We’re mandated to use it at my work. For unit tests it can really go wild and it’ll write thousands of lines of tests to cover a single file/class for instance whereas a developer would probably only write a fourth as much. You have to be specific to get any decent output from them like “write a test for this function and use inputs x and y and the expected output is z”

Personally I like writing tests too and I think through what test cases I need based on what the code is supposed to do. Maybe if there are annoying mocks that I need to create I’ll let the AI do that part or something.

One thing I’ll say is that for a lot of distros these days you shouldn’t really need to use the terminal much if ever. That being said don’t be scared of the terminal. It’s just another way to tell the computer what to do. It takes some learning but if you want to learn things with the terminal you might eventually find it easier/faster than using the mouse for some things. Go through some tutorials and you’ll probably find out that the terminal is not that actually all that scary.

Most distros allow you to try them out before you install them. You can run them from a USB stick to let you try a few out before you settle on one. You won’t be able to install any programs this way but you’ll at least be able to get an idea of the interface and see if there are any you like more than others. Even still you can dual boot your PC with Windows + Linux and switch back and forth whenever you need. It’s not an all or nothing ordeal. I still have windows 10 on my machine but I rarely use it now.

Gaming on Linux is better than it’s ever been thanks to Steam coming with proton out of the box. protondb.com is your friend for figuring out what games you can run. That being said there are occasionally some rough edges that I have run into personally. I can run most games I want just fine but occasionally I have some issues. I’m just telling you this so you know it’s not like a flawless experience. Then again I’ve also spent plenty of time trying to get games running on my windows PC in the past too so…

My recommendation for a first Linux OS is Ubuntu because in general it’s the most popular and has the most support.

Best of luck!

Nebula is an option for some content creators but it is subscription based.

My setup got messed up once after a kernel update that went bad and booting from the live USB and running the recovery install fixed everything for me

Only problem was that I had lost the USB, but luckily I still had my Win10 partition I can’t boot into and make a new one.

So it seems the lesson here is you don’t need another computer as long as you keep another partition with a backup OS on a different drive?

Even then sometimes manufacturers will still use Amazon for fulfillment and shipping. I agree though, the shopping experience is pretty awful and I try to avoid it

Yeah it’s like if you had a calculator and 10% of the time it gave you the wrong answer. Would that be a good tool for learning? We should be careful when using these tools and understand their limitations. Gen AI may give you an answer that happens to be correct some of the time (maybe even most of the time!) but they do not have the ability to actually reason. This is why they give back answers that we understand intuitively are incorrect (like putting glue on pizza), but sometimes the mistakes can be less intuitive or subtle which is worse in my opinion.

And it’s also a way for topic focused servers to filter out signups as well. There are general purpose instances with open sign ups that don’t do that.

Yeah if the settings panel had feature parity with control panel but with a better user experience nobody would mind but it’s less features AND a worse experience.

I remember trying to change some mouse settings on windows 10 but they removed the ability to get to the old mouse options from the desktop. I drilled down through the settings app and eventually buried deep I found where it would let me open up that same old mouse settings modal to get to what I wanted to change. More clicks, more searching, and less features = poor user experience

I’m pretty sure you can install Firefox on those too can’t you?

For starters doesn’t it only run apps from the Google play store?

I think it can benefit in certain situations. Like when we traveled to a European country we stayed in an AirBnB that was being rented out while the family who lived there was in summer vacation. So they essentially got to subsidize their vacation with Airbnb.

As far as units that are permanently Airbnb style short term rentals though I agree. Terrible for the actual residents in the city.

Thanks, sounds like it’s probably not worth it.

Yeah that’s what I’m worried about. I just want an open source version of my smart TV that doesn’t have stupid ads on the home screen and trackers and works near flawlessly without all the fuss

I can’t use the Internet on Mobile without an adblocker. The user experience is totally unbearable

I think it was mostly the parental controls we aren’t familiar with on Linux and I think she thinks it would be too “hard” for her.

I don’t agree obviously

Thanks for the advice. Yes I absolutely want her to have the opportunity to learn more technical stuff and be able to explore and play games. Also lan parties for games.

I just want some guard rails because we have issues with managing screentime and things like that.

I appreciate your input, I was also teaching myself to code by the time I was in middle school, but this is a different situation and some guard rails are needed to manage screen time and app usage, etc.

I’m not so much worried about her wrecking the computer and more about her wrecking her brain with unfettered access to the Internet

That sounds like exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for. She’s not great at managing her electronic time yet and she needs some guardrails to make sure she’s not staying up all night watching YouTube videos and things like that.

But I also want to give her the opportunity to learn and explore

It’s buried in the settings, but you are right. Thanks for the tip!

If they could just add album sharing and maybe face/object tagging it would be pretty solid imo

I’m trying it out since I just upgraded to proton unlimited.

It’s pretty barebones. It has automatic uploads but only from the camera folder. It does have the ability to share links, but no folder or album support for sharing. No face tagging or object recognition that Google does