The first thing I do to, if I need to get the size down, is swap out Gnome for one of the X11 Windows managers, usually XFCE.

I usually do this by starting from the minimal install and building up, as schizo already suggested.

That said, I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Linux Mint is an easy way to get Debian’s core with the XFCE window manager.

Looks like Mint starts at 3GB - 8GB, depending on options chosen?

Disclaimer: It’s honestly been awhile since I really paid attention to my own Linux install size, as long as it’s below 40GB.

the live disk won’t find my Wifi

Oof.

I’m case it helps: I have solved that problem for myself using a $9.00 USB Wifi dongle.

For whatever reason (other contributors facing the same issue?), I have found that every cheapo USB Wifi dongle I have tried has worked perfectly with the minimal Linux images.

I realize I might have just gotten really lucky a bunch of times, but it could be worth a try.

Lol. Good point.

Dang. Not a scrap of awareness of the irony, in the article.

I’ll bet substantial amounts of money that the claim of “advanced reasoning abilities” will be ruled to be outright fraud, if it ever goes to court.

It’s the same claim made by traveling freak shows about horses that solve algebra problems, and the technology is essentially the same, under all the abstractions - learning models are great at repetition, and don’t understand jack shit, today.

“We’re confident that the AI we sell can take care of everything…except anything we actually want to see get done correctly (such as selling it).”

They are solvable problems, and many have already been solved already in some countries.

This is a great point!

Yeah. At least until his yes-men high five him and slap him on the back on his way to board the deep space or deep sea vessel that he designed himself.

But losing 75% of population, I can see some nuclear war breaking out

Seems pretty likely (eventually). I take hope that I’ll be in the direct blast radius, and not a mutilated horribly scarred survivor.

I choose not to think about this one much because it’s well outside my circle of influence.

The current trend sucks, obviously.

But historically, we used to be so much worse to each-other.

There’s reasons (data and practicality) to have faith that things will continue to improve.

But it won’t be enough, for many of us, in many of our lifetimes, so let’s all stay angry and active.

Lol.

“But honey, I left you a README file…”

Providing competition against media monopolies is illegal.

If they can’t sell you your memories, they think no one should have them. They will let your memories burn and be lost before they let you own or share them.

They’ll keep this up and they will continue to work to make intellectual property never enter the public domain.

I’m too chicken to be a pirate, myself. But I’m aware that pirates and librarians are the only ones with any intent to preserve works of art for the public.

Can you be more specific?

Sure.

I’ve had discussions about my impression that Rust’s build chain can be a bit surly compared to other popular languages.

I don’t particularly mean it as a criticism - of course Rust’s security enforcement comes with more warnings and errors.

But the novel part of the interactions, for me, was Rust community members coming at me with ‘well get gud, newbie’.

These interactions are particularly ironic, given my experiences and specialties. I’m an old school veteran software developer. I have spent over half of my career in dedicated Cybersecurity roles.

These conversations converted me from a mildly interested Rust proponent into a casual Rust critic.

I have heard of him compare the cult-like following Rust has with the whole Vim/Emacs tribalism thing.

Heh.

I do think the worst thing going for Rust, right now, is the Rust community.

It feels like few specific jackasses from the Java community made the jump to Rust, and no one had the sense to slap them with a newspaper.

Ha! I have an AI for that! Gotcha!

…

On, but the AI trains now on other docs that I used an AI to write…

…

Oh shit…

Yeah. When I need additional insights on a difficult technical configuration, it’s nice to be able to speak to an artificial insufferable dipshit, rather than a real human insufferable dipshit.

The AI ones continue helping me even after I explain to them how they come across to real humans. (I do my best not to mention it to the insufferable Human dipshits, of course.)

Yeah. We desperately need anti-trust laws to actually be enforced. I think we’ve proven that nuanced and thoughtful rules don’t cut it, so I’m in favor of some deeply restrictive new rules that are impossible to mis-interpret.

I also think we should create laws with immediate financial incentives for breaking up monopolies.

I’m essence, we need a law that I, as a random citizen, can just climb into any parked Amazon truck and take it home.

I think Amazon would be a lot more interested in splitting the company along appropriately legal lines if the alternative was the owned capital just getting declared public property on a random Tuesday next year.

I’ve found enshittification to go in cycles, with mixed results for recovery.

• Google successfully embraced extended and extinguished XMPP, but now it seems like most folks use Discord, Skype, Zoom, Signal, and whatver Meta calls their spyware today. Our chat experiences certainly aren’t living the FOSS dream, but at least Google Talk doesn’t feel mandatory anymore like it briefly did after it “extinguished” XMPP. (Did Google kill Talk? I can’t keep track of what Google hasn’t killed yet.)
• Mobile operating systems have been a bumpy ride with highs and lows, but Android, the current most common mobile OS, is a lot more open than anything we had before. The vendor builds of Android that most people accept are, indeed, enshitifying now, so I guess the verdict is still out.
• The web itself tried hard to go fully proprietary several times: with Microsoft COM, Microsoft ActiveX, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight, among others. These are all completely gone now. Today, almost every scrap of technology serving and browsing the web is open source. Of course, most of search is still closed and enshitifying, and the open options for social media are very new, so there’s still plenty of room to improve or lose ground.
• The Commodore 64, a (delightful, but closed) proprietary platform, was once the single best selling single computer model of all time. Today that title goes to the Raspberry Pi, a mostly open hardware specification that is rapidly improving.

Anyway. There’s cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

Spot on. And I’ve found it’s even that bad at small companies too, if the company is more than five years old.

Maybe because I tried to follow MS’s “use your own distro” instructions instead of using something prepackaged?

Not op, and I don’t care about systemd, but…

When I’ve used anything I wanted to substantially modify, I’ve followed the “use your own distro” instructions. In the past I’ve done this because WSL had a strong assumption of exactly one copy of each distro, and I like to abuse it for more.

Overall, I’ve had a better time with the the “bring your own distro” instructions. But some of my experiences with WSL were before they even got the Windows Store installer working correctly.

More recently, I recall Windows Store being fine for stock Ubuntu and for stock Debian. But I didn’t find the “bring your own distro” instructions to be much trouble, either. My perhaps faulty memory is that it took maybe ten minutes, last time I used them.

So why are you advising to change the default install of Debian to include it?

I didn’t advice any such thing. My edit is just to acknowledge someone else who makes it part of their process.

Citation needed.

I shared my personal experience and you turned it into a distro war. Go look up your own damn sources.

Pretty sure this is either personal opinion or anti-canonical, anti-snap ideology.

Fuck yes. It’s both! Snap is a slap in the face to the contributors who brought Canonical this far. I appreciate their partnership so far, and now, speaking as a package maintainer, Canonical can fuck right off.

Targeting WSL users with this rhetoric is ridiculous.

Helping people make an informed decision about their tool chain is rhetoric? Give me a fucking break.

I don’t like Ubuntu. That’s not a secret. Ubuntu is a fine option for total newbies. People using WSL tend not to be total newbies and may well run into real issues (such as the ones that prompted me to switch), thanks to snap.