My parents always said I could do whatever I wanted with my hair if I didn’t do drugs or alcohol. It was a surprisingly healthy rule they had for me. Didn’t realize at the time why I liked having long hair, I always said it was something, something, I don’t like getting it cut. They did make me cut it (not short though) on occasion mostly because I was never taught to properly take care of my hair, so I did let it get a bit unkempt in the past.

It’s a straw man’s argument. I don’t plan on continuing to use Noctalia because of AI, therefore I shouldn’t use Linux itself? These are two entirely different statements.

Is it problematic that the kernel is developed using AI? Yes, certainly, but that’s not something I have the capacity to deal with at the moment. But why shouldn’t I be allowed to switch to other projects that are stringently anti-AI like River and Quickshell? I will support any open source project that comes with blanket statement against AI usage on the project because I loath it with a vengeance to deep to put into words. But that’s just me, these projects are freely available for anyone to use and if you don’t mind LLM generated code, knock yourself out.

I use it with Niri, please know, the community likes AI at least a few of the plugins are LLMs, doesn’t default to giving you AI features, and it’s fair to say a lot of commits are AI assisted. Whether or not that’s a problem for you is your choice, but it is a problem for me and plan to not use it in the future. Regardless, it gets a tentative recommend from me. Its convenience factor of you just run one program to provide widgets, bar, notification daemon, clipboard manager, and such is really hard to pass up. Moreover, the common design language between all the components is quite nice with the color scheme system they provide working rather well.

Play the Wikipedia game!

https://chimera-linux.org/

Got a tip recently to limit the search range to pre-2024. Won’t work for everything, like current events, but will work for a lot, like heat transfer and normal shock wave equations.

Similar(ish) boat, but I never got as into as you, really sorry to hear that and really proud you are trying to get away from it. I used the very first version of ChatGPT to get through a very annoying CS class (yeah, it was a really bad class). I messed around with some small local models in Ollama, but eventually realized I was too dependent on technology as a whole. I was using DuckDuckGo to get answers to questions I should be working through myself and using AI to take notes I would never reference. So I actually started sitting down and reading the textbooks, Wikipedia, and carrying a physical notebook (yeah, I know, way old-school). I started downloading information in forms I knew was AI-free (like Wikiepdia from 2024), and working offline. Even went so far as to ditch my phone this semester. It ended up working really quite well for me. I started getting much better grades in some really hard classes like aerodynamics, and annoying entry-level classes like thermo. So, really, my suggestion boils down to, read. Read encyclopedias, textbooks, and documentation. phone, bad book good.

Surprisingly only been mentioned once, but Chimera! It’s weird and strange and brilliant!

If you want something slightly more normal (well, actually, it’s not any more normal, just more common), then you can get PostmarketOS installed on anything if you go outside the documentation a little (it’s really not hard, pmbootstrap is quite a good utility). If you take that route, I recommend OpenRC as not only is PMOS anti-AI, but so is OpenRC!

Genuinely some of my favorite projects are on there (before I knew they where anti-AI too)! Chimera, Dune3d, Krita, River, PostmarketOS, Zig, Quickshell, Alacritty, OBS, yt-dlp and MUSl all get my 100% recommend (really, check them out, they are all brilliant projects). There’s also some sweet new finds in there, keep the good work going!

Yeah, fair, I am very fortunately in a position to ditch having a phone altogether and never look back. Waydroid is a nightmare, but translation layers like Steams thing and the creatively named Android Translation layer do exist and kindof work.

Being required to use a phone to get snail mail is insane! The whole point of mail is that direct interaction with technology along with some pretty excellent security and privacy guarantees! I hate how much smartphones have become a piece of society.

Also worth noting, simply having a SIM tied to your name and taken with you is a privacy issue.

It’s a conversation we have had before, but Android derivatives are really not a long-term solution. There are mountains of technical issues that myself and others take issue with that only ditching the Android ecosystem in its entirety can fix. Also, are we really sure phones are a necessity of modern life?

I’m in this picture… and I don’t like it.

Apparently that line was supposed to be a joke… which I reject because the thing Spider Punk is referring to is a damn good metaphor for capitalism.

All the responses are correct. These days it’s a complicated web of various factors, but the academic term I was taught for it was social caging (yeah, I know I probably misspelled that). In short, the state seeks its continued existence (and its existence is solely dependent on the violence of the military and police (and yeah, I know, I’m oversimplifying it)). Therefore, it uses various means of social pressure to encourage military service. Honor, glory, duty, citizenship, etc. The book Starship Troopers puts this into perspective quite well, very much worth a read (completely different from the movie from what I understand) (and no, I don’t agree with the society it puts forth, but I really don’t think the author does either. Read The Forever War afterward, a book written almost in response to Starship Troopers, they are strangely two books best read together).

Yup, having only ever driven Subarus, this is what I have always been told. The ever-so-slightly different diameter of a worn VS new tire can cost you way more money than a three additional tires in the long run.

By no means should we avoid the development of the space environment for human gain.

I don’t want to be a naysayer or Luddite (wait, who am I kidding?), but I hard disagree with that take. A space economy will get us nowhere. Yeah, sure, some interesting technology (arguably) came from the Apollo program, and NASA has done some amazing astronomy with JWST and Hubble. But, as with so many other aspects of modern life, the cost is far too great to society as a whole. The energy needed to get anything to or from orbit is enormous, and there is no way around that. The thing we need to curb climate change is reduction of energy usage in any form (driving, flying, electricity, ect.). This is even on top of other issues in rocketry like ozone layer depletion and the light pollution described above. As such, if climate change really is the greatest threat to humanity (which it is), putting anything into space is not a worthwhile venture.

There’s a ton of suggestions and stuff already, so don’t want to add to the noise, but thanks for the work! Had no idea about Artix, and almost installed it because of dinit.

Just wanted to say, KaOS is systemd free, it’s been using dinit for the init system for some time now. It does ship with some standalone systemd components like elogind, but so does Chimera. (also a really good project if anyone wants to check it out, quickly becoming my go-to recommend).

Also check out Chimera Linux, it’s a brilliant project. The lead dev is trans, the package management philosophy is very similar to Void, but with Alpine’s APK instead of XBPS, and Dinit is a damn good init system. Here be dragons, but it remains one of my favorite distros.

Even better, it was “hostage negotiation tactics.”

Or the DOE, or the EPA, or… well any three letter agency.