the other night a friend of mine wanted to switch to Linux and was dead set on using Pop!_OS after reading about COSMIC and seeing some images of it on unixporn. He even asked an LLM about the best distros for his rig and what he liked to do and the answer was Pop!_OS. So he asked me to help him install it. I suggested other distros but no, dead set on using pop.
Live boot USB and the entire time during the install it's complaining about not being able to connect to the internet while being connected to the internet. After the install, it locks up immediately on logging into the OS. try again, ok not locking up now. start doing some apt installs/updates - it crashes. Finally get it to a stable state and try installing steam and a game to test out the nvidia stuff that the LLM claimed Pop was fantastic for. Game crashes. system locks up again.
I eventually say "dude, I got cachyos on this usb too...wanna try that instead?" fine, install CachyOS (which gives you the option to install COSMIC during the install) everything just works. no more crashes, everything is smooth, his games work flawlessly. COSMIC crashes. just the DE. switch him to KDE and that was that. no more issues.
I'm honestly a bit worried about System76. They put all their focus on COSMIC and it feels like with each alpha release it progressively gets worse. I mean during the early Alphas I was seriously considering daily driving it but with each alpha release it just "felt off" and a bit slower/worse with more features added (and there aren't many). the OS has noticeably gotten worse because it hasn't been worked on. Even the distrowatch reviews for it have gotten worse.
But hey if you want GNOME with a tiling toggle then have at it. It's just weird that its taken them this long for something that doesn't have much to it and it's not very good.
That's where I'm making my money. Went from a freelance/consultant dev to pretty much a digital janitor for companies. it IS the next big industry.
Get good at code reviewing - hell really you don't even need to be that good at it all you need to do is know the typical Claude Code comments and search for a lot of "#TODO's"
I make more money doing this now than I did just being a developer. If you're looking for work I HIGHLY suggest you deal with the crap on Linkedin and start advertising yourself as an expert code reviewer with a specialty in diagnosing "AI generated builds". Then wait for the desperate companies to start trickling in.
Vibe coders this past year have made me a lot of money. I've pretty much transitioned from being a freelance dev to a digital janitor as it makes me more money. Just code reviewing their slop. It's extremely easy too, much easier than reviewing code of an actual dev.
"We need you to review this and see why it doesn't work" /me opens up nvim and does a / for #TODO that was written by Claude "the AI didn't implement it but said it did...I'll take my $2500 now thank you"
yes and the reason for that was the massive security risks to users systems that Deepin refused to resolve. ALSO their community packager utilized workarounds to bypass the RPM packaging mechanisms to install "restricted" assets.
yeah, don't use this distro AT ALL. I'd trust RedStarOS over this and friggin RedStarOS is proven to modify your files.
because fixing a problem in the United States won't line anyones pockets with dollar bills.
Someone saw a problem, figured HOW to financially gain from said problem, not solve the problem in order to financially gain from it. So some company has scored a contract to patrol schools with drones in order to "prevent" school shootings and we know they won't and the US tax payer will pay for it.
Problems in the United States are never fixed, they're handled.
reminds me of stories of when they would target wrestling fans. Like they would pretend they were WWE wrestlers and talk to fans and get them to send them money cause they'd be broke. Then one time of the fans actually went to a show to confront one of the wrestlers about paying them back. jumped the barricade and everything.
Just blows my mind that it always seems to be mentally ill individuals that have a ton of money and they can just easily hand it out like that.
that's what I did when I moved my stuff to codeberg and my private forgejo instance. I knew deleting the repos on github wasn't going to do anything, they would likely still have them. so I just pushed a bunch of claude code AI slop into all of them. let Microsoft's AI gorge itself on the waste from Anthropics. Literally just opened up a Claude Code CLI and had it do a bunch of absolutely dumb crap and when it'd get confused and say "this isn't right" I would correct it and say "no, NO! you're completely right! keep going!"
It was actually kinda fun. like teaching a kid to ride a bike wrong on purpose.
yeah I don't get it either. tiling I guess. the problem is, they've progressively made it worse.
There's just something "off" about Cosmic that I can't but my finger on. In the early alphas it was good, decent for being an alpha. But with every release, to me at least, it just feels like it's gotten worse. slower, features that haven't really been expanded on, etc. It just looks/feels like GNOME with the option of tiling. the options for customization, much like GNOME, are limited. no where near what you could potentially do with KDE. the thing is though if you want a DE with basic tiling then it stands out. its good for that. I mean sure you can get tiling with KDE if you use something like Krohnkite but that on it's own is pretty janky for certain things.
I dont' know it's weird. I once went from early alpha using COSMIC as a daily driver to now trying it out again and immediately getting rid of it. maybe I'll give it another swing today.
weird requirements for sure. sounds like they want an investigative journalist that also has a few years of web development under their belt which is....an odd mix to say the least.
good luck to them I guess. they're going to get either journalists or web developers applying but doubt they'll get they're magical Clark Kent that takes their glasses off and then becomes Web Developer Man.
yup and now many of those places are realizing "oh fuck..."
My client base for the past year has been those "oh fuck..." moments. "Hey our app that we built with a junior dev and Claude Code isn't really working and we really don't have anyone available to see why, can you come in for a consultation and review the code?"
"sure thing client, I"m going to nickle and dime you for this but sure i'll code review it" I then proceed to tell them how fucked they are, how much money they DIDN'T save, and how much it's going to cost them to start over. not fix it, you don't fix this slop, you have to start from scratch.
