Now I want to see the plug.

That’s generally the thing with decisions that don’t matter much. If one option is much better, there is no discussion.

But if the benefits of either option are marginal at best, you get tons of discussion and no decision.

For example, the EU decided almost a decade ago that they would get rid of daylight saving time, and everyone quickly agreed that DST sucks, mostly because changing the clocks sucks.

Since then, the whole EU has been arguing about whether to keep summer time or winter time, even though that matters so little that we have been using both of them for decades. A week after switching DST, nobody even notices the time shift.

That’s why at work if a discussion goes on for too long I usually point out that that’s the case because all options are almost equally as good and thus we should just pick a random one instead of continuing to waste time discussing in circles.

On the one hand, tree shaking is often not used, even in large corporate projects.

On the other hand, tree shaking is much less effective than what a good compiler does. Tree shaking only works on a per-module basis, while compilers can optimize down to a code-line basis. Unused functions are not included, and not even variables that can be optimized out are included.

But the biggest issue (and one that tree shaking can also not really help against) is that due to the weak standard library of JS a ton of very simple things are implemented in lots of different ways. It’s not uncommon for a decently sized project (including all of the dependencies) to contain a dozen or so implementations of a padding function or some other small helper functions.

And since all of them are used somewhere in the dependency tree, none of them can be optimized out.

That’s not really a problem of the runtime or the language itself, but since the language and its environment are quite tightly coupled, it is a big problem when developing on JS.

I’m not too optimistic on that one. Bloated software has been an issue for the last 20 or so years at least.

At the same time upgrade cycles have become much slower. In the 90s you’d upgrade your PC every two years and each upgrade would bring whole entire use cases that just weren’t possible before. Similar story with smartphones until the mid-2010s.

Nowadays people use their PCs for upwards of 10 years and their smartphones until they drop them and crack the screen.

Devices have so much performance nowadays that you can really just run some electron apps and not worry about it. It might lag a little at times, but nobody buys a new device just because the loyalty app of your local supermarket is laggy.

I don’t like Electron either, but tbh, most apps running on Electon are so light-weight that it doesn’t matter much that they waste 10x the performance. If your device can handle a browser with 100 tabs, there’s no issue running an Electron app either.

Lastly, most Electron/Webview apps aren’t really a matter of choice. If your company uses Teams you will use teams, no matter how shit it runs on your device. If you need to use your public transport, you will use their app, no matter if it’s Electron or not. Same with your bank, your mobile phone carrier or any other service.

What’s your point? “Don’t use Linux unless you are a professional user”?

Beginners have to begin somewhere and they need to get info from somewhere.

A lot of Linux UX is still at the level where it doesn’t give enough relevant information to a non-technical user in a way that the user can actually make an informed decision. That is the core problem.

Whether users get their wrong information from AI, Stackoverflow, random tutorials, Google, a friend or somewhere else hardly matters.

Take for example a look at the setup process of a Synology NAS. A 10yo can successfully navigate that process, because it’s so well done. We need more of that, especially for FOSS stuff.

Too much of Linux is built by engineers for engineers.

I totally agree with the rant, and a big issue is that the Linux community specifically consists to a large part of technicians and not users who then go full *surprised pikachu face* when they see a user who is not a technician.

But seriosly, how would a (to quote OP) “total beginner” know that AI is not a good place to look for help?

And, tbh, it sometimes does actually help. AI lies more often than it doesn’t, but it at least tries to help, which is more than I can say of most members of the Linux community.

I had an issue on Fedora 42 where the performance of my games would randomly be abysmal. One day I can play current AAA titles without issue on my Nvidia 4070, the next day I have to measure performance in “Seconds per Frame” even on 15yo indie titles. This issue only affects game started from Heroic, all other things I try including all debugging stuff works fine.

I’m not a new Linux user. I’m a developer and I’ve been using Linux for about 20 years. So I get to debugging, googling, reading bug reports, all that, and can’t find anything. I ask on StackExchange, Lemmy, even Reddit, no result. Most people are like “Works on my machine, noob”, and a handful people are like "I have the same issue and no solution.

So after a year or so I swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT. The first answer is correct: Heroic (and thus all proton/wine games it spawns) runs in Flatpak. Flatpak has its own version of the Nvidia drivers, and if that version doesn’t exactly match the OS driver version it falls back to software rendering. So if I do dnf update and it updates the Nvidia drivers this breaks my performance until I do flatpak update. I often ran flatpak update before dnf update and thus my performance sucked.

Yes, the majority of the answers I get from AI are lies. But without AI I would still not be able to game on my system.

