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You've not made it clear what exactly it is you want. Nextcloud or syncthing are good for syncing personal files. If you want to make server backups, they're not gonna be the way.
If you want to automate backups, you could just use a cronjob to make a tarball and rsync it?
Rather I think what we should wish for is that they be unnecessary, or at least it be unnecessary for them to be as fleshed out as they are. I've found a lot of FOSS communities to be quite casually misogynistic—you could just say to ignore it and focus on the code, but it most certainly makes it harder to focus on the code when the community is subtly hostile towards you. If you think CoCs are unnecessary even for large projects then it's probably because you're not one of the demographics affected by the problems that led to CoCs proliferating. Once a project has enough of a community around it I think a CoC is reasonable enough in the current culture.
I installed and switched to Ubuntu around the same age. I'm sure your niece will be fine with Mint. All she really needs to know how to do is to look stuff up online.
I recommend pointing her towards Mint and encouraging her to install it herself. Don't assume that children are incapable of these things just because they're children.
saying that anything AI generated in the kernel is a problem in itself is bullshit.
I never said that.
Same with human generated code. AI bug are not magically more creative than human bugs. If the code is not readable/doesn’t follow conventions you reject it regardless of what generated it.
You may think that, but preliminary controlled studies do show that more security vulns appear in code written by a programmer who used an AI assistant: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576915.3623157
More research is needed of course, but I imagine that because humans are capable of more sophisticated reasoning than LLMs, the process of a human writing the code and deriving an implementation from a human mind is what leads to producing, on average, more robust code.
I'm not categorically opposed to use of LLMs in the kernel but it is obviously an area where caution needs to be exercised, given that it's for a kernel that millions of people use.
I wonder if a "deposit" system for huge projects that get a lot of patch submissions might be worthwhile to deter vibe coders from submitting slop patches. You pay a trivial amount of money (adjusted for region/local currency strength) to submit a first patch and get it back if it's accepted. People who have already had patches accepted in the past are exempted.
The issue is that it's easy for AI generated code to be subtly wrong in ways that are not immediately obvious to a human. The Linux kernel is written in C, a language that lets you do nearly anything, and is also inherently a privileged piece of software, making Linux bugs more serious to begin with.
The other problem is, of course, you can block someone submitting AI slop but there's a lot of people in the world. If there's a barrage of AI slop patches from lots of different people it's going to be a real problem for the maintainers.
I see, that's interesting. Well glad that it's not hard to switch away from systemd on Debian for those who want it—although I still think if you don't want systemd you should just pick another distro, given that the Debian installer doesn't let you pick another init.
On Debian you can use both sysvinit and openrc
Huh really? Then why does Devuan exist? (I don't use Debian for context)
I use Alpine for servers because I like its simplicity. Not in terms of computational power requirements, just in terms of user experience.
Alpine is an interesting choice for hosting
I'd say servers are one of the main uses of Alpine, second to containers. It would be a much more unusual choice for a desktop OS.
Alpine already uses OpenRC. There's no option to use systemd with Alpine.
Popular alternatives include runit (which Void uses), OpenRC (Gentoo and Alpine), s6, sysVinit, dinit. The suckless people have also written some suckless inits—I think one of them's called sinit.
So what are the alternatives that work with both Alpine and Debian?
None. On Alpine you can only use OpenRC and on Debian you can only use systemd. Most distros don't let you change out the init system. If you want systemdless Debian look into Devuan.
Judging from this post, I would say you should not be looking to change out your init system as, no disrespect intended, but you really don't seem to know what you're talking about. You don't even know what init systems your operating systems (Alpine and Debian) are using, let alone the details of different init systems.
Some people have strong opinions about init systems. They are nerds with reasons behind those opinions. You don't seem to have many reasons and you don't seem to be particularly invested in the debate. I would say it's not worth your time to change operating system (which is what you would need to do to change your init) just because you heard vaguely that systemd is bad. If you reach a point where init system matters to you, then you won't need to be asking the questions you're asking in the OP.
I wouldn't know about professionally as I don't work in the industry, but anecdotally a lot of young people I see use LLMs for everything. Meanwhile in the FOSS community online I see very little of AI/LLMs. I think it's a cultural thing that will vary depending on what circle of people you're looking at.
I think the point about convenience is more about familiarity than Windows being inherently easier. Speaking as someone who switched from Linux to Windows previously, I found the change very difficult as a lot of the FOSS software I was using didn't have Windows versions. I had a nightmare trying to read one of my LUKS-encrypted drives on Windows. I was practically using WSL for everything. That's not that Windows is inherently harder than Linux; it's just that I was used to Linux and the FOSS ecosystem, just as some are used to Windows and their proprietary ecosystem.
If your hardware isn't working properly, you have to find drivers that run on Linux; if the developer never made Linux-compatible drivers, you have to figure something else out.
Most drivers come pre-installed with the Linux kernel or your distro—I never had to manually install any drivers for my current hardware. Compared to Windows where you will have to go out of your way to install graphics drivers for NVIDIA or AMD depending on your graphics card, if you want to make the most out of your card's capabilities.
