This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.
I just did my yearly attempt at this again, and unfortunately I ran into multiple issues - aside from issues I had during dual boot setup which is still WAY too user unfriendly, the driver recommended for my video card breaks the standard resolution on my main monitor, downgrading the version fixed it but it took me an hour of hacking with console commands to work this out, and reading forum posts where I watched people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue. Sleep is still half broken, the login appears on the wrong monitor and only console commands I had to modify to copy some obscure config file would fix it. And cyberpunk crashes for me randomly every 10-30 minutes and runs 30% slower. And I can’t install it on my macbook… but I don’t blame linux for that last one.
Linux isn’t ready in 2025. I wish it was, I try it every year, but it just isn’t. And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.
SteamOS seems promising though and we may have a saviour there.
Throughout using Linux here and there for like two decades or so, my only issues were Ubuntu forcing some very Microsoft-ish decisions on me, which I did not like. Plus, this very very stable very stable Debian breaking upon version upgrades (I have no idea why, I keep running mostly default Debian since forever). These days I mostly use Arch and Fedora (on those shared computers I don’t bother to config to my liking), and they were mostly flawless for like years. I have some things I don’t like, but they aren’t too many and minuscule. I used a MacBook Pro for like over a decade, but left macOS earlier than this LiquidAss fiasco, so I cannot relate really. But still reading all these complaints about Windows and macOS, it looks like your guys only issue with Linux is ‘I did not make any effort to understand the system, I’d use my weird pervert Windows baggage and expect it would just work the same way.’ Hey, it wouldn’t. Take a weekend to research, take a month to play with Linux on some non-critical hardware (buy a used ThinkPad or ThinkCentre). I’d say Linux is quite ready for most things these days. Yes, not all hardware may work well, but once you understand the reasons for that, you won’t blame the community, but rather those who intentionally do nothing to make their own hardware work. I’m looking at you Nvidia. And even them, it looks like, started doing something. Switching my desktops from almost a decade on macOS, I mostly feel like an upgrade. Even on a MacBook! I wish some software to be better, but it’s getting there slowly, even without my help.
> And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.
Well, that's not fair to the community or yourself. You didn't outline your yearly install process whatsoever, for all we know you're installing Hannah Montana Linux and throwing in the towel. You can get a SteamOS-style environment on whatever Linux device you want, you just need to copy Valve's steps.
Additionally, you have to accept that you're just outlining perspective here. Linux was "ready" for my desktop in 2019. I played 4 hours of Cyberpunk last week with my GPU undervolted by 33%, no crash whatsoever. Your experience certainly doesn't reflect what most people say, so a lot of people will pass this by and say PEBCAK.
I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all.
Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.)
Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.
My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.
Federated solutions are quite annoying, because you still have to rely on single server that's hosted most often by someone else.
When you build decentralized protocol for public messaging, you want your messages to be replicated in as many servers as possible by design.
Sandboxing keys on the device is indeed removing one point of nostr, but to clarify on your point: The difference between Signal and Nostr is that in nostr there are hundreds of independent servers (relays) that your app broadcasts events to, whereas on Signal it's just one centralized server.
Marmot is a subprotocol based on Nostr (and MLS signatures): https://github.com/marmot-protocol/marmot that's used for private messaging while using Nostr for identity.
Your specific example is true - nostr currently doesn't have generally available key rotation solutions, there are couple proposals in works thought. This is also noted in the article with "Nostr is not perfect. Key management remains challenging, though solutions like NIP-46 and hardware signing devices are emerging."
Sidenote - the article you just read is hosted on nostr. Did you notice that? The comments under it are powered by nostr, etc. It's pretty seamless - habla.news is just one of the client apps that fetches it from many relays. Nostr phone apps (like Amethyst) also display the same article and allow interacting with it, commenting, etc.
It's not easy to spam someone on Nostr. The apps that users use have multiple options that make it into a non problem. There is a lot of spam and offensive content, but you just don't get to see it unless you look at "global" feed and that's now quite hidden in most apps.
Essentially your app restricts to seeing content from people you follow and then you limit visibility on random replies to posts.
Now nostr is actually much bigger than "twitter-like" app, including powering app stores, chat apps, collaboration, podcasts, music player, etc.
Well, you are right. This article sort of sucks in explaining anything and it is also already outdated. Understandably your summary of how it could work is wrong and the article is indeed to blame.
My suggestion would be to skip it and learn about nostr from other sources. I'm on Nostr since almost the beginning and it's been very exciting to watch. For reference my android client app (Amethyst) is currently directly connected to 390 relays (using the new "outbox model") and it works well, no slow down, no battery drain.
Well, his writing style is too good. The sentences flow too beautifully, he uses rich vocabulary and styling. It's unusual to see that style of writing online. I definitely don't poses that power.
I don't know the author of this article and so I don't know whether I should feel good or bad about this. LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most people will assume that it's being produced by LLM. The ride in the closed horse carriage was so comfortable it felt like being in a car and so people assumed it was a car. Is that good? Is that bad?
Also note that LLMs are now much more than just "one ML model to predict the next character" - LLMs are now large systems with many iterations, many calls to other systems, databases, etc.
> LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most people will assume that it's being produced by LLM.
I really don’t think that is what most normal people assume… And while LLMs can definitely produce more grammatically accurate prose with probably a wider vocabulary than the average person, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good writing…
I meant "good" in the formatting, grammar, vocabulary sense. I'm not arguing that LLMs are "good" in writing amazing prose.
I mean look at two of us - I have typos, I use half broken english, I'm not good in doing noun articles, my vocabulary is limited, I don't connect sentences well, you end sentences with "..." and then you start sentence with "And", etc. I very much believe you are a real person.
This once again brings up the point that while Meta and other "single company" social networks can easily exclude you, you can't get excluded on Nostr.
It's designed in a way that that's not even a thing. Anyone can create account locally on their computer or mobile phone (even completely offline) and that's it.
If you save & store your "notes" or "posts", you can always re-broadcast them later to different "relay" servers - and this is what your app can do for you anyway.
For larger amounts it makes sense to use the bitcoin rails for international transfers. I'm doing bank to bank international transfers and using bitcoin saves around 3% compared to Wise and you get the money immediately (or within 1hr, depending on what you use).
Few years ago I needed to transfer a big sum from a Scandinavian country into Euro. The official bank exchange rate plus fees was worse than Wise’s. But I asked the bank and the bank gave me an exchange rate that was like 0.1% better than one from wise.
Depending on the direction, but there are ways to actually make a little extra on top of the middle exchange rate (e.g. on the USD to EUR path), since there are many people that want to buy no-KYC bitcoin in Europe and they are willing to pay a couple % extra.
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