I'd happily give technical advice but first I need to understand the actual need.

I don't mean "what would be cool" but rather what's the absolute minimum basic that would make a solution acceptable.

Why do I insist so much? Well because installing a distribution, e.g. Debian, takes less than 1h. Assuming you have a separate /home directory, there is no need to "copy" anything, only mounting correctly. If it is on another physical computer then the speed will depend on the your storage capacity and hardware (e.g. SSD vs HDD). Finally "configuring" each piece of software will take a certain amount of time, especially if you didn't save the configuration (which should be the case).

Anyway, my point being that :

• installing the OS takes little time
• copying data across physical devices take a lot more time
• configuring manually specific software takes a bit of time

So, if you repeat the operation several times a week, investing time to find a solution can be useful. If you do this few times a year or less, it's probably NOT actually efficient.

So, again, is this an intellectual endeavor, for the purpose of knowing what an "ideal' scenario would be or is it a genuine need?

Depends entirely what they are doing with it. If they are using services with DRM, e.g. Netflix or Disney+ I bet you will be out of luck because that pulls out an entire ecosystem, driven by Google, which is based on selling ads.

"not realistic to propose rpi and more complex systems"

If they have to install it, probably not. If they have to plug it on the HDMI port, power and optionally Ethernet honestly things like LibreElec or Kodi are pretty well done. Heck even a very young kid (talking not even 5y/o) can manage that (I've seen it, repetitively) or even start VLC to connect to DLNA server as long as it's properly setup.

This is the market place, brah.

...

Free market capitalism

then talk about subsidies or non capitalist country controlling the currency, markets, VCs, etc.

What does that even mean?

If you were implying that I said being funded by Alphabet/Google was a good thing then let me be explicit, I did NOT say that nor believe it to be the case. Now, once again, cf my actual comment about pragmatic better alternative we can rely on and support today. If you meant to suggest better and are supporting that, please do share.

I thought saying

contribute however they can up to their own capabilities

was actually very clear but seems I wasn't clear enough so that means... literally doing ANYTHING except only criticizing. That can mean being an open-source developer, yes, but that can also means translation, giving literally 1 cent, etc. It means doing anything at all that would not ONLY be saying "this is good, but it's not good enough" without doing actually a single thing to change, especially while actually using another free of charge browser that is funded by advertisement. Honestly if that's not clear enough I'm not sure what would be ... but please, do ask again I will genuinely try to be clearer.

I hope everybody criticizing the move either do not use products from Mozilla or, if they do, contribute however they can up to their own capabilities. If you don't, if you ONLY criticize, yet use Firefox (or a derivative, e.g. LibreWolf) or arguably worst use something fueled by ads (e.g. Chromium based browsers) then you are unfortunately contributing precisely to the model you are rejecting.

I'm using https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local and it's working without issue.

In case others are interested on the general compute aspect, e.g inference for self hosted AI, here is something related I found :

• ZLUDA, for CUDA everywhere, https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/ unfortunately in the process of a major rewrite https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/discussions/261 due to AMD (somehow?!) not wanting their code being used in there (maybe they did some shady RE on NVIDIA work?)
• AMD ROCm https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm and HIP https://github.com/ROCm/HIP

What's driving me nuts is that people will focus on the glasses.

Yes, the glasses ARE a problem because Meta, despite being warned by experts like AccessNow to SHOW when a camera is recording, you know with a bright red LED as it's been the case with others devices before, kept it "stealthy" because it's... cool I guess?

Anyway, the glasses themselves are but the tip of the iceberg. They are the end of the surveillance apparatus that people WILLINGLY decide to contribute to. What do I mean? Well that people who are "shocked" by this kind of demonstrations (because that's what it is, not actual revelations) will be whining about it on Thread or X after sending a WhatsApp message to their friends and sending GMail to someone else on their Google, I mean Android, phone and testing the latest version of ChatGPT. Maybe the worst part in all this? They paid to get a Google Nest inside their home and an Amazon Ring video doorbell outside. They ARE part of the surveillance.

