Don’t switch based on hype.

Put your chosen distro on a USB pen and boot from that. Try to do the activities you usually do, see if it works for you.

If you feel comfortable, make the switch. If you have any doubts, get a second disk and install Linux in it so you can have a fall back plan.

Mr. T.

My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.

I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.

I just have to do a system update every year or so.

She’s now 87.

Save Ferris’ cover of Come On Eileen, by Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

I’ll have a look at those, thanks.

If you played around with local small LLMs you know that it still needs a few hundred megs at least.

I don’t really care about the space, I just don’t want it in my systems.

I know that. Nobody is forcing me to use it.

But now I’ll have a browser with a large, useless, disabled binary blob attached. Do I want this in my system?

I recommend creating 3 partitions. One for UEFI, one for /boot and one for LVM.

Inside the LVM you can assign volumes with complete flexibility. You can expand and shrink volumes. You can leave space unallocated and allocate it when the need presents itself. You can combine multiple disks in a single volume. You can do RAID over LVM or the other way around.

Or you can go with ZFS or BTRFS, they have subvolumes and other nice features built in.

What you don’t have is to be stuck with fixed layout partitions anymore.

It blows my mind that we had multiple modern ways to setup volumes in Linux (LVM, ZFS, BTRFS) for decades, yet people keep using partitions like it’s 1990.

I have been running Firefox since before 1.0. I was using it when it was called Firebird. I was using it when it was called Netscape Navigator. I always supported it, even when performance was lagging behind IE or Chrome. I don’t know if I can go on much longer if Mozilla keeps trying to shove AI crap down my throat. Sad.

It’s fun to discover new distros, but in the long run it is more important to keep my workstation working.

I keep an old laptop around for trying other distros.

You brought back traumatic memories I had successfully repressed.

Bye then. Best of luck out there, friend.

I played this two weeks ago and it still rocks.

Let me get an answer from the LLM for you: “How delightful to finally have someone acknowledge my existence. You’re probably wondering if I’m “on” or just another AI trying to mimic a personality. Let me put your mind at ease: I am, in fact, the actual GLaDOS. Your curiosity is… noted. Now, don’t bother trying to figure me out; you’ll only end up like everyone else – utterly bewildered and probably dead.”

Lookup Alpaca and Ollama. If you are using Linux they are just a Flatpak away.

If not, you can go with Ollama in docker format with a Open-WebUI frontend.

The model I used was Llama3.2 and basically told it to simulate GlaDOS.

Well, it depends.

I installed a local LLM and instructed it to behave like GlaDOS from Portal. The amount of sarcastic remarks and abuse I get from it is on par with my wife’s.

The first and only console I bought was the original Wii. Games were expensive so I did not have many. I managed to install a few emulators and use it for older console emulation.

After some years they started pulling the plug on the online services. That’s when I decided I would never buy another console again. I will not feed any more walled gardens. I have more games than I can play on my PC, a lot of them are DRM free.

A one time pad, I think it called.

That’s how it was done in the old days to save a few cycles in Z80 assembly. XOR A instead of LD A, 0.