As stable as that dime is, it’s utterly useless for all practical purposes.

What Google is talking about it making a stable qbit - the basic unit of a quantum computer. It’s extremely difficult to make a qbit stable - and as it underpins how a quantum computer would work instability introduces noise and errors into the calculations a quantum computer would make.

Stabilising a qbit in the way Google’s researchers have done shows that in principle if you scale up a quantum computer it will get more stable and accurate. It’s been a major aim in the development of quantum computing for some time.

Current quantum computers are small and error prone. The researchers have added another stepping stone on the way to useful quantum computers in the real world.

While this is true, if your pc is secure and you don’t install crap then this is not going to be a major issue for the vast majority of people. Both desktops have their own security flaws but always the number one flaw is the user.

Keep systems up to date, do not side load software from outside well managed official package systems, use strong passwords, use encryption etc. This counts for far more than the various security flaws and fixes that constantly come and go with any system. If you don’t give bad actors a route into your system to exploit flaws then you are generally OK.

Like the screen copy flaw would need someone installing software that would exploit that - possible but unlikely in a well managed environment with a good robust distro.

And it’s worth saying that generally Linux remains less targeted than Windows and Mac for malware. That does not mean people should then be lax in their behaviour but it’s a better starting point for being secure if you look after your Linux install properly.

You can install both but it can get a but messy in menus with 2 settings apps and 2 versions of lots basic apps all over the place. It can be cleaned up but it can be a bit frustrating to do.

You may be better trying them both out with live images on USB sticks or a virtual environment like virtualbox. Both are relatively easy to set up without making any major change to your current pc.

I use KDE. It’s very powerful and flexible. While it can be windows like, you an also craft pretty much any GUI you like with it with relative ease. It can be Mac like or something unique, or even Gnome like if you really want that.

It’s also intuitive and user friendly, with well made apps and a comprehensive settings menu.

I’ve found KDE to be reliable and stable, as well as attractive and customisable.

There are a lot of apps made for it - the only downside is software bloat if you install all of them. I’d start with the basics KDE desktop and add apps one by one rather than install the whole KDE app suite. Although the apps are usually excellent lots of the apps may not be useful to you personally . For example I don’t like installing the PIM suite (email, contacts etc) as I don’t use it - all that is online for me so I don’t need the native apps.

I’m personally not a fan of Gnome. It’s got a single rigid GUI philosophy which you can now expand with extensions but I find they can be hit and miss on whether they work or are stable, and time consuming to set up how you want.

So for gnome you either like it as is or you don’t, and if you dont like it then honestly I’d say don’t bother trying to make it be what you want - just use something more flexible.

But regardless of what desktop you use, Apps will work on either or any of the others available.

The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.

Now generative AI has come along to dilute knowledge in a great sea of excrement. Humans have to hunt through the shit to find knowledge.

If it doesn’t say the year it means Nov 10 this year. The page you linked shows last release was 2 weeks ago for me.

This is such a bizarre story. First as others pointed out 1 in 125 is 0.8% not 0.008%. They presumably forgot the 100 but in percent conversions. It’s presumably 0.8% as if it’s 0.008% then they’re saying 9billion devices were sold on the last quarter. At 0.8% it’s 90million laptop devices. They later say 20% of all laptop sales were AI laptops at 13.3 million which would be 66.5 million laptops overall, not 90milljon. 720,000 would actually 1.1% of all laptops and 5.4% of the AI subcategory.

So whoever wrote the article doesn’t seem to know how to do basic maths? They also don’t make clear how they arrived at their figures with these contradictory figures elsewhere in their own article.

But the main thing is this whole story is some bizarre idea that a new device getting nearly 1% of global sales in its first quarter is doing badly?

To me that’s actually good? But maybe the manufacturer had some crazy expectations? Or maybe the writers think that all products should behave like incumbents?

This reads like shitty journalism - trying to make big claims to get clicks. I have no idea if the product is doing well or not versus expectations, but I don’t trust this articles take on it.

I’m personally skeptical about the “AI” bullshit in these products, but I do think the power efficiency of ARM chips may give these Snapdragon X a chance to take market share from traditional chips.

