I totally agree with this.

Whenever I see people criticise AI, it’s usually because the company steals copyrighted content, with the aim to replace the people they stole from. Or the environmental impact of training and running the data models, which is awful. And, both of those reasons are good enough to not like AI, in my opinion. But, I feel like I never see people talk about the fact that all the answers it gives, is being filtered through a private corporation with its own agenda.

People use it to learn, and to do research. They use it to catch up on news of all things!

Like others have mentioned, Google has already been doing this a long time, by sorting search results they show to the user. But, they haven’t written all the articles, the blog posts, the top 10 lists, or the reviews you read… until now. If they’ve wanted to, they’ve made certain things easier or harder to find. But, once you found the article you were looking for, it was written by a person unaffiliated with Google. All that changes with AI. You don’t read the article directly anymore. Google (or any other AI) scrapes it, parses it however they want, and spit it back out to the end user.

I’m very surprised that people are so willing to let a private corporation completely control how they see the world, just because it’s a bit more convenient.

I know right. xD I just have to learn things one at a time as they become relevant, otherwise it’s too overwhelming.

After a quick search of conky, it seems to me that it solves a different problem than waybar does. Waybar can display stats, but that is not its main purpose. Since you use Cinnamon, I doubt you need waybar or Rofi, as Cinnamon comes with pre-installed alternatives for them.

I should have mentioned before when I talked about window managers, I was mainly thinking about tiling window managers. They are really good for a keyboard centric workflow, so if you like using keyboard shortcuts, they’re worth a try. Ideally, you’ll spend less time moving windows around with the mouse, and less time trying to find the window you’re looking for.

But, we’re all different, of course. To each their own. To keep to the trodden path is definitely a good strategy for a stable system :)

Nice :)

Hyprland is a window manager (or actually a Wayland compositor if you want to be pedantic) , alternatives would be i3, dwm Niri, etc. A window manager is a more basic alternative to desktop environments like Gnome and KDE Plasma. It requires you to set up more things yourself, which is what most of the other things solve.

I use Rofi as an application launcher (it can be used for a lot more things as well), it basically does the same job as the Windows startmenu.

Waybar is a statusbar, can be configured to display anything really, but it usually displays the date and time, application tray, active workspace, RAM and CPU usage, battery level, etc. It basically does the same job as the the Windows taskbar.

Ghostty is a terminal, alternatives are Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, foot. All operating systems come with a pre-installed terminal like Windows Terminal on Windows and Gnome Terminal on Gnome. But, you can change it out for some improved functionality.

Neovim is a terminal based text editor. New and improved version of the Vi and Vim text editors. Very steep learning curve, but very fun once you learn it. :q to exit the editor, if you ever feel like testing it.

I use NixOS for the atomic updates that I can roll back to at any time, so I can more or less never completely break my system. And even if I somehow manage it, I can just do a fresh install and apply my flake to get my entire setup back.

The drawback is that it does not follow the filsystem hierarchy standard, so a lot of scripts and binaries does not work out of the box. It gives me quite a bit of friction, but I’m sure that is a skill issue.

My desktop started by being inspired by a lot of Linux YouTubers, and I’ve gradually modified it to fit my needs.

I’m using Hyprland, Ghostty, neovim (btw), Rofi, waybar.

But, I’ll have to check out Niri after reading here.

Yeah, sorry for assuming it’s obvious. Maybe I’ve been around Linux people too much xD

AngryCommieKender is mostly right. It would delete every file and directory in your home directory, which is the Linux equivalent of the Users/<username> folder on Windows. It’s where all of your Documents, Pictures, Downloads, config files, and the likes are stored.

I’m not sure it’s a protected action, since it’s not the actual root of the computer. But, I’ve never tried, so I don’t know :P

Doing nothing is way better than running random commands suggested by AI, or anyone for that matter, if you don’t know what it does. I’ve seen AI suggest to run rm -rf ~/, which is obviously never a good idea.

I use i3. Pretty bare bones, so it took me a while to get productive with it. But it’s all exactly how I want it, it’s all mine.