No, it’d still be a problem; every diff between commits is expensive to render to web, even if “only one company” is scraping it, “only one time”. Many of these applications are designed for humans, not scrapers.

The main issue is UX imo. On Windows 11, it’s “5 clicks”, but you have to open the settings app and find the setting two submenus deep. On KDE, it’s right click > configure application launcher > toggle setting > apply.

I was very annoyed when I got this, but remembered that it’s KDE, and turning it off is 4 clicks. Proprietary software often doesn’t allow you to turn this off (easily). Windows has this “feature”, where is the setting?

I don’t think it’s a productive “feature”, but considering it can be turned off so easily I don’t consider it a complete showstopper.

Scrapers can send these challenges off to dedicated GPU farms or even FPGAs, which are an order of magnitude faster and more efficient.

Lets assume for the sake of argument, an AI scraper company actually attempted this. They don’t, but lets assume it anyway.

The next Anubis release could include (for example), SHA256 instead of SHA1. This would be a simple, and basically transparent update for admins and end users. The AI company that invested into offloading the PoW to somewhere more efficient now has to spend significantly more resources changing their implementation than what it took for the devs and users of Anubis.

Yes, it technically remains a game of “cat and mouse”, but heavily stacked against the cat. One step for Anubis is 2000 steps for a company reimplementing its client in more efficient hardware. Most of the Anubis changes can even be done without impacting the end users at all. That’s a game AI companies aren’t willing to play, because they’ve basically already lost. It doesn’t really matter how “efficient” the implementation is, if it can be rendered unusable by a small Anubis update.

Someone making an argument like that clearly does not understand the situation. Just 4 years ago, a robots.txt was enough to keep most bots away, and hosting personal git on the web required very little resources. With AI companies actively profiting off stealing everything, a robots.txt doesn’t mean anything. Now, even a relatively small git web host takes an insane amount of resources. I’d know - I host a Forgejo instance. Caching doesn’t matter, because diffs berween two random commits are likely unique. Ratelimiting doesn’t matter, they will use different IP (ranges) and user agents. It would also heavily impact actual users “because the site is busy”.

A proof-of-work solution like Anubis is the best we have currently. The least possible impact to end users, while keeping most (if not all) AI scrapers off the site.

“Yes”, for any bits the user sees. The frontend UI can be behind Anubis without issues. The API, including both user and federation, cannot. We expect “bots” to use an API, so you can’t put human verification in front of it. These "bots* also include applications that aren’t aware of Anubis, or unable to pass it, like all third party Lemmy apps.

That does stop almost all generic AI scraping, though it does not prevent targeted abuse.

You don’t get control of the incoming port that way. For LetsEncrypt to issue a certificate primarily intended for HTTPS, they will check that the HTTP server on that IP is owned by the requesting party. That has to live on port 80, which you can’t forward on CGNAT.

Probably because they’re incapable of maintaining a distribution: https://manjarno.pages.dev/

Manjaro is not Arch based. They use pacman, but they use their own repositories. They create a ton of issues that way.

Reminder that the license was changed to a “custom” non-free license.

I, a Linux user, agree that there is work to be done, but I disagree with the “this needs to change first” on proprietary software availability. Specifically the “first” bit.

Let me explain why: The problem of software availability is a chicken and egg problem. No users on an OS = no developers make stuff for it = no users because there is no software.

With Wine/Proton, Valve “fixed” this issue for gamers. This “opened the floodgates”, and at least in one group of computer users, made Linux viable as a daily driver. People who play video games are diverse, and have different needs for software outside gaming, so this change grew the userbase of every category of software in Linux, not just games.

With an actual userbase comes both a community of people, who are all potential contributors for FOSS, whether that’s programming, docs, or reporting issues. And a marketshare for businesses to target (and profit off of).

The ball has clearly started rolling, Linux is gaining marketshare at a pace it hasn’t seen before. The bigger the userbase gets, the more software will work overall. The more software, the more people who can switch.

There isn’t a single definable point where software availability suddenly makes a userbase appear, these two grow together.

So yes, there is work to be done, but no, it doesn’t “need to change first”.

A lot of people find out after using Linux that it’s perfect for their daily tasks. A lot of other people never bother, and thus never find out. With Windows 10 EOL coming up, and MS pushing more and more onto users (like recall and copilot), a portion of people forced to switch will look for alternatives, or will try out Linux because they’ve heard of it as an alternative.