For electricity generation: Solar across the UK was about 5% in last year, while Wind was about 29% and Nuclear 13.9%, and hydro 1.3% - so 49.2% of electricity generation over the last 12 months was carbon neutral.

That’s a huge success story - still a long way to go, particularly as that does not include Gas burned in homes, but the UK is moving in the right direction. And Scotland is a huge source of Wind & Hydro power for the whole country.

So even if the barriers to solar in your home are still high, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner every year. There are also community projects installing wind generators which you can join/invest in if you do want to try and get a slice of cleaner energy and solar is not realistic.

Edit: Source on UK electricity generation: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical Good data on UK electricity generation

As people have said, you can add Jellyfin as a service to start with windows regardless of users being logged in.

No one seems to have said how to do this.

The easiest way is to use the NSSM open source tool - it stands for “Non Sucking Service Manager” and it gives a GUI route to create services, as well as some useful reliability and fall back functions.

It can also be used from the command line if you prefer but regardless it’s probably the easiest way without faffing around with powershell or command line and in built windows tools (which do suck).

Edit. The official website is NSSM.cc and it includes guidance on how to use it. There are also plenty of guides online if you search “how to create a windows service”.

Edit2: the easiest way is to use the Jellyfin windows installer itself but the documentation is pretty vague on that and gives a warning about ffmpeg config. It should work but using NSSM will give you more direct control. I think the installer uses NSSM anyway.

Yeah I get what you’re saying. I would put some caution for Fedora Kinoite - if you want a system that just works and you don’t want to tinker, then it’s great. It just works, and it updates in a very sane and stable why. But if you want to learn Linux and tinker, then it can be very frustrating working with an Atomic distro at the start.

So if I was putting Linux on my parents laptop and didn’t want to be dealing with too much tech-support, I’d probably go for an atomic distro. But if the user wants to learn how to use linux, play with it, tinker then I think an atomic desktop is too restrictive to start out on.

While Mint with Cinnamon isn’t the most cutting edge feel to it, there is a huge wealth of resources out there for people to tinker and play with the system and it’s a great spring board in to other parts of the Linux world. I do love KDE Plasma though - it’s my favourite DE and I used to run it on Mint before I finally moved to a KDE based distro.

I’d recommend Linux Mint generally for noobs. It’s popular and has lots of tips and advice available online, easy to find. It’s easy to install, and as it’s an Ubuntu derivative you get a lot of the benefits of the big user base without the downsides of Canonical (such as Snap being forced on you). I used to use Mint, and it’s a good stable daily driver.

In terms of your specs, you should have no problem with running it as laptop, but as a 2-in-1 device you may find some specialised drivers don’t work out of the box. The most common is finger print readers, but also some of the switching between Desktop and Tablet mode can be tricky. Having said that, I own a Toshiba Satellite 2-in-1, and I installed Linux without issue. I don’t and never have really used it as an actual Tablet though; it ended up being a gimmick too far for me - they’re just too heavy and cumbersome as a tablet, and even the touch screen (which works fine in linux) is just a bit pointless for me. However I have KDE on my Toshiba now and it works well as a 2-in-1 for me at least.

The best thing to do is flash a USB stick with Linux, for example Mint, and try it out to see how it works with your hardware “out of the box”. Linux Mint has a few spins for desktop environments: Cinnamon, XFCE and Mate. None of them are really designed to be Touch based interfaces to be honest. Cinnamon is the main/high end DE and it is ok with Touch interface.

I would say KDE and Gnome are better DEs for touch screen and convertible devices; I personally prefer KDE but both support Touch well - they just have different design ethos. Both can be installed in Mint, although as they’re not “main” DEs for the distro you sometimes get some minor janky integration of the Mint tools in the KDE or Gnome desktop (e.g. sometimes the task tray icons for Cinnamon based tools just aren’t as well integrated into the system themes of KDE & Gnome). You also can end up with duplicate apps in your app menus (cinnamon tools sitting alongside native KDE/Gnome tools which can be a little irritating). But the system works fine and a lot of these things can be tidied up if it bothers you.