Those people are FUELING surveillance capitalism by pouring their private data to large corporations earning money on their usage.

Come on... be shocked yes, be horrified yes, but don't pretend that you are not part of the problem. You ARE wearing those "glasses" in other form daily, you are paying for it with money and usage. Stop and buy actual products, software and hardware, from companies who do not make money with ads, directly or indirectly. Make sure the products you use do NOT rely on "the cloud" and siphon all your data elsewhere, for profit. Change today.

No doubt, the kernel itself is also quite complex... but my comment here is on the user experience perspective, namely, for me at least "it just works". So I'm not trying to imply it will work for anybody flawlessly nor that it's due to the simplicity of the stack, solely that it works, for me.

I'd argue... Alpine?

Why? Well, because it's small. So Alpine isn't the programming distribution itself but rather the distribution for the container your run whatever you build inside of just because it's very VERY small (like... 5MB?!).

Obviously that makes sense only in some cases. For example for a frontend Web developer or a game developer (or a WebXR dev like me) it might not help much but otherwise,... maybe?

Anyway if you are into this kind of things check also Gitpod, it's about wrapping your dev environment inside a container then having it anytime, anywhere, including for other developers and facilitate their onboarding.

HP Laser 107w, driverless, over LAN.

I just Ctrl+P from any software and it prints.

It also prints programmatically (for e.g. folk.computer ) thanks to IPP.

I didn't have to "think about printing" since I have that setup so I don't know where you get that sentiment.

Indeed, AKA the OpenAI playbook.

As per usual, in order to understand what it means we need to see :

• performance benchmark (A100 level? H100? B100? GB200 setups?)
• energy consumption (A100 performance level and H100 lower watt? the other way around?)
• networking scalability (how many cards cards can be interconnected for distributed compute? NVLink equivalents?)
• software stack (e.g can it run CUDA and if not what alternatives can be used?)
• yield (how many die are usable, i.e. can it be commercially viable or is it R&D still?)
• price (which regardless of possible subsidies would come from yield)
• volume (how many cards can actually be bought, also dependent on yield)

Still interesting to read after announcements, as per usual, and especially who will actually manufacture them at scale (SMIC? TSMC?).

PS: full disclosure, I still believe self-hosting AI is interesting, cf my notes on it https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence but that doesn't mean AGI can be reached, even less that it'd be "soon". IMHO AI itself as a research field is interesting enough that it doesn't need grandiose claims, especially not ones leading to learned helplessness.

Read few months ago, warmly recommended. Basically on self selection bias and sharing "impressive" results while ignoring whatever does not work... then claiming it's just the "beginning".

I haven't seriously read the article for now unfortunately (deadline tomorrow) but if there is one thing that I believe is reliable, it's computational complexity. It's one thing to be creative, ingenious, find new algorithms and build very efficient processors and datacenters to make things extremely efficient, letting us computer things increasingly complex. It's another though to "break" free of complexity. It's just, as far as we currently know, is impossible. What is counter intuitive is that seemingly "simple" behaviors scale terribly, in the sense that one can compute few iterations alone, or with a computer, or with a very powerful set of computers... or with every single existing computers... only to realize that the next iteration of that well understood problem would still NOT be solvable with every computer (even quantum ones) ever made or that could be made based on resources available in say our solar system.

So... yes, it is a "stretch", maybe even counter intuitive, to go as far as saying it is not and NEVER will be possible to realize AGI, but that's what their paper claims. It's a least interesting precisely because it goes against the trend we hear CONSTANTLY pretty much everywhere else.

It's a classic BigTech marketing trick. They are the only one able to build "it" and it doesn't matter if we like "it" or not because "it" is coming.

I believed in this BS for longer than I care to admit. I though "Oh yes, that's progress" so of course it will come, it must come. It's also very complex so nobody else but such large entities with so much resources can do it.

