Been doing this for a couple weeks myself and have had very few reasons to go back to Windows. In fact I haven’t booted windows in more than a week at this point. I’m using Nobara 42 (based on Fedora) because mostly what I do with my PC is game nad it’s worked great so far.

3060 user here, nvidia closed works just fine with Wayland too.

<3 alexandrite, I like it a lot better than the default lemmy UI.

To be clear you don’t have to get that technical to read non-Amazon books on your kindle… I’ve owned 2 different kindles over the course of about 15 years and literally never bought an ebook from Amazon. Just gotta know where to get them (libgen) and how to use them (calibre.)

A cheap ereader would be nice, but I’ve kinda had to go the opposite direction; my eyes weren’t great to begin with and have only gotten worse with age, so I need a larger screen. I do very little reading (in general, not of books specifically) on my phone because it’s too small and I have to zoom in and pan around all the time, etc.

I’ve been using duck.ai recently myself and quite like it. My only complaint with it is that the chats have a length limit, so if you’re working on complex projects you can run into those limits pretty quick. I use it for worldbuilding for a novel I’m working on and I have to use chatgpt for thematic stuff because it has a better memory, but otherwise it’s great for quick/small things.

I just started a novel project a few weeks ago and have been using scrivener because it’s just what I saw recommended the most. But now I’ve switched to linux and have been looking for FOSS linux-native alternatives so this is perfectly timed. I tried anytype briefly but it feels like it’s designed for programmers. By which I mean it’s extremely powerful and flexible, but just doing simple shit like creating a bunch of pages in a tree structure requires an hour of hunting and watching tutorial videos.

I like the look of novelwriter that someone else linked, gonna give that a shot.

That, I’m afraid, is the nature of technology: it makes everything easier, even the stuff you really wish it didn’t.

Out of curiosity, what is it you use it for? I pretty much only use it for SMS, for which it is kinda janky and unstable. Doesn’t always get contact names, doesn’t load everything from conversations, misses messages that I sent or that were sent to me, crashes if I scroll too fast, etc. I have Connect installed just to use SMS (cause I hate typing on my phone keyboard), but I’m honestly not even sure what the base software does.

Enshittificaiton is a uniquely capitalist thing, so…

Yeah, my primary concern is I’m part of a community of ~350 people who games together, and while there’s probably some folks in there who could swing a server, right now discord isn’t costing us anything and does everything we want (chat, voice, streaming, etc). If we were to consider moving we would probably need a reasonably beefy server and some software with all of those features, and right now that just doesn’t seem feasible.

I quite liked Walkaway, but I’ve got kind of an anarchist bent myself, so.

Replace ‘stop remembering things’ with ‘remember fewer things’ at your own leisure if it makes you happy, I’m exaggerating slightly to make a point.

My argument is not that we will stop practising critical thinking altogether, but that we will not need to practise it as often.

And mine is that as far as I know we have no evidence (or at least nothing more than anecdotal evidence at best) for that because society has only gotten more complex, not less, and requires more thought, memory, etc to navigate it. Now instead of remembering which cow was sick last week and which field I’m going to plant tomorrow I have to remember shit like how to navigate a city that’s larger than the range in which most people traveled their entire lives, I have to figure out what this weird error my PC just threw means, I have to calculate the risk-vs-reward of trying to buy a house now or renting for a year to save up for a better down payment and improve my credit, etc. These are just examples, pick your own if you don’t like them.

Less practise always makes you worse at something. I do not need evidence for that as it is obvious.

Now who’s being reductive? I’m not asking for evidence that less practice makes you worse at something, I’m asking for evidence that labor-saving devices result in people doing less labor (mental or otherwise), because I think that’s a lot less obvious.

I have seen how today’s students are using it instead of using their brains

This is a bad example because learning is a different matter. People using it instead of learning will not learn the subject matter as well as those who don’t, obviously. But it’s a lot less obvious in other fields/adult life. Will I be less good at code because I use an LLM to generate some now and then? Probably not, both because I’ve been coding off and on for 30 years, but also because my time instead is spent on tackling the thornier problems that AI can’t do or has difficulty with, managing large projects because AI has a limited memory window, etc.

We teach critical thinking in schools for a reason, because it’s something that does not always come naturally, and these students are getting AI to do the work for them instead of learning how to think.

That’s debatable, though I guess it depends on where you’re from and what the schools are like there. They certainly didn’t teach critical thinking when I was in (US public) school, I had to figure that shit out largely on my own. But that’s beside the point. Shortcutting learning is bad, I agree. Shortcutting work is a lot more nebulous and uncertain in the absence of that evidence I keep asking for.

To be fair that was also my experience with PopOS which is designed to be user-friendly. The answer to questions like ‘how do I take a screenshot of a region and copy it to clipboard without spamming files’ or ‘how do I switch audio devices between speakers and headset’ just tends to be ‘run this long-ass command you would never have figured out on your own’ or ‘Write a shell script full of such commands to do it for you and call it with a shortcut key’. I think this is a linux problem, not a distro problem, because it was the same way when I was using redhat 15 years ago or slackware 30 years ago.

And I want Windows and all its bullshit to heck off!

Fortunately I’m winning that one so far.

PRETTY_NAME="Nobara Linux 42 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)"

Next thing you know the ‘orbs’ will be NFTs and we’ll all be expected to grind away at their ‘quests’ (probably training AI) to earn ‘real money’.

increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.

The word you’re looking for is enshittification.

Damn, I’ve been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn’t do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it’s just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don’t want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I’ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord’s bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.

I listen attentively to pretty much anything Cory Doctorow says about the internet and technology, he’s been consistently insightful as hell on the subject. His books are also pretty good.

For sure, I even said so.

Social media makes it easier to fearmonger and spread hatred, no doubt

I hate to break it to you though; I grew up during the Cold War and propaganda was literally everywhere before the invention of the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Red Scare?

I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it’s focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It’s been… I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can’t install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can’t log into epic games store, etc), but I’ve also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.