AI is a tool, and for beginners its a tricky tool, because sometimes it works perfectly, but sometimes it totally messes everything up. The same holds true for pretty much any other source of information made for beginners. Before “Don’t paste AI commands into CLI” we had “Don’t paste stuff from Stackoverflow into CLI” and before that it was “Don’t paste stuff you found on Google into CLI”.

Kinda as evidenced by a lot of the other responses. Thanks for the affirmation!

Add to the list: doing native development most often means doing it twice. Native apps are better in pretty much every metric, but rarely are they so much better that management decides it’s worth doing the same work multiple times.

If you do native, you usually need a web version, Android, iOS, and if you are lucky you can develop Windows/Linux/Mac only once and only have to take the variation between them into account.

Do the same in Electon and a single reactive web version works for everything. It’s hard to justify multiple app development teams if a single one suffices too.

The only evidence that OP irreparably nuked their hardware is ChatGPTs word.

The bigger issue ad hand is that everyone here is a noob when it comes to exotic hardware like SAS, and still everyone here thinks they are 1337 haxors enough to tell OP that they are a noob idiot.

Tbh, if OP asks for help here and there’s 49 comments of people being dicks and one that actually helps it might be worthwhile. But as it stands it’s 50 to 0, with nobody here beeing educated enough to know anything about the subject.

Did it occur to you that OP might be a total beginner who doesn’t know about the conventions on how to report issues and how to format posts?

I had a problem with Fedora 42, where the performance of my games would be fine one day and abysmal another day. Couldn’t find a pattern. I googled a ton, tried to debug myself, asked on reddit, stackexchange, the fedora forum and lemmy. I only got answers like “Works fine on my machine, noob” and “I have that problem too”. It only affected games running in proton on heroic, everything else was fine.

After about a year of on-and-off debugging and asking around, I swallowed my pride and asked ChatGPT.

First answer from that thing was correct: I had run dnf update without doing a flatpak update right afterwards. Turns out, flatpak has its own copy of Nvidia drivers and if the system driver is updated without the flatpak copy being updated, it falls back to software rendering. So the performance was crap until I did flatpak update the next time, and broke again when I ran dnf update.

I still haven’t found that in any documentation so far.

AI is crap more often than not, but it does at least try to help and sometimes it actually does.

Look in this thread here. Is there even a single answer that tries to help OP, or is every single answer here just dumb snark?

Can you blame them?

The manuals are written by experts for experts and in most cases entirely useless for complete beginners who likely won’t be able to even find the right manual page (or even the right manual to begin with).

Tutoral pages are overwhelmingly AI vomit too, but AI vomit from last year’s AI, so even worse than asking AI right now.

Asking for help online just gets you a “lol, RTFM, noob!”

Look at this thread right now and count how many snarky bullshit answers are there that don’t even try to answer the question, how many answers like “I got no idea” are there and then how many actually helpful answers are here.

Can you really blame anyone who turns to AI, because that garbage at least sounds like it tries to help you?

No, that’s not the point of a platform like Lemmy, because you can do exactly that on a platform like Reddit too.

And stylizing fragmentation as something desireable is a pretty bad take.

In general, I really don’t like that style of argument. It’s like “No, you are not allowed to bring up negative points that can be improved, because you can instead just DIY the whole thing.”

Would you say the same when someone complains about an issue they have with their car? “If you don’t like your car’s entertainment system, you know, you could just build a car from scratch.”

It’s a stupid argument used by people who can’t stomach the concept that the tech thing they base their identity on isn’t seen as absolutely perfect by everyone.

Add to that that some major instances have disabled downvoting, which actively disables people’s ability to filter stuff like that by voting.

I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy to shame people for collecting a Harry Potter game for free, while happily shopping for a Microsoft laptop on Amazon that you use to watch youtube, facebook and read reddit.

When you know which xkcd it is before you click it…

I think it fits because it isn’t an actual question meant to be answered.

Rowling funds petitions to the government. Trump is the government.

Don’t lose sight of the bigger evil.

Do you think Trump is better for Trans rights than Rowling? I don’t think so.

Yes, Rowling spends money petitioning the government and courts, but Trump is the government and controls the courts.

Don’t lose sight of the bigger enemy just because a smaller enemy is a woman.

People also still use Meta products, Apple products, Amazon and their products, and so on, even though all of these companies directly support the budding fascist empire in the USA.

Likely, you too buy/use products by a corporation that supports the pumpkin dictator, and that has much more real-world effect (on trans people and on all other minorities too) than the ramblings of a mad old TERF.

At least Rowling isn’t directly stoking the genocide in Gaza or rounding up and deporting people to prison camps in other countries.

(I’m not defending Rowling. I’m just saying at a certain point most people, likely including you, value the convenience of next-day-shipping over the life of some people we don’t know.)