It’s a command that pulls a whole bunch of useful system information and sticks it on one page.
Really, the biggest use of it is for showing other people your system- especially showing off. It’s a staple of “look at my system” brag posts.
But to be generous, there are (small) legit use cases for it. If you manage a lot of machines, and you plausibly don’t know the basic system information for whatever you happen to be working on in this instant, it’s a program that will give you most of what you could want to know in a single command. Yes, 100% of the information could be retrieved just as easily using other standard commands, but having it in a single short command, outputting to a single overview page, formatted to be easily readable at a glance, is no bad thing.
If a machine is going to have multiple users (all my computers have multiple profiles for family members) all those users have to be called something, and I’ve not got the energy or the creativity to come up with fun and funky usernames for every system when my actual name is more than good enough.
Having data means nothing if you can’t monetize it.
As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.
And they’ve been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.
I currently have a Dell laptop that runs Windows for work. I use an external SSD via the Thunderbolt port to boot Linux allowing me to use the laptop as a personal device on a completely separate drive. All I have to do is F12 at boot, then select boot from USB drive....
Simple question: what would your employer say if you asked them?
My contract has a standard “no using company computers for personal business” clause. However I feel entirely confident that my employer doesn’t mind me using it to do personal errands using the web browser (on my own time). And I know they have no problem with me using Zoom or Teams to join meetings for non-work things in the evening. How do I know this? Because I asked them…
I’ve never asked them “can I install a new hard drive in my laptop, install an OS I downloaded off the internet, and boot into that OS to do things which I’d rather you not be able to track like you could on the main OS”. But I’m completely confident I’d know what the answer would be if I did ask.
If you think installing a new SSD etc. is acceptable, ask them. If you’re not asking them because you’re worried they’d say “no”, then don’t do it.
Try asking them instead if you can use your laptop to look up directions to the dentist on Google Maps. See if you get the same answer.
The Budgie desktop team announced today the release and general availability of Budgie 10.9 as the latest version of this modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.
If you need more than “modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions” to figure out what the project is, then you’re probably not the target audience for 9to5Linux.
To be fair, there are (or were) lots of distros downstream of RHEL marketing themselves as drop-in replacements, not just Oracle. And this move isn’t likely to stop Oracle (and the rest), only make the transition experience less smooth for clients (ultimately all the downstream distros can just rebase off of CentOS Stream instead; they lose “bug for bug” compatibility, but will still largely be drop-in replacements).
I also find it hard to muster any sympathy for IBM of all people, even when their opponent is Oracle (who are the lowest of the low).
We can’t immediately convert all cars to EV, we don’t have the grid capacity or enough charging stations, yet.
Well sure, but there’s no suggestion of converting “all cars” to EVs “immediately”. Even if ICE cars were banned for new sales tomorrow, it’d still take a decade and more for the existing rolling stock to gradually be replaced by new vehicles.
A 10 year period for utility companies to gradually upgrade their infrastructure doesn’t sound desperately unrealistic.
I’ve been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it’s baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There’s lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, “is this thing pleasant to use” stakes, they just never manage to get it right.
Windows 7 was…fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.
When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can’t get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.
They started selling them in the UK this year, and I’ve already started to see them on the road. They claim to be on track for around 30,000 sales per year in the country, which would put them at about half of the number of Teslas sold (about 60,000).
Why are people buying them? Well, the same reason people buy any car. They’re sold with a relatively high trim for a relatively affordable price, and they’re reviewing well with the auto press. It’s not like there’s any magic to it. China’s a cheap manufacturing country, and they’re undoubtedly willing to throw profit margins to the wolves to boost market share.
Wine and Rosetta are fundamentally different things. Wine is a reimplementation of Windows APIs on Linux, whereas Rosetta is hardware emulation (famously, Wine Is Not an Emulator).
The equivalent of Rosetta on Linux is QEMU, and specifically qemu-user-static.
The thing about hardware emulation, though, is that it has a non-trivial processor overhead. Apple Silicon gets away with it because it’s a very fast chip which has been designed partly with hardware emulation in mind. Trying to emulate x86 on some generic off-the-shelf mobile ARM chip is not going to give great results.
Neofetch development discontinued, repository archived (github.com)
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/13437386...
Linux continues to be above 4% on the desktop (www.gamingonlinux.com)
A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO (www.theverge.com)
Use work laptop as personal device by dual booting on a separate internal drive?
I currently have a Dell laptop that runs Windows for work. I use an external SSD via the Thunderbolt port to boot Linux allowing me to use the laptop as a personal device on a completely separate drive. All I have to do is F12 at boot, then select boot from USB drive....
Budgie 10.9 Desktop Adds Initial Wayland Support, Redesigned Bluetooth Applet - 9to5Linux (9to5linux.com)
4 reasons to try Mozilla’s new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives | The Mozilla Blog (blog.mozilla.org)
What’s next for Mozilla? (techcrunch.com)
one passage of note:...
The march towards an all-EV future hit a major roadblock. What went wrong? (www.businessinsider.com)
Based KDE 🗿 (lemmy.ml)
Chinese automaker BYD goes after Tesla’s throne with more than 300,000 electric cars sold in a month (english.elpais.com)
SteamOS will be coming to other handhelds before you can install it on your PC 'because right now, it's very, very tuned for Steam Deck' (www.pcgamer.com)