Installers made for Windows don't need any special TLC; you double-click them and they work.
See, I think if you've used Linux for any length of time you'd quickly find the system of package managers way easier than the system of having to hunt down an .exe on the internet, guess whether or not it's a legit copy or if it's malware, and manually manage updates for all the different software you have installed.
I agree that people stay on Windows out of convenience, but it's not convenience as in Windows is inherently easier, but it's convenience as in you're used to the way things work on Windows. Because in my perspective, things do "just work" on Linux, and that's because I'm used to the way things work here.
I doubt that would hold up in court as false advertising given the significant time gap between them marketing Win 10 that way and them releasing Win 11.
That wasn't legally binding.
I think you're still avoiding the point:
I will never wait for any individual or group to give me the go ahead to do what I think is the right thing. BDS isn’t perfect.
The point isn't that you have to follow the BNC specifically. The point is that announcing you're not using any software hosted on GH, on a small social media platform, is far from organising a boycott. If you are serious about organising a boycott, that is what you do in the movement, with the masses. As it currently stands, you are simply making a personal consumer decision.
Personally, I don't think it'll be possible for this to become a mass boycott (which it needs to in order to have effect), just because you're going to struggle to explain to everyone what GitHub even is let alone how to boycott any software that's hosted on it. That's why the demand to boycott GitHub ie not host your own software on there is far easier; that only applies to people who make software, who do know what GitHub is and understand how to not use it. If you don't know what GitHub is then you're already boycotting it. Meanwhile, your version of the boycott requires teaching people what git is, what a git repo is, and what a git forge is, and then giving them a very long list of software that they need to boycott in order to join you. For the reasons that BDS explains in terms of their tactic of targeted boycotts, that's not going to work, because in practice very few people will boycott the full list of software and everyone will boycott a few GitHub repos and those repos will be different for each person.
At the end of the day, boycotting is a political strategy to force change through. It's not about showing how moral you are. If you can't get a critical mass of people with you, your consumer decision is as impactful as your decision of what shirt to wear today.
I will drop as many projects as I can. Media players, web browsers, mail clients, social platforms - can all be changed for more ethical alternatives. It doesn’t have to be black or white.
That's still avoiding the real problem of defining strict boundaries for your boycott. It is still entirely unclear to me how I could join you even if I wanted to. What are you proposing we boycott? I adhere to BDS, who have given pretty unambiguous guidelines on how to boycott. Even their Microsoft boycott accounts for "do as much as you can"; they acknowledge that some people will be forced to use MS products, and encourage people to move away from them unless they have no choice. That's understandable enough and the average person knows exactly how to join that boycott if they want to.
Like I said, if you're serious about this, you need to go somewhere other than Lemmy. And if you're not serious about this, then stop pretending you're making a political decision, and accept that you are just making a personal consumer preference.
No, I'm not arguing that we should be users of Microsoft. You're still not understanding what I'm saying. I don't use Microsoft's services, including their free ones. Software that happens to be hosted on GitHub is not Microsoft's software.
You can do whatever you want as an individual. But as a political actor, you should be participating in organised boycotts, such as BDS's boycott of Microsoft. BDS's boycott is already fairly wide-sweeping, going as far as to ask people to e.g. stop playing Minecraft and Skyrim, even if they already own the game. Avoiding using Microsoft's products like this is effective because, even if you've already bought the game, you lend Microsoft more cultural capital by proliferating their products.
BDS has not, on the other hand, called for a boycott of all software that happens to have a GitHub repo. If you think they should do that, take it up with BDS. If BDS called for such a boycott, it would get much more momentum behind it.
As it currently stands, you are boycotting all software that has a GitHub repo on your own. This is not going to have any effect. You are going to be hard-pressed to get people to join your boycott. What kernel do you use? The Linux kernel has a GitHub mirror. The majority of FOSS projects where collaboration occurs off of GitHub still have a read-only GitHub mirror. Is your boycott suggesting that everybody should be using OpenBSD? That's going to be a very hard sell.
BDS has achieved huge victories because it offers targeted boycotts that the average consumer is perfectly capable of doing, and it has a mass movement behind it. There are also grassroots boycotts that have been organised outside of BDS, such as the Starbucks and McDonald's boycotts, but again, these caught on because they had the backing of people active in the movement and were willing to organise said boycotts. You're a random Lemmy user who, if you are serious about organising a boycott, you're in the entirely wrong place to do so. You won't achieve anything doing what you're currently doing.
You're welcome to make whatever consumer decisions you want, but don't confuse that for political organising.
You wouldn't see it if you're not on .ml. The removed censoring is clientside so I'd see it using the .ml hosted web client.
I'm also opposed to "using [Microsoft's] free stuff"; I'm arguing that using software that happens to use GH isn't using MS's stuff at all.
Agreed. I don't find it misleading; it's showing a gui frontend, which makes more sense for a screenshot as it's a more interesting screenshot than a screenshot of your terminal.