I have always wanted to use linux as my main OS. I tried with Ubuntu twice the past and always ran into really painful hurdles or missing features. This year I tried again with Mint and it absolutely stuck the landing. I have completely switched my desktop and laptop (and plex server) to mint. I have never even booted back into windows. I have not had any big issues and have been able to make it better than my windows desktop ever was.
The x200 was a really neat machine. They run great with linux mint - I have mine running as a home assistant server for our house since my raspberry pi died with flash card corruption.
Browser and PDFs are my only daily GUI usage these days. And I could revert to a text browser if not for a lot of sites having horrendous navigation dom or requiring JavaScript.
I'm so glad linux is well polished enough now that I can finally use it as a daily desktop. Mint 22 is amazing with cinnamon. Switched from win11 about 2 months ago and have not once booted back to windows. first time I actually find my linux desktop experience is as good or better than windows.
I switched myself to Arch about 4 years ago now, with Sway. So fucking amazing. Everything is at my fingertips. Config files are easy to understand. AUR is a massive productivity boost.
As I got more comfortable with Linux, I decided to change things up even at the office. I switched to RHEL on my work PC. Consequently, moved from Matlab to Python. I even got my girlfriend to switch to Linux Mint and Graphene OS. The other day, she said it was joyous to be able to hit the start menu, type "Print" and have "Printer" show up. No drama. She has also discovered a love for the command line, being able to type "pdfunite blah blah" and have her PDFs combined into one etc.
Linux in 2025 is world-class, I have zero regrets.
Mint/Cinnamon has been my favorite for at least 5 years, after an assortment of KDE/Gnome distros. Basically the only argument for me being on Mac now is full Adobe graphics software support. (I dislike their business practices as anybody, but Lightroom CC is genuinely good tech, and gets useful updates at least yearly).
yeah. Lesson learned: never share on HN late at night without paying more attention. I’m sorry guys. It wasn’t my intention at all, I was trying to learn about time syncing and thought they really needed help to keep the site and devs support up. 2 months left and 1k goal looked sad and perfect for us to help. I failed in the title badly and no idea what they are doing by changing the goal. I will dig deeper later. It was 100% my fault. Stop donating. I only hope they are not a scam. :/
I've found it very weird observing how CEOs across many companies behave as if they're part of some hivemind. When to do layoffs, how to implement office policies, and now pushing AI in the same way as if they have no brain of their own. It's very offputting. I can't tell if its collusion or whether maybe capitalism has its own goals that are pursued in lockstep by its creepy agents. I think the end goal is definitely to eliminate workers as much as they possibly can. And they think whoever can do that first will "win".
Having worked with CEOs of a few start-ups, I suspect that many CEOs feel like they belong to a small circle of people "in the know".
Part of it is going through the VC gauntlet, I believe. Let's face it, to get money from VCs, you need to abase yourself, to learn how to lie to them and to yourself, to focus only on the survival of your company and pretending that you're going to make lots of money, regardless of your original goals and ideals. If you're a bit of a techie, you have just entered a world of appearances, where [it feels like] pretending to be successful and knowing something more than others matters more than actually doing something. And being kicked out would mean losing funding, which means everything for which you've twisted yourself into something you were not.
I think that this strongly favors hivemind/mob thinking.
"Programmers" exist on a (not always "the") spectrum. At one extreme, there are frontend developers changing JS/Ruby frameworks every few months. New stuff is fun to play with. At the other, there's there's Tony Hoare's quip that "I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." (https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computing...). In 2025, quite a few of the numerical routines powering LLMs are built on top of BLAS, LAPACK, and other frightening FORTRAN IV code that shouts at you using very short words like SGEMM and DGESV. It's a big tent; get comfortable.
You might find some inspiration in this video of metronomes synchronising and desynchronysing [0]. It doesn't take much to cause things to happen at the same time, in the case the CEOs are likely all responding to the same market signals at the same time for the same reason. Probably interest rates.
What makes you think that it's only CEOs who look like they're part of a hive mind? It's got nothing to do with capitalism or it's "creepy agents". It's simply the human condition. It's literally company/human see company/human do. One company/management loudly kangs whatever their position is and others simply follow it because they think it's either "industry standard" or it's convenient somehow to them. That's all it is - people trying to be safe.
Let me give you a technical parallel. A couple of engineers/architects from Big Co. that's hugely successful leave and go to Hot Startup. There they proselytize their One True Way because honestly that's all they know. Everybody in Hot Startup goes along with it because they are Senior Engineers from Big Co. who are now plotting the course and Big Co. is HUGE so they know what they're talking about. Now because Hot Startup is suddenly using the One True Way everybody else in the market tries to copy them because that's obviously why Hot Startup is Hot. This leads to a job market where people optimize for things used by Hot Startup. This tilts the skill set of the general tech market towards the One True Way making it gospel to a lot of people. So hiring managers who don't know the first about anything suddenly start optimizing for One True techs and ask for 20 years experience with React. They think they're doing the safe thing by using the same tech stack used by everybody else - the industry standard. Never mind that the "industry standard" changes every time it's convenient.
This is the same thing for CEOs. Oh you're having a slightly down quarter and have to answer to investors? Say you're using AI. That's the in-thing and will give you that bump to ride out the quarter. You screwed up in 2021-22 and hired a fuckton of people who are just sitting on their hands costing the company money? Say AI and get rid of them because they're not productive. It's got nothing to do with collusion or anything like that. It's just that people have mismatched expectations and things happen downstream of these unmanaged expectations.