As for your other arguments:

too much different distros not always compatible one with another

Which used to be true, but is significantly better than even a couple years ago. “Standardized” packaging like Flatpak makes a ton of software available on all distros, ensuring compatibility. Valve took a shot at this too with Steam Linux Runtime, but this hasn’t seen any use outside Steam.

depending on the distro also often an deficient support and maintance,

For the vast majority of distros, no. Though I agree that we (the community as a whole) should stop accepting terrible resources for finding Linux distros (like “top 10 distros” lists that make no sense to a new user) and push for better ones.

certain driver problems, among others.

Which is being solved too. “driver problems” is exclusively Nvidia, but the issues are (very slowly) being fixed (by nvidia), and distros are offering easy options for getting the Nvidia drivers. Nouveau/NVK is also on the slow cooker, but I trust it’ll come out great. “Among others” is not a valid reason.

Not good if an still minority OS is above to diversified, which cause a lot of problems for the devs of software.

Which fits into the point of Flatpaks for proprietary software, and highlights where FOSS truly shines. Flatpaks standardize the runtime, proprietary software only needs to support this one standard to support all distros. FOSS devs can target whatever they want for their project. If “works on my machine” is good enough for them, so be it. (People will always complain about stuff like this though). If a distro wants to officially provide some open source software to its users, it has to be packaged. With the packaging process for a distro, modifications might need to be made, which can often be contributed back to upstream.

To dethrone Windows as leader of the market does it still need a lot of work in many environments.

It’s a lot closer than you think. It’s already a viable daily driver for many. The biggest blocker is the fact that MS is a global megacorp, with advertising, OEM “support”, and a lot of money to “persuade” people and companies to use Windows.

OEM support also ties into the whole “choosing a distro”. I trust that even the worst OEMs choose at least a supported distro, which takes all pressure away from the user. When Linux marketshare grows enough for OEMs to provide the option, the least technical users going to a brick and mortar store will be presented with “100$ cheaper, but looks different than your current computer”. If Windows UI keeps being as inconsistent as it currently is, it would have similar impact for non-technical users going between Windows N and N+1 as it does going to Linux.

Keyguard, which works on Bitwarden-compatible servers like Vaultwarden

SteamOS is immutable, and has its own updater because of it. While SteamOS is related to Arch Linux, it is far from the same distro.

Regular Arch Linux can install local packages, the process is described on the Arch wiki. SteamOS has no built in mechanism to update without an internet connection, and installing packages manually is not recommended (due to the immutable nature of the system).

In order to update SteamOS from a local file, you would need to figure out how SteamOS updates work, and somehow trick the Steam Deck into accepting your local images. This is far outside the scope of anything related to Arch Linux, and not very well documented. The better option is to update your Steam Deck by connecting it to the internet.

Also of note, the latest version of SteamOS (as far as I’m aware) does not have any significant changes when it comes to controlling the fan speed.

None of that’s true. Free speech laws try to prevent the government from arresting you for opinions or criticism. Social media platforms, parents, etc are still able to take action against statements without reason. The government can also put the blame on something else. If someone is critical of the government, they’re likely to have broken laws they don’t agree with.

Article doesn’t even cite their sources correctly, typo-ing “Bringus Studios” as “Dingus Studios”

Fully agreed. There’s some stuff in the list that could leak server info or metadata about available content to the public, but the rest seems to require some knowledge before being able to exploit it, such as user IDs.

That doesn’t mean these aren’t issues, but they’re not “take your jellyfin down now” type issues either.

Current LLMs are just that, large language models. They’re incredible at predicting the next word, but literally cannot perform tasks outside of that, like fact checking, playing chess, etc. The theoretical AI that “could take over the world” like Skynet is called “Artificial Generalized Intelligence”. We’re nowhere close yet, do not believe OpenAI when they claim otherwise. This means the highest risk currently is a human person deciding to put an LLM “in charge” of an important task, that could cost lives if a mistake is made.

Probably, yes. Dual-booting may also be an option for the one or two games that don’t work.

Not every game works, but as another user pointed out, ProtonDB is a good resource. If you buy a new game on Steam, and it doesn’t work, you can refund it within the first 2 weeks (and below 2 hours playtime) for any reason. That includes “Ths game does not work on my operating system”.