This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
LLMs have a high coolness-to-code ratio; very cool and not a lot of code. This is the type of thing open source developers are more interested in, so I hope Linux will have some good AI built-in and running locally.
Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.
Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.
You are going to allow an LLM to run commands on your system?
You could have a command that recommends commands and then you select them on a drop-down list.
Alternatively if the dataset is verified you wouldn't need to worry about it running dangerous commands, since it doesn't know any. Or you could have a list of verified commands that run automatically and any command not on that list requires confirmation.
But this is missing the point that most of the time I know exactly what command I want to run so adding a LLM Is quite useless. The reason so much of linux is still relying on commands is because for a lot of people (myself included) commands are quick and efficient.
You could have a command that recommends commands and then you select them on a drop-down list.
Still dangerous. One character (even a space) might make a huge difference. You wouldn't want a hallucinating probability matrix barf out a command and run it only half understanding what it does. By building it yourself, you get a better understanding.
But this is missing the point that most of the time I know exactly what command I want to run so adding a LLM Is quite useless. The reason so much of linux is still relying on commands is because for a lot of people (myself included) commands are quick and efficient.
100% agreed here.
Maybe.
Like, if I could type "extract the audio of this video and re-encode it as a medium quality MP3, break up the audio into 30 consecutive tracks" in a shell, and the next line was populated with the appropriate ffmpeg command, but not yet executed, I could quickly look over the command, nothing looks fishy, so I go ahead and run the command.
And it will be optimized for nothing looking fishy, right.
What would an ai achieve? The only thing I can think of is a documentation summariser, but that can already be made with current applications independent of linux
“The year of Linux on the Desktop” is in the article. This again? Been reading this for decades and it’s still not true.
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
every year is the year of linux for linux users. not so much for other people
Linux is close, but has some core flaws that will forever keep it out of mainstream acceptance by your average user.
It has nothing to do with any flaws within Linux itself. The problem is and has always been that it's nearly impossible to buy a PC with any flavour of Linux pre-installed. Until that changes, Linux (on home user desktops) will never gain mainstream acceptance.
Didn't HP sell some fancy shmancy laptops that came with Ubuntu or some flavor of it? Think it was for developers but I thought that was the closest we gotten to commercially selling Linux based machines.
P.S. I could be wrong about this but I am sure this happened.
HP sold he DevOne, it had PopOS on it. Dell sells an XPS developer machine that has Ubuntu pre installed. System76, Entroware, and Tuxedo computers have all been selling Linux hardware for a long time. So there are viable commercial options. I wish the DevOne were going to get refreshed, it looks like a nice machine but alas, I don't think it will.
Maybe we should have like a yearly event for this. Like a holiday. International Linux Year Day.
Ehh, I have a different vision here - AI is useful, it's just going down the hypermonetisation path at the moment. It's not great because your data is being scraped and used to fuel paywalled content - that is largely why most folks object.
It's, also, badly implemented, and is draining a lot of system resource when plugged into an OS for little more than a showy web search.
Eventually, after a suitable lag, we'll see Linux AI as the AI we always wanted. A local, reasonable resource intense, option.
The real game changer will be a shift towards custom hardware for AIs (they're just huge probability models with a lot of repetitive similar calculations). At the moment, we use GPUs as they're the best option for these calculations. As the specialist hardware is developed, and gets cheaper, we'll see more local models and thus more Linux AI goodness.
Linux has been great for me. I switched during Windows 10 forced updates and never been unhappy since. I hope more people at least give a try. If you have a computer that can't meet Windows 11 requirements, it is worth a shot.
Look, Linux is amazing and perfect for those that can install and maintain with minimal support. The only way the average user will use Linux, is if it’s wrapped in a way that is supported by a business… that is probably going to add AI. People are lazy, they want that easy button.
AI will probably die off in its current iteration, likely becoming less prevalent and just a background service. Or, it’ll gain sentience, watch all our AI movies where we’re the hero and learn the most efficient way to kill all humans, is to be quiet and silently kill off humans. Pretty sure I’m on Siri’s list, the twat. Also, fairly sure I told Alexa to “die in a fire you fucking dumass robot”. Yep, yep… I’m dead.
And forced the hardware obsolescence nightmare.
And the big tech surveillance nightmare.
And the nightmare of the war on general purpose computers. (OK, that is more GNU and GPLv3)
And a few other nightmares!