> This tilts the skill set of the general tech market towards the One True Way making it gospel to a lot of people
That lot of people literally cannot get hired anywhere but startups because everyone else isn't so naive
> things happen downstream of these unmanaged expectations
It sounds like a metric fuckton of people need to retire or get out of the way already if they can't set expectations despite being in the exact position where they should be able to talk to multiple audiences
None of these excuses appease the investors nor the heads-down employees. Shit will have to change sooner rather than later. Many factors will make it so. This is exactly what defines a tech bubble.
Sure, plenty of incompetence out there, but nobody wakes up thinking they’re doing wrong. They overpromise, they play it safe. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
As Picard says, "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life"
Hypothesis - your average CEO is a normal person without much more insight than you or I but they don't want to look dumb and so go along with whatever the trend is.
I’m not sure of the forum where they exchange and align on goals and approaches, it probably exists in some forms, but ultimately I think it’s CEO’s not wanting to be too far from the pack.
If you make the wrong call on one important thing and everyone else is right, your company is f_cked.
Firefox mobile was basically the only option I considered for a long time just because it lets you install Ublock origin . Not sure if other mobile browsers have that now too or not. I'm a firefox user on desktop anyway so I love having tab sharing between my phone and all my pcs. They also added a nice feature recently that optionally requires an additional login (fingerprint) to access private tabs. I have found no reason to switch.
I teach CS at a state university, specifically computer security. At the beginning of this semester, I did a poll of my students and asked if they use any form of ad-blocking. Less than a third of my students did, and not many more even knew about browsers other than Chrome or Safari. This was out of a class of ~110.
Granted, it's anecdotal, but if 66% of my upper-division CS students don't even know about Firefox and ad-blocking, than I seriously doubt many non-tech people do.
Similarly, after that lecture, I had a student come to my office hours and ask for more info about ad-blockers. I had them open up msn.com and showed them the large banner ad on the page. It took a few seconds for them to even realize they were being advertised to! I then showed them my browser, nice and ad-free.
I get the impression that people have gotten so used to ads flashing in their face that they gloss over them. But the damage is still done.
Although I didn't collect numbers, but I made a similar experience in my workplace. I assume many people are highly distracted by ads and work efficiency is even reduced. Even many software engineers seem to not be aware of ublock... Would be interesting to know how many students started using an ad blocker at the end of your lecture :)
I did a poll in my CS class last year and half the students knew of it. This is a trade school level CS class so the number struck me as impressive. In another light, it is pretty low.
No, the brain doesn’t Adblock, that’s the misconception. It gets used to ads to a point where it is not registered _consciously_ anymore. But the ad works subconsciously very well, armies of marketing people studied this.
I recently figured I'd try browsing without a dedicated adblocker. Using NextDNS, configured with several adblockers, I thought it would be interesting to see how effective it would be alone.
In approximately no time at all, I wanted to go full Amish. Maybe Office Space.
Ublock should be protected as a religion. It is divinely inspired and a modern miracle. I know about false idols and the antichrist and all that, but I think even Jesus would approve. Gorhill is a Saint.
I have been using Firefox + ad blockers almost exclusively for almost 20 years now on all my devices. I also install Firefox + uBlock Origin for all my family members. I'm constantly suprised when I look at other people's browsers. How can they put up with all those ads, especially on YouTube? (I have uBlock disabled for a certain national newspaper and I'm pretty close to paying for a subscription instead :)
I was curious and obviously there is no single exact source but it seems like ~30% of web users have an ad blocker of some kind. Remember that some quite popular browsers include a built-in ad blocker.
I noticed google cloud console runs extremely slow (practically unusable) on Firefox Android while there're no issues with Chrome. No issues with any other site which I find strange.
Orion by Kagi ships with adblock on iOS in the EU, at least, where Apple is required by law to allow for different browser engines.
Firefox on mobile has had a crippling performance regression on excessive tabs twice in 3 years. I have it installed as a password service, but opening the app kills my iPhone.
Yeah, that's really sad and totally undermines my UX on iOS (my iPad particularly). On my Android phone and macOS FF is my go-to browser, a delightful, irreplaceable experience. Sometimes people are amazed by the experience when I show them, look, no ads. But then they go back to their phones and just use whatever crap they use.
I was hoping that the EU directive [1] would give FF a chance of using their own engine, at least in the EU, but no word from that camp, so... I guess not.
This became a hot discussion issue in magic the gathering online (MTGO). I always felt my shuffles in MTGO felt different somehow than my offline paper shuffles. It's hard to know for sure when its all closed source. I know a lot of people were suspicious though.
Closed source doesn't need to stop you - even if a server was dealing out the cards you can still do a randomness test on them once you gather enough deals, but you would probably need millions of hands of data to do the analysis (see: dieharder tests)
My cornea was too thin for lasik, they offered me ICL but it was like 13k vs 5k. And the surgery seems scarier. And apparently they had complaints about the previous generation ICL causing hightened corneal pressure, so the current one with a hole in the center is pretty new. I kept my contacts.
It’s cataract surgery. Apart from infection practically all the risks are lower than with LASIK. The principal downside is cost. (That said, I haven’t done it yet—I am on daily contacts.)
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