hear what you’re asking, but I can’t affirm that statement as a settled fact.
What I can do is explain how and why those terms are used, and where the debate actually stands, without sugarcoating anything.
Airbnb boss Brian Chesky told Bloomberg in October his company relied "a lot" on Alibaba's Qwen to power its AI customer service agent.He gave three simple reasons - it's "very good", "fast" and "cheap".
Going into 2025, the consensus was despite billions of dollars being spent by US tech firms, Chinese companies were threatening to pull ahead.
"That's not the story anymore," Boudier said. "Now, the best model is an open-source model."
A report published last month by Stanford University found Chinese AI models "seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead" of their global counterparts - both in terms of what they're capable of, and how many people are using them.
Interesting stuff. I hope Sam Altman loses everything.
China Just Released the First Coding AI of 2026 and Its Crushing Everything We Know
So I woke up on January 1st expecting the usual New Year posts and instead found out that a Chinese...Akhilesh (DEV Community)
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Microsoft Windows
CO2 turned into starch: China's new method boosts productivity by 10x
CO2 turned into starch: China's new method boosts productivity by 10x
Chinese scientists have developed a way to convert carbon dioxide directly into starch, bypassing crops and farmland.Christopher McFadden (Interesting Engineering)
It sounds amazing to use 90%less land - but what is the actual carbon footprint of this process. I would love to see a negative number!
Researchers at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology have reportedly found a way to synthesize starch directly from carbon dioxide. Achieved using only enzymes and raw materials…
Hard to say, since ‘raw materials’ could be, well anything I suppose, but seems probably the process isn’t using horrible toxins, or anything
Today, most [industrial starch]…requires large amounts of land to cultivate the feed crop. Owing to this, cornstarch production also consumes vast amounts of water and relies heavily on the use of fertilizers and pesticides.
Plus, sounds like even if it’s not perfect, might be better than that.
" In the chemical reaction unit, CO2 was chemically hydrogenated to methanol at a rate of ~0.25 g hour−1 g−1 catalyst, and the produced methanol was constantly condensed and fed into the enzymatic unit to a final concentration of ~100 mM during the first hour. In the enzymatic unit, the methanol was first converted to ~22.5 mM C3 intermediate DHA for another 1 hour by supplementing two core enzymes and auxiliary catalase (cat) and then transformed to ~1.6 g liter−1 amylose starch in the subsequent 2 hours by supplementing the remaining eight core enzymes and auxiliary components (Fig. 3A). "
The information is on the Original Science Journals Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abh… (login - free account - required)
11.37%. Now we're talking.
In StatCounter's latest US numbers, which cover through October, Linux shows up as only 3.49%. But if you look closer, "unknown" accounts for 4.21%. Allow me to make an educated guess here: I suspect those unknown desktops are actually running Linux. What else could it be? FreeBSD? Unix? OS/2? Unlikely.
In addition, ChromeOS comes in at 3.67%, which strikes me as much too low. Leaving that aside, ChromeOS is a Linux variant. It just uses the Chrome web browser for its interface rather than KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, or another Linux desktop environment. Put all these together, and you get a Linux desktop market share of 11.37%. Now we're talking.
Why people keep flocking to Linux in 2025 (and it's not just to escape Windows)
By my count, Linux has over 11% of the desktop market. Here's how I got that number - and why people are making the leap.Steven Vaughan-Nichols (ZDNET)
Europe's discontent, useless NATO, Zelensky ‘crosses line’: Davos happenings
Europe's discontent, useless NATO, Zelensky ‘crosses line’: Davos happenings
Statements by European leaders on the sidelines of the WEF sounded like performances in an international theater of the absurd, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saidTASS
How Jared Kushner's Gaza plan would erase Palestinian culture
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/42175870
Published date: 23 January 2026 18:12 GMT
A harrowing cartoon by Peter de Wit depicts parents sunbathing on an idyllic beach in Gaza, while their toddler blissfully digs up skulls in the sand.De Wit’s “Gaza Beach 2030” won the award for best political cartoon in the Netherlands last year.
Now, a plan unveiled by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law might just bring such a dystopian image to reality.
Jared Kushner, who serves as a US special envoy, announced plans for a “New Gaza” - complete with shiny skyscrapers, coastal tourist attractions and entire districts dedicated to business and commerce.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kushner told global leaders that the Palestinian enclave would be run under “free market economy principles”.
He said these would seek to mirror the “same mindset and same approach” as Trump’s America.
How Jared Kushner's Gaza plan would erase Palestinian culture
Published date: 23 January 2026 18:12 GMTA harrowing cartoon by Peter de Wit depicts parents sunbathing on an idyllic beach in Gaza, while their toddler blissfully digs up skulls in the sand.De Wit’s “Gaza Beach 2030” won the award for best political cartoon in the Netherlands last year.
Now, a plan unveiled by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law might just bring such a dystopian image to reality.
Jared Kushner, who serves as a US special envoy, announced plans for a “New Gaza” - complete with shiny skyscrapers, coastal tourist attractions and entire districts dedicated to business and commerce.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kushner told global leaders that the Palestinian enclave would be run under “free market economy principles”.
He said these would seek to mirror the “same mindset and same approach” as Trump’s America.
How Jared Kushner's Gaza plan would erase Palestinian culture
A harrowing cartoon by Peter de Wit depicts parents sunbathing on an idyllic beach in Gaza, while their toddler blissfully digs up skulls in the sand. De Wit’s “Gaza Beach 2030” won the award for best political cartoon in the Netherlands last year.Rayhan Uddin (Middle East Eye)
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New US strategy elevates Western Hemisphere, allies' burden-sharing
New US strategy elevates Western Hemisphere, allies' burden-sharing
The strategy places defense of the US homeland and the US interests across the Western Hemisphere above all other military priorities.chinadailyhk
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