Because an average user would do that. Hell, I use Linux full-time and I didn’t know that PopOS in a huge transition. A user wants a gaming-focused distro an picks one. It should just work if we want all those Windows users to transition. He can’t do it right either, there will always be someone complaining about his choice. People here seem to think they’re an average user, when they’re really way above average in terms of technical knowledge. Even if Linus should maybe know better, it’s better that he does some dumb stuff because that’s what many people would do.

Seriously? I have recently been working on my personal programming projects on my ThinkPad from 2014. That thing also has 8 GB RAM. It’s slow, but that’s only because the dedicated video card is no longer supported by NVIDIA. I was totally able to run PyCharm, my program (which was hungry for ram), and Firefox with quite some tabs open without any issues. And most people will be doing more basic stuff on this than what I was doing. Browsing around, editing some documents, viewing some photos. I’m not sure how heavy MacOS is, but I’ll assume it’s more like Linux than Windows. You can do a lot with 8GB if your OS isn’t gobbling up resources to spy on you, show you ads, or run some useless AI shit you didn’t ask for.

I agree that it’s not a lot, but this laptop is not meant for people who need to do more than what I mentioned, putting much more RAM in there would just creep up the price without really offering anything.

Note that I’m not an Apple fan or anything, I’ve never even used anything from Apple.

Yeah exactly. Although it’s also totally understandable that OP is unhappy with their decision. At the end of the day any reasonably large workplace just wants all their IT to be as manageable as possible, which means as uniform as possible in hardware and OS. But using windows for many jobs just kinda sucks.

Too little too late. I’m already over to Linux now. Shit’s been going downhill even before this whole AI craze went off the rails. I hope Microsoft Windows crashes and burns

I used to feel the same. At some point I put some time into setting up KDE how I wanted it and then I just kinda kept using it. Still use it today. I do find the editing tools of the toolbars etc to be extremely chaotic. But once that’s in place it’s actually nicer than Gnome imo

For some issues, especially related to programming and Linux, I feel like I kinda have to at this point. Google seems to have become useless, and DDG was never great to begin with but is arguably better than Google now. I’ve had some very obscure issues that I spent quite some time searching for, only to drop it into ChatGPT and get a link to some random forum post that discusses it. The biggest one was a Linux kernel regression that was posted on the same day in the Arch Linux forums somewhere. Despite having a hunch about what it could be and searching/struggling for over an hour, I couldn’t find anything. ChatGPT then managed to link me the post (and a suggested fix: switching to LTS kernel) in less than minute.

For general purpose search tho, hell no. If I want to know factual data that’s easy to find I’ll rely on the good old search engine. And even if I have to use an LLM, I don’t really trust it unless it gives me links to the information or I can verify that what it says is true.

Damn what the hell. I’m Dutch and I pay less than €12 euros. For that I get 100 call minutes/messages and 6 GB. Neither of which I ever really get close to. Calling is mostly just in case of emergency or when we need to align something right now. And data is always useful because I definitely do not have free wifi anywhere. Do you never leave a big city or something? If I slip with my bike on an icy road and break something in the middle of nowhere it’s kinda good to have some way of communicating.

Yeah I’m on a 5700 or something with 64 GB of DDR4 and I don’t see any issues with it yet. I went that route because I could keep my mobo and it was also way cheaper than DDR5 back then. I figured I’d rather have more older RAM than a full system upgrade.

Is RAM already at a price that it’s worth considering selling one of those sticks? :3

Yeah I’m on a 5700 or something with 64 GB of DDR4 and I don’t see any issues with it yet. I went that route because I could keep my mobo and it was also way cheaper than DDR5 back then. I figured I’d rather have more older RAM than a full system upgrade.

Is RAM already at a price that it’s worth considering selling one of those sticks? :3

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You’re probably aware, but Bitwig studio runs natively on Linux. And tools like yabridge can allow you to run many VST plugins as well. Though it remains a bit of a hassle compared to Windows. I’ve for instance lost access to a NI plugin because their new all-in-one installer/verification program won’t work on Linux

I did so at the start of 2025. It was meant mostly as an experiment, to see what I needed before switching permanently. But I kinda just kept going. I think I’ve booted windows like 2 or 3 times across the year to get something off of it or to run test something that didn’t work on Linux. I’m kinda considering to just wipe it, or wipe it and install it on a separate partition so it can’t mess with shit anymore. Maybe put it on an old disk in my spare parts PC (if that is possible with the TPM bullshit) to isolate it further.

Might as well be a Dutch dialect at this point haha. It’s funny how the platt/plat dialects are kinda similar.

Yeah. They/them feels quite natural, but compared to that all Dutch alternatives feel a bit forced. Maybe it’s better just to find something new, but good luck teaching those to people.

The th sound is honestly a bit difficult. Three will end up sounding like either tree or free, but not three. Usually I just pronounce it as a slightly weird T. I have quite a Dutch accent anyways and that just something y’all will have to deal with ;p

Fun fact, this loop is kinda how one of the generative ML algorithms works. This algorithm is called Generative Adversarial Networks or GAN.

You have a so-called Generator neural network G that generates something (usually images) from random noise and a Discriminator neural network D that can take images (or whatever you’re generating) as input and outputs whether this is real or fake (not actually in a binary way, but as a continuous value). D is trained on images from G, which should be classified as fake, and real images from a dataset that should be classified as real. G is trained to generate images from random noise vectors that fool D into thinking they’re real. D is, like most neural networks, essentially just a mathematical function so you can just compute how to adjust the generated image to make it appear more real using derivatives.

In the perfect case these 2 networks battle until they reach peak performance. In practice you usually need to do some extra shit to prevent the whole situation from crashing and burning. What often happens, for instance, is that D becomes so good that it doesn’t provide any useful feedback anymore. It sees the generated images as 100% fake, meaning there’s no longer an obvious way to alter the generated image to make it seem more real.

Sorry for the infodump :3

I’m Dutch, but due to the large amount of English content I never really had an issue with English. While I struggled with German and Fr*nch, I never had to pay attention or study for English lessons. I just did what felt natural and ignored the homework etc. Not that I’m a great English speaker or anything, my vocabulary is sometimes a bit limited which makes me have to search for the right words to use. But when watching or reading I can follow pretty much anything. I also sometimes feel like I’m more resilient to accents than native English speakers, maybe because we get exposed to British and American English and therefore kinda learn a more generalized representation of the language? Idk, maybe that’s not a thing

Really? That would surprise me a lot. Maybe it’s a cultural difference, I’m not sure where you’re from. I can’t imagine that the majority of the people I know only brush once a day, I’ve never noticed anyone deviating from the normal morning/evening pattern. But I also haven’t really paid much attention so maybe I just haven’t noticed. How do people do that? I tend to notice quite quickly that I forgot toe brush because it feels yucky.

I’ve never even considered brushing my teeth under the shower? That seems unnecessary and impractical imo. I shower ever other day usually and I brush my teeth at least twice a day, but currently 4 times a day due to braces. I don’t see how these 2 things align in terms of planning?

That’s probably not too hard to detect based on IP. They only do it for some content though. The only content I watch that has this block is official Formula 1 content on YouTube. It’s probably something that creators can enable when they want to region lock content or something