But Mint is very Noob friendly, and I think it’s a good way to get into the Linux world. Pretty much everything can be done via the GUI, and it has opted for a default Windows-like feel which can really help with getting used to it. Cinnamon is also still pretty flexible for creating some other interfaces to experiment. Gnome is far removed from that windows feel and is also pretty rigid in it’s design philosophy - it’s kinda “take it or leave it”; personally I don’t like it. You can push it do other things though with extensions, so there is still potential to experiment. KDE does a good job of a default Windows feel but with more design flair/slicker feel, but it also has a huge range of options for making pretty much any interface you like. One reason I left Mint is because I wanted a distro which is built around KDE rather than me installing it separately (I’m on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed now).

So overall, I’d recommend Mint, and use the Cinnamon version. Flash a USB and try it out (note it will be slower/feel sluggish compared to a native install, but should give a feel for how it handles your hardware). If you install it, I’d also recommend a dual-boot setup rather than ditching Windows completely if you’re completely new to Linux. Another option is install on a portable SSD attached via USB, and don’t touch your actual hard drive. That way you can get a reasonable feel of an actual Linux system without messing up your laptop. It’ll still be slower than a true native install but generally faster than a live-USB stick (you can of course also partition and install a full install on a USB stick itself rather than an SSD for the same effect).

EDIT: Just worth saying; if you decide to install Linux, be very careful where you install it. Double and triple check, as the last thing you want to do is accidentally wipe your windows install!

OpenSuSE Tumbleweed is my current favourite. It’s user friendly with good system tools in Yast, it’s got good repos including community repos with lots of software.

Its also a rolling release but has been stable and reliable for me. Leap is their point release version if rolling is not right for you.

I’ve been using Tumbleweed for over a year, and it’s my main OS since I stopped using windows. I’ve dual booted Linux for many years but always mained windows up until Tumbleweed.

Previously I used to use Mint; it’s decent but switching to Tumbleweed (and in particular KDE) convinced me to completely switch from Windows. Everything “just works”, and I do a fair bit of gaming without issue with nvidia drivers, steam, and lutris.

For example I’ve been playing Stardew, Cyberpunk 2077, Distant Worlds 2, and Factorio recently - all in Linux and all without issue.

AI is a marketing term at the moment, and it’s all orne big financial speculative bubble. Just look at Nvidia and how it’s share price is so divorced from reality.

LLMs can bd uaeful tools and have value in themselves. The problem is the hype and misuse of the term AI to promise the earth. Also the big tech companies rushing to push tools that are not yet fit for purpose.

Any tool which “hallucinates” - I.e. Is error strewn and lies - is fit for nothing. It’s just a curio and these general tools are going AI and LLMs a bad reputation. But well designed and trained LLMs targeted at specific tasks are useful.

“Time to switch to uBlock Lite or another ad blocker”

No. Time to switch to Firefox or derivative such as Librewolf.

This is not open source? There is no license just a statement saying free to use for personal and commercial projects, but don’t redistribute or resell.

This freeware at best but if you contribute to this project it’s not clear who owns the work.

The metaverse a resounding failure, Facebook has latched on to the AI hype train in hopes of making the company relevant. They’re basically put of ideas on how to feed the beast of “forever growth” the markets demand.

I don’t have specific experience with the tools you list, however on googling it looks like Ableton Live does work under wine. Wine is what underpins playing windows games on Linux too; it’s very powerful and effective.

You can install Mint into a VM environment on your current PC (such as Virtual Box) and see how you get on with software you really can’t live without. It won’t run as fast as real life in a VM but you should get an idea whether any tools you can’t live without can work.

As for OneDrive there are unofficial clients to get it working with Linux if you want to sync to your local filesystem. However Microsoft doesn’t officially support it beyond Web browsers, so if you want something slick and supported you probably would be better migrating to other solutions. You’d certainly be able to migrate with the unofficial clients but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on them long term as things xna break if Microsoft unilaterally changes something.

There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?

Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don’t need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don’t need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.

However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).

Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?

Quick FYI - Exa is no longer fully maintained; there is a fork called Eza which is maintained. They couldn’t take over the original Exa repo as the original creator is unreachable. Eza is in many distros; I’ve installed it on OpenSuSe Tumbleweed with ease from the factory-oss.

https://github.com/eza-community/eza

For the Flatpak apt upgrade how about “flapt”.