Then... you start to encounter more and more vaporware. Grandiose announcement and when you try the result you can't help but be disappointed. You compare what was promised with the result, think it's cool, kind of, shrug, and move on with your day. It happens again, and again. Sometimes you see something really impressive, you dig and realize it's a partnership with a startup or a university doing the actual research. The more time passes, the more you realize that all BigTech do it, across technologies. You also realize that your artist friend did something just as cool and as open-source. Their version does not look polished but it works. You find a KickStarter about a product that is genuinely novel (say Oculus DK1) and has no link (initially) with BigTech...

You finally realize, year after year, you have been brain washed to believe only BigTech can do it. It's false. It's self serving BS to both prevent you from building and depend on them.

You can build, we can build and we can build better.

Can we build AGI? Maybe. Can they build AGI? They sure want us to believe it but they have lied through their teeth before so until they do deliver, they can NOT.

TL;DR: BigTech is not as powerful as they claim to be and they benefit from the hype, in this AI hype cycle and otherwise. They can't be trusted.

DIY is difficult

Well, arguably it's difficult at first then become much easier BUT I understand one might not want to dedicate time to it. There are solutions though to buy hardware that is open hardware and with open-source firmware. I personally do NOT recommend reverse engineering except for the pursuit of knowledge. I do NOT recommend RE for "liberating" products because even though it is amazing, it is adversarial. The companies are making money still while NOT supporting Linux or even preventing it from being supported by the community without them spending a cent. That's fine, that's their strategy. I don't approve of it but from a business standpoint I can understand it.

What I do recommend though is spending few minutes looking for proper alternatives. I clarified that a bit in another thread about inputs, cf https://lemmy.world/comment/12550034 so please consider having a look.

TL;DR: DIY/RE can be too much work but there are open hardware with open-source firmware projects sold on e.g https://crowdsupply.com which are "just" plug&play.

Tool lazy to read it all with existing comments but still want to help so :

Recommendations for Notepad++ replacement

vim/gvim (and derivatives, e.g. neovim) or emacs or derivatives, if you are serious about text editing, being text or otherwise, they are the foundations. They probably include most of what you need out of the box and if not they do and a lot more through their extensions

I have an iPhone, I like to back it up and sync

You are swimming upstream there. Apple is doing everything it legally and technically can to lock up its own ecosystem. You might managed few things with e.g libimobiledevice/ifuse or ish or even KDE Connect

I do some gaming.

Me too, playing both 2D and XR on a nearly daily basis. It works. Sadly, just like the previous answer some are trying to sabotage anything they can via DRM or "anticheat" and this might screw up your experience entirely. A good heuristic is if works on the SteamDeck (cf ProtonDB) it probably works on Linux.

How do Xbox One controllers work wired with Linux?

They work. I don't have an Xbox controller but SteelSeries ones and I play near daily on them, either with their dongle or via BT, with Steam or anything else.

Recommendations for GUI mpv frontend?

VLC

I use software called AdvancedRenamer.

As suggested in the first answer, learn Bash or any other CLI environment, it's made for this kind of tasks and is the de facto standard for literally.

Keyboard shortcuts.

They work. If you need more it takes second with your desktop environment, e.g KDE Plasma for me, to add new ones.

I don’t understand Linux distro segmentation especially when it comes to software availability

That's the "cost" of freedom. You do whatever you want with your computer. It sounds trivial but it's not. We have been trained for years if not decades to see someone else get to decide for us. It's false. It's amazing. It is also daunting. Now YOU get to decide. You can use you distribution package manager or a binary or... anything in between (AppImage, AM, dbin, cloning a repository and building from source, etc). It's crazy... but it works so it's up to you.

Last but not least. I’m looking for suggestions for a Linux distro to use that fits my needs.

Who cares, picks any one BUT keep your data safe! Try it for an hour, a day, a week and try another one if you feel like it. Switch whenever YOU want for whatever reason YOU care. Cf previous answer.