No, you’re right. It’s a problem. Someone in another thread said, “Hey, I’m considering moving to Linux from Windows, what do you think of these distros?” and got downvoted to hell just for asking, because apparently one of the distros they mentioned is disliked by others.

It’s a problem, generated by some of the exact same people who loudly wonder why more people aren’t on Linux without ever considering how having their own noob question thrown back in their own face by someone who has made their OS their identity would turn them wayyyyy the fuck off Linux as well.

For myself I will always be grateful for the many others who have generously and graciously answered my stupid Linux noob questions.

South Carolina has entered the chat

This isn’t great, but it has more information than the above, with links to other sources:
https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1pwvji3/did_wired_have_a_breach_on_122325/

Alternate link:
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1pwvji3/did_wired_have_a_breach_on_122325/

I wrote a longer comment elsewhere, but while the facts this article presents are in themselves correct, the conclusions the authors have reached, I think, are not. There are a number of glaring omissions that, to me, add up to trying to erase the very likely blackmail Epstein was conducting all along.

Or, to put it another way, I think the NYT represents NYC’s many billionaires very well, a non-zero number of whom were directly engaged in this behavior with Epstein and/or helped him to keep his lifestyle and social standing intact, not just before his 2008 conviction in Florida but well after.

Frankly, I think people like Leon Black and Les Wexner and all these other Epstein “theft, but only theft” victims are shaking in their sordid little boots right now because it was NEVER just theft or they’d have brought charges and/or sued, and that’s what NYT wants the public to forget about. I think that’s why this article was written the way it was, excluding not just the extreme audio/visual evidence from Epstein’s mansion search and his data collection practices in St. Thomas and private islands, but as Blue_Morpho rightly points out in their comment, Epstein’s stint at Dalton where he was hired by Donald Barr, another pedo freak.

These very well-heeled New Yorkers form the core of NYT’s subscriber base. Something to bear in mind as you read.

Well said.

Truth. Especially if someone suffers from anxiety: quitting social media will help immediately. They may jones for it for a few days, but the world is full of other things to do, and they’ll be so glad they did. Even if someone is forced to use it for work or business, the personal use of social media can be limited to exactly that.

Also, and it must be said, it’s much harder to become propagandized when you’re not allowing yourself to be exposed to a constant feed of it daily. When you find yourself emoting over something you’ve read, that’s usually a clue to step away. The world is full of horrible, saddening things, but we now have a bunch of oligarch techbros who want to use that to steer us via our own emotions, and that’s what social media excels at. If you’re feeling angry, if you’re feeling fearful, if you’re feeling hopeless about the world at large, social media is a very expensive short-term remedy. Get offline and occupy your body as well as your mind: you’ll be grateful you stopped it when you did.

They’re here to stay

Eh, probably. At least for as long as there is corporate will to shove them down the rest of our throats. But right now, in terms of sheer numbers, humans still rule, and LLMs are pissing off more and more of us every day while their makers are finding it increasingly harder to forge ahead in spite of us, which they are having to do ever more frequently.

and they’re going to get much better.

They’re already getting so much worse, with what is essentially the digital equivalent of kuru, that I’d be willing to bet they’ve already jumped the shark.

If their makers and funders had been patient, and worked the present nightmares out privately, they’d have a far better chance than they do right now, IMO.

Simply put, LLMs/“AI” were released far too soon, and with far too much “I Have a Dream!” fairy-tale promotion that the reality never came close to living up to, and then shoved with brute corporate force down too many throats.

As a result, now you have more and more people across every walk of society pushed into cleaning up the excesses of a product they never wanted in the first place, being forced to share their communities AND energy bills with datacenters, depleted water reserves, privacy violations, EXCESSIVE copyright violations and theft of creative property, having to seek non-AI operating systems just to avoid it . . . right down to the subject of this thread, the corruption of even the most basic video search.

Can LLMs figure out how to override an angry mob, or resolve a situation wherein the vast majority of the masses are against the current iteration of AI even though the makers of it need us all to be avid, ignorant consumers of AI for it to succeed? Because that’s where we’re going, and we’re already farther down that road than the makers ever foresaw, apparently having no idea just how thin the appeal is getting on the ground for the rest of us.

So yeah, I could be wrong, and you might be right. But at this point, unless something very significant changes, I’d put money on you being mostly wrong.

I shoulda looked it up, lol. Thanks for the correction.

Both HP and Dell are partnered with Microsoft, and have been for decades. Isn’t a discrete GPU one of the things required for Microsoft Recall ready machines?

There’s NO way they broke HEVC just for 4¢. Something else is paying them a lot more, and Recall would be one of those things.

I’m sick and tired about hearing about Zorinn when there’s a dozen excellent Linux distros that aren’t derivative trash that astroturf social media and pass off other Foss projects as their own.

Your quote, but when asked to name a better “easiest distro for Windows users” Fedora KDE was the best you could do.

Somebody asked you a genuine question, looking for real information, and out of this “dozen excellent Linux distros” you came at her with, you lazily just shat out the name of a single one, and that being one of the more advanced distros out there.

