Raspberry Pis are also ARM-based, and you can use them as desktops. Only problems are that they aren’t very powerful for media usage (e.g. video editing, 4k video decoding on youtube, blender etc). If you’re not into such high performance media production, then sure, they’re fine for everyday usage.

You can always provide them with enough standardized APIs that don’t break, to make them useful. The situation that’s right now is unacceptable.

That’s more acceptable than to have them break every 6 months.

No, there is a third option: you freeze the API for the extensions. That way, nothing breaks. And if an app uses private APIs (or public APIs that are not meant for extensions’ use), then and only then you treat it as unsupported.

And yes, the constant breaking is a big, big problem. I use 6 extensions to make the desktop the way I want it to. In every release, I get at least 4 of them breaking for several weeks each time. The last time, the dock extension I used broke with the new Gnome version, but when it got disabled, the “favorite” icons on its dock did not reflect on the Gnome’s default dockbar. All that stuff, are unacceptable for a proper usage in 2024, especially for people coming from Windows that expect stability (no matter what people say, Windows IS stable). I use Linux since 1999, but it’s that kind of stuff that i can’t stand. I want stability. The days when I was hacking on Gentoo in 2003, are long gone. I’m now in my 50s and i don’t have time for that shit.

So, yeah, the third option.

I use Gnome, and I’m not a hater, but if you’re expecting some harsh criticism for it, here it is: Extensions breaking so easily should not happen. It’s an extreme pain in the butt every 6 months. They should establish an allowed API that’s frozen, while extensions that use private api calls, don’t get posted on the gnome website/extensions app, so they’re harder to find. Simple.

The ads have become too long. Some of them are 40 seconds long, for a 3 minute video. That’s unacceptable. I have thought about it, and I think the best would have been a single 8 second ad, unskippable. But never more than that. That, I could take. But multiple ads (even if they’re just 5 secs each but you have to be vigilant to press “skip”), or long ads, or interrupting ads, are just too much to accept.

With 32MB of RAM you can’t go far. The Linux kernel barely runs on it, and that’s just the kernel. NetBSD also has a minimum requirement of 32GB of RAM. One other thing you can do is try to run BeOS (not Haiku, but BeOS). It could run on 32MB of RAM (it still preferred 64 MB, but it could run on 32 too).

If you’re trying a less “smart” phone experience, just buy a dumb phone. They still exist. Phones are needed for emergencies.

Did. you not read what I wrote? I used it as a media center and it was swapping like hell. That’s what Emby and Jellyfin are. Media servers.

3 years ago XFCe needed on Debian about 450 MB of RAM (on a clean boot). It now needs 850. And that’s not so much XFce’s fault, it’s all the other stuff underneath that have been growing too much too.

I mean, heck, Cosmic should not need more than 500 MB of RAM overall, having such a clean codebase. And yet it’s the heaviest of them all, at 2.5 GB (even Gnome/KDE boots at 1.3 GB on Debian). And it’s not a matter of optimization because it’s an alpha. That’s a cheap explanation. It’s just heavy. Just as much as Windows in terms of ram usage.

Not enough RAM to be honest (at least not to be useful in the near future). I ran an Emby/Jellyfin server with 180 GB of music (nothing else was running, not even the UI), and it ran out of RAM, and was swapping like crazy at 1 GB of RAM on my Rpi3. In this day and age, you need 2 GB of RAM for servers, but that won’t be enough within a couple of years (and that’s why I don’t suggest this new model with 2 GB of RAM). I personally would only get a new Raspberry Pi if it comes with 16 GB of RAM, so I can run a UI properly. You just can’t ever have enough RAM these days. Linux is using less RAM than Win11, but not by much these days. It’s growing too fast in requirements in the last 3-4 years.

If society benefits from the democratization of art/books/etc then it’s not a loss, it’s a win for everyone. There were many jobs in the past that were lost because technology made them obsolete. Being a commissioned artist is one of these professions. However, there IS still going to be a SMALL niche for human-made original artworks (not made on ipads). But that’d be a niche. And no one stopping anyone from doing art, be it a profession or not. That’s the beauty of art. If you were to be a plumber, and robots took your job, you’d have trouble to do it as a hobby, since it would require a lot of sinks and pipes to play around, and no one would care. But with art, you can do it on the cheap, and people STILL like your stuff, EVEN if they won’t buy it anymore.

Nobody stops you to be an artist. You can still have a job that is still alive today, AND be an artist in your own free time. As I mentioned, I was a very successful collage artist (NYTimes pick for best book cover, lots of commissions, lots of print sales etc). I decided to leave the surrealness of collage behind because I enjoyed children’s illustrations more. Guess what, I don’t make a dime with my illustrations. I’ve spent $15k on art supplies in 5 years and I made $1k back. But that doesn’t stop me from painting nearly EVERY DAY. I share my work online, and whoever likes it, likes it. I don’t expect sales anymore. Be it because it’s not a popular look, or because of AI. It doesn’t matter to me, I still paint daily.

Not an issue either, my copied works were fully copyrighted. I wanted them to be cc-by, but I never really relicenced them, too much work for 1500 works.

I used to be a very popular and successful collage artist (I’m now an illustrator, I like painting more), and my work has been copied by AI. However, I don’t really care. In fact, I was musing once the idea of licensing everything under the CC-BY license. I don’t mind if AI copies my stuff, because if eventually this democratizes art (as it has already), all the better. Yes, these AI belong to corporations, but if they’re easy to access, or free to use, all the better. I want people to extend what I did, and remix it. I don’t want to be remembered as me, as a singular artist, that somehow I emerged from the void. Because I didn’t. EVERY artist is built on top of their predecessors, and all art is a remix. That’s the truth that other artists don’t wanna hear because it’s all about their ego.

Also, healthcare is free (in the public hospitals, they also have dentists in there), and education is free.

Yes, of course. There’s even a treaty to not be double-taxed.

A lot. The UI blows. Which is why there is a commercial version of freecad that fixes exactly that. If there wasn’t an issue with the UI, they wouldn’t have a case for a commercial product. But they do, and they do rather well. There’s even a youtube video about the two apps, by a professional cad person who tries many new cad apps. When he eventually made a video on freecad, he couldn’t believe that people used it in that condition. In the comments, he was directed on Ondsel, and he tried it a few weeks later. He found it way more usable, even if it’s just freecad underneath. And I agree with his assessment.

You can always move to a town in Greece, in the mainland (something smaller than 5k people), close to the beach. You can live amply with 20k euros per year (about $22k) for you and your spouse. Buying a house is about $100k to $150k, taxes are rather low for most professions, and you can have your own vegetable garden, trees, and chickens. Fresh fish, goat meat (best kind of meat for humans). Car repairs and other repairs are much cheaper than in the US (my husband was expecting a $2500 bill to replace the car engine’s chain, and it was just $600).

If you’re in your 30s right now, and you’re going to live until you’re 100, that’s “only” 1.4 million euros. If you get a couple of kids, that’s 1.8 to 2 mil euros. Definitely not 20 million though.

For PDFEditor, the best option is OnlyOffice, not libreoffice. You can download an appimage on their website to test that out.

Also, for CAD, consider giving QCAD a go (if it’s 2D cad/cam you’re after). If it’s 3D cad, consider the free version of OndSel, a more sane version of Freecad.