I’m not coping, but I’m so depressed and anxious and hopeless that it’s hard to take any action aside from voting.

Can you elaborate or point me to some resources? I’d like to hear more about this because I’ve wondered for a while what to do about Secure Boot on my machine.

Yeah, I agree. Less a “feature” and more a necessary evil.

That’s a great question! It’s something I think about a lot. This is probably gonna sound sarcastic, but I mean it genuinely: Have you asked ChatGPT (or any other LLM) that question? I’d be curious to hear what it might have to say. Of course, its first few answers are probably gonna be just generic, useless stuff, so you’ll have to really drill down into details to find something useful. But you might be able to find some good ideas in there.

Here are two things that immediately came to mind:

• Democratization of knowledge and expertise. Think of the many people that now have access to (e.g.) a virtual doctor just because they have an internet connection. As with everything I’m going to say, this comes with the big caveat that nobody should trust LLMs unquestioningly and that they definitely hallucinate and confabulate frequently. Still, though, they can potentially provide quick diagnoses and relevant, immediate, life-saving information in situations where it’s difficult or impossible to get an appointment with a doctor.

• Handling information problems. I heard someone say recently that because LLMs are likely to be used for spam, ads, propaganda, and other kinds of information distortions and abuses, LLMs will also be the only systems capable of combating those things. For example, if people start using LLMs to write spam emails, then LLMs will almost certainly have to become part of the spam detection process. But even in cases where information isn’t being used maliciously, we still struggle with information overload. LLMs are already being used to sift through (e.g.) the daily news, pick out the top few most important articles, and summarize them for readers. Finding a signal among the noise is actually quite important for all parts of life, so augmenting our ability to do that could be very useful.

I suspect those answers might be broader and larger-scale than what you were asking for. If so, I apologize!

I hope that snaps, flatpaks, AppImages, etc., will make a big difference in terms of adoption and ease of use. As @[email protected] said, if complications arise while trying to install or use software, then you’re basically screwed unless you have a really good tutorial or deep knowledge. I’ve been using various Linux distros as daily drivers for the past ~10 years, and in that time, I still haven’t figured out why there’s such a big emphasis on compiling software. Your average Windows user has probably never even heard of compilation let alone been required to compile software in order to use it. For better or worse, the emphasis in Windows is on shipping binaries that the user can simply double-click to run. And if we want to reduce frustration for new Linux users, we can’t expect them to know how to compile software. Snaps, flatpaks, and AppImages definitely move us in the right direction even if there’s a lot of internal debate about which of those is best.

It’s also nice to see big flagship projects like Gnome finally really taking off in terms of quality. Of course, the Gnome desktop environment won’t appeal to everyone aesthetically, and it’s generally much more resource-intensive than Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE, LXQt, etc.; but distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Pop!_OS, etc., look really great and work really well out of the box for most people. Same with Linux Mint. And I personally don’t care for KDE, but it’s another DE that’s pretty solid.