Hell yeah, try harder. People who ask genuine questions deserve genuine answers. Unless that’s just your best and you need pity.

Nothing against Fedora KDE, it’s the best of the best, but it is hardly the easiest for a noob to Linux: just the install process alone requires a working understanding of the Linux filesystem and partitioning if you’re not using the entire disk space, you have to understand root vs sudo, god help you if you want to encrypt a disk, and there’s a lot more CLI at every step than other distros. Try harder.

I’d be surprised if he does. If he’s “sick and tired” of hearing about Zorin, it’s because Zorin is getting a lot of deservedly good reviews from the Windows crowd right now. If it really were ass he’d have nothing to say about it. The only social media I’m on is Lemmy, and I tried Zorin because it was highly ranked on Distrowatch, so if people are getting “astroturfed” elsewhere it’s news to me.

But you should know I tried over twenty (conservative estimate) distros before I settled on Zorin. USB drives are cheap, and you can try as many distros as you like without ever having to install one. Don’t take my word for it, nor his: buy a handful of USB drives, create some LiveUSBs and start trying out whatever distros catch your attention. I found distrowatch.com to be a good front page to the distro world, with rankings and extremely detailed reviews: start there if you’re looking for a fairly exhaustive list of what’s out there.

Oh, they’re customer focused, alright: focused on scraping customer data via the installed OS to feed to their AI and then aggregate for sale to other data brokers and/or interested governments.

The Dell logo is the BIOS loading, the black screen is your bootloader and the beginning of your OS loading, and of course the Z is Zorin loading. While it could be hardware, to be honest where it’s hanging for you makes me wonder about how well your Zorin video driver suits your actual hardware, based on some similar issues I had with Fedora doing the exact same thing that you describe.

I am still learning Linux myself so I am not the best person to tell you what to do, but I know where I’d start if I were in your shoes: use the lshw command (see below) to get the details on your actual hardware, specifically the graphics chip; see if anyone else is having similar problems with the same graphics hardware; and in the meantime put Mint on a LiveUSB and run Mint for a while to see if it performs better or ends up doing the same thing.

That’s just beginner tips off the top of my head; I know you will get better advice if you run your problem by the Linux communities, esp because they can tell you how to capture the load process to see exactly what’s causing it to hang, and I’m just guessing. But at least you now have some hints of where to start.

Quick primer on lshw: To use lshw to see your hardware specs, type at a command prompt:

sudo lshw -short

If it says it’s not installed, to install it type

sudo apt-get install lshw

That will get you started, I hope. Either way, whatever you do will get you further toward a solution, whether that solution is a different distro or tweakling this one. I hope this helps.

Love it. Just wrote a separate comment about it. I ran the free versions for over a year, then decided to go to paid just to support the project. Paid gives you GUI for appearance adjustments and desktop “personalization” but not a whole lot else; other than superficials like that, under the hood the free version is exactly the same. I can’t remember what the Zorin folks say about it, get the details directly from them of course, but IMO don’t feel like you have to buy the paid version to get a true taste of how it will work for you.

EDITED to add: This incessant, eternal negging shit from the Linux crowd kept me away from Linux for a long time. I found OPs question legitimate, which is why I answered it, but whether you like Zorin or not noobs should not be downvoted for simply soliciting opinions on a distro. I’m very fortunate that some people were generous enough with their time and answering questions to make me give it another go, but there were over thirty years between the first time I tried Red Hat that came on a dozen 3.25" floppies in the early 90s, and last year when I tried Linux again: that absence had EVERYTHING to do with the core haters that apply purity tests to any mention of any Linux distro that they personally find some fault in. Seriously, for the sake of Linux, shut the fuck up and piss off, unless you’re just concern trolling for Microsoft or some shit, in which case you’re doing a fine job, never stop.

Just for clarity, when you say it won’t boot, where in the boot process does it fail? Do you get as far as loading the BIOS, do you get a little way into the OS and then it crashes, or does it just not start at all?

I ask because depending on how far it gets into the boot process, you may not be looking at a software problem at all. Generally speaking, you have to get past the BIOS and into the bootloader before assuming the problem has to do with your choice of OS.

Further comments may have been disabled, but a number of them are still up and are highly entertaining:

https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336

Zorin is working out really well for me, esp on my older machines with slower processors and less RAM that choke a little on fuller distros. I enjoy the KDE Plasma distros, for example, but they’re a little too heavy for my older boxes and I was getting a lot of video stutter and unexplained shutdows, etc. I don’t get that with Zorin or Mint. For me Mint works just as well as Zorin and picks up all my hardware just as handily, it just feels a little basic for what I’m used to. But Zorin hits just right in every direction for my needs. It’s a good distro for Windows noobs, that’s for sure.

If you’re not actively curating your own choice of reading material and are relying on unknown others to make those choices for you, then you absolutely deserve everything you are “forced” to read.

But even that is far too generous: nobody held a gun to your head loaded with the article you clearly did not read, lol.

I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)

Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.

Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.

I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.