It's the same song and dance for these places. They get a license from anthropic, keep a couple junior devs on board to be vibe coders/prompt monkies and then axe the rest. And always a few months to a year or so down the road they realize they fucked up and how much money they DIDN'T end up saving. Then they hire people like me to come in and clean up the slop and then in turn end up having to look for actual devs. then once people realize they're hiring they get absolutely blitzkrieged with resumes (many of which are AI written and fake themselves) thus costing them even MORE time and money to deal with. Then they hope they can find a REAL developer in time (which they never do) and then their investors get pissed and eventually they end up getting fucked over. Not before I get my cheque though.
All these places think in the short term, think of immediate savings, but always it will come down to massive tech debt as a result of leveraging their LLM's that WILL cost them a hell of alot more money in the long run.
sooooo a site that says it'll do something but in turn won't actually do it.
companies already post ghost jobs via AI on linkedin/indeed/etc so there's no need for this. No one, other than the Linkedin Tech Bros/Wannabe middle managers, is going to use this.
Feels like Sam is grasping at straws right now to keep his shit afloat.
I did one years ago on Reddit and someone made a youtube video out of it without my permission that went semi-viral so I'm sure it's on there somewhere. Just youtube something like "Reddit porn industry AMA"
started my career as a developer working for an adult entertainment industry company (porn) so yeah. Everything I know today is from titties and the bang bus.
he said he never heard of Nix or NixOS. that's it. it's a dumb article that just poorly sums up a few youtube videos of his talk.
as a consultant/freelancer dev whose entire workload for the past year has been cleaning up AI slop, no with dev it hasn't been what I would say a smooth or even good implementation. for my wallet? been a fantastic implementation, for everyone else? not so much.
The thing is as a TOOL it's great depending on the model. As a rubber duck? fantastic. As something that the majority of companies have utilized with vibe coding to build something end to end? no, it's horrible. It can't scale anything, implements exploits left right and center, and unlike junior devs doesn't learn anything. If you don't hold its hand during a build then it'll quickly go off the rails. It'll implement old APIs or libraries or whatever simply because those things have the most documentation attached to it.
An example. a few weeks ago a client wanted to set up a private git instance with Forgejo. They had Claude Code set it up for them. the problem? Claude went with Forgejo 1.20. ForgeJo is currently on 12.0. MASSIVE security hole right there. Why did Claude do that? 1.20 had more documentation as opposed to 12.0. And when I say "documentation" I could simply be referring to blog posts, articles, whatever that talked about it more than the latest version because The LLM's will leverage that stuff when making decisions for builds. You also see it if you want something in Rust+Smithy. Majority of the time the AI will go for a very outdated version of Smithy because that's what a lot of people talked about at one point. So you're generating massive tech debt before even throwing something into production.
Now like I said as a tool? a problem solver for a function you can't figure out? it's great. the issue is like I said companies aren't seeing it as a tool, they're seeing it as a cost saving replacement for a living human being which it is not. It's like replacing construction worker with a hammer attached to a drone and then wondering why your house frame keeps falling over.
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in your case I'd say Fedora with a DE you can customize to your liking. Honestly just go for a KDE Fedora then you don't have to think about it.
I'd also say CachyOS but that might be out of your ballpark. Cachy just works. yes it's Arch based but it's by far the best Arch based distro out there. Monthly, on the dot, updates and works with whatever DE/WM you want to throw at it. Hell during the installation it gives you a bunch of DEs/WMs to install with it and all have been customized to work with CachyOS so you don't even have to think about it.
it's because Youtube is a content monopoly. TikTok is a platform for short content...on youtube it's a feature with shorts. Twitch is a platform for live streaming content...on youtube it's a feature with, other than discoverability, the same features. Any music streaming service? again...it's a feature on youtube. The fact I could export my playlists from any music streaming platform and import it to Youtube and listen to it ad free via an ad blocker? come on. So as opposed to using multiple platforms, with youtube you have it all in one place. So no, this will not get people to stop using it.
Premium you don't need if you're even the slightest bit tech savvy. but no one is ever going to stop using youtube, there's no point. I mean I use peertube as much as possible but every now and then I'm back on youtube because of all those features in one place and some things I just can't find on peertube.
I mean there's no point to it, it doesn't speed anything up.
For example this morning I had a client meeting (saturdays, ugh) so I went to the train station cause it has a mcdonalds and it opens at 630am. They have 5 kiosks there and one person manning the til. People who were ordering from the til were getting their orders faster than people who used the kiosks. I had to wait 10 minutes just to get a coffee and muffin simply because I used the kiosk.
And it doesn't even make sense. I would have assumed all the orders go through the same system regardless of where it was placed but apparently not. apparently people who don't use the kiosk get priority?
meh just do what Amazon does "Hey if you're student you can get Amazon Prime for $5! how old are you?"
me: "I'm 20."
Amazon: "Ok here's your cheap prime!"
/me groans getting out of the chair cause I'm in my 40s
Point being just slap up an unverified age gate and be done with it. Really, truthfully, whose going to actually check? who even cares to check? it's all just a dog and pony show to please the conservative and "think of the children" religious nut jobs who have no idea how any of this shit works anyways. Just spend 2 minutes whipping up a site with a centered div that has a drop down menu asking "how old are you?" less than 18 send it to a "no internet for you page" greater than 18 "go look at porn" page.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what's REALLY happening that they're requiring scanned IDs or faces or what have you. and no company in their right mind is going to fight this as it's free and easy data collection. Bluesky doesn't give a flying fuck as they're just going to end up selling the data they collect.
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oh they will and my year long stint of making a good decent amount of money isn't going to last. And that's fine, I'll be back to being an actual dev again.
I know it's not going to last and since I'm charging a premium for what I'm doing most of it is going right towards retirement.