At that point, you’re just paying for training Microsoft’s AI.

If smart people thought like this, we won’t have cryptography.

I’d say that mpv also has a place near VLC when it comes to playing everything.

I mostly use mpv to play local music nowadays. (Most of the music I play is streamed using a Navidrome server with Feishin as the frontend.) Back when I did use a proper audio player on Linux, Harmonoid was my go-to.

Right in front of me is a guy editing a >10 page LaTeX file in Overleaf on a 13 inch laptop. The sidebar takes like 1/3rd of the screen. The editor in around 3 inches in width, and he needs to zoom into the PDF preview to read it.

My point in, some people simply don’t care about anything.

I prefer Office 365 online.

I do use Ventoy, but a more “traditional” alternative that I like is Popsicle. Super lightweight, and works very well. Some cases do require a dedicated USB, where Ventoy won’t work, at least not without trickery (e.g. anything with persistent storage).

I’ve been using Gallery for PhotoPrism for a while now and it’s pretty solid.

It’s a choice. We know that it’s riskier to use stuff from AUR. Which is why it’s highly recommended to read the PKGBUILD before installing the package. The basic Arch install doesn’t even include an AUR helper. That said, AUR is typically very reliable for packages with a decent userbase. It’s mostly due to the community aspect. Bad actors are caught relatively easily as the PKGBUILD is available to look at.

I dislike both. But since Google Docs is free, it’s easier to use everywhere and with all kinds of groups.

No, it’s powered by Tensorflow, not an LLM. It’s the useful side of AI, basically, also it’s locally hosted. In case you don’t like it, you can disable it. It’s still a great app.

I’ve been using exclusively Linux since high school, and now I’m doing a PhD in math. It’s always been pretty smooth. I used to have a separate Windows rig for gaming, but don’t really need it anymore, now that Proton works very well with most games. (I don’t really play AAA games, so that helps.)

Coming to the point, for academic stuff, I mostly needed to use a PDF reader (Zathura and qPdfView), LaTeX, and some computation and graphing software (mostly SageMath). I sometimes needed to use DOCX files, but LibreOffice works well for that. Most other software I need from time to time are usually Linux native.

Also, many universities provide access to O365. I’ve used it in some rare cases where I needed to provide input in some collaborative document. But in most cases, I was able to convince my friends/colleagues to use Google Docs instead.

Unless you do CAD, or some creative work, Linux should be perfect for your usecase.

There’s also PhotoPrism.

Individual philanthropy is never a solution. Most of the breakthroughs happen by public funding. Tax the rich, and fund the research. Don’t let the MFs claim they’re helping anyone out by donating 1% of their stolen wealth.

Lol. Hope you found something else to enjoy with the tea.

Take a look at this.

Nicco Loves Linux made a pretty interesting video on him a month-ish ago. You might enjoy it if you’ve known Lunduke since when he was still nice.

Edit: Link to the video

I understand not liking the vim way of doing things (which seems not to be the case for you), but I’ve never heard anyone describe neovim as buggy. Not throwing shade, genuinely curious. What bugs did you encounter, and when was it?

Edit: I missed that you posted a link there. Interesting.

Yeah, I don’t get it.

Very good write up overall. I’ll start by admitting that I didn’t read all of it. But from the parts that I did read, I have some small comments. I think that Debian Stable is a great beginner distro, since it’s essentially unbreakable. With something like KDE Plasma as a DE, it’s perfect for noobs. EndeavourOS is another great one. Maybe not for beginners, but for semi-advanced usecases.

Also, I’m not sure about suggesting the Atomic family of dostros to newcomers. It might be my relative unfamiliarity with them, but I don’t think immutable distro are a good place to start. They’re definitely great to try when you’re familiar with Linux, but they’re still kind of fringe. It’s hard to get support using those.