Bad idea. We're just a few volcanic eruptions away from wanting all the sunshine we can get.

>"Even if all 1 million downloads turn into real OS installs, it's a drop in the bucket compared to Windows installs."

True. But if even if a small number of those people then show someone else and that other person switches, and on, and on, awareness keeps spreading. That is a great thing.

Generally, I don't care what OS people use (as long as I don't have to support it), but I do care if they are unhappy. Having Linux as an option is really great and works fantastically for a large number of people willing to really try it. The fact that it is free, fast/efficient, has no licensing mess, is more secure, more privacy-oriented, more controllable, more customizable, more open, easier and faster to update, and without forced cloud crud, no AI creep, no ads or nagware, and very little fake/forced hardware "obsolescence" all make it a very compelling option for lots of use cases. Not all use cases, but a surprisingly large number.

>"However, after Microsoft's recent announcement their own updates have broken their own system [slashdot.org] combined with no longer supporting W10, this can only lead to good things."

Microsoft obviously has its own agenda that doesn't mesh at all with what many (perhaps even most) users want now. And it shows. As MS-Windows has gotten significantly worse and more hostile over the decades, Linux/distros have gotten significantly better. Even people who haven't tried it in 5 years are often pleasantly surprised.

I tend to point people to Mint, but Zorin might be just fine, as well (I just have no experience with it).

>"I need an OS that I can plug a sound card into, start up my machine and it installs the driver and starts working"

Generally, that is Linux. I have installed various Linuxes over decades on hundreds of various machines. For the most part, modern Linux detects all the typical hardware and just configures and uses it. There is no need to "install drivers".

>"I want GUIs for all common tasks and I want it intuitive enough the I'm not spending hours looking up"

Again, that is generally the case with modern Linux. All the good distros can be completely managed through a GUI.

Could you end up with trying to install a not-so-great distro on a machine that has some unusual hardware? And have to take a dive into stuff? Sure. But that is the exception, not the rule, at least not in 2025.

Just imagine the cost of this over the course of a decade. The utility seems to have borne the brunt of the work, having to analyze and filter this data multiple times per year. That cost would have been passed onto customers - I'm sure it's appreciated that everyone's power bill was just a bit higher to fund this fishing expedition by law enforcement.

Then of course the investigators would be tied up digging through the 33,000 "tips" this data produced. Literally, law enforcement had to review 33,000 potential customers who met this profile, checking them for warrants or other known crimes giving them some excuse to surveil or even search that residence. Pretty extreme when you think about it - and that is just to catch people growing weed of all things. Not the dangerous drugs killing people or contributing to the homeless population on so on.

Finally, the fact that this generated so many potential leads shows how stupid the concept is in general - the "profile" they were going after regarding power usage. I can think of a hundred of other things that would cause higher power usage 24/7 that has nothing to do with growing weed.

Yes, Google is profitable now. Tremendously so. But they're at risk of losing revenue and ceasing to be profitable as people cease using Google search and switch to asking questions of their AIs. So to retain their position as the place people go first for information, they have to stay ahead of the AI race. Well, they could also just sit back and wait to see if their competitors are overwhelmed by the query volume, but that risks losing traffic and then having to win it back. It's much better to keep it. And Google is better-positioned to win this race than its competitors both because of its existing infrastructure and expertise and because it already has the eyeballs.

In addition, you seem to be assuming that doubling serving capacity means doubling cost. Clearly Google is not planning to increase their annual operating expenses by 1000X. As the summary actually says in the third paragraph, Google is also going to have to improve efficiency to achieve the growth rate, with better models and better hardware. This is what the AI chief is challenging the employees to do; he's not challenging them to write bigger OPEX checks, that's his job.

As I already said in the previous post:

"MacOS mostly doesn't really even use ~/.config, because, well, "Apple".

We don't know if Mozilla will do that on MacOS, which does not follow all Unix conventions. Especially desktop ones, of which this is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

>"Linux" appears ZERO times in the specification."

And yet, 99% of who this change will affect will likely be Linux users. MacOS mostly doesn't really even use ~/.config, because, well, "Apple".

>"This is a specification for UNIX. Linux copied from UNIX but is not UNIX."

If it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it is probably a duck. Linux is Unix, in all ways that matter to anyone now (and for a long time before now). Worrying about exact Linux vs Unix vs UNIX vs Unix-like vs BSD vs POSIX is kinda no longer relevant.

>"Apps should keep their files in their own directories. Spreading them across a 1000 different directories makes no sense and just make uninstall a hassle"

It will still be in its own directory. Just in ~/.config/mozilla instead of ~/.mozilla

For example, LibreOffice stores its settings in ~/.config/libreoffice, GIMP is in ~/.config/GIMP, Thunar is in ~/.config/Thunar, VLC is in ~/.config/vlc, etc...

>"To date Firefox has just positioned all files under ~/.mozilla rather than the likes of ~/.config and ~/.local/share.

That is not technically correct. They have been using ~/.cache correctly for a very long time. So it is not *all* files. But it is true the other files have been in ~/.mozilla. I manage an ACTUAL multiuser system (something you rarely see today; yes, hundreds of different users each often running Firefox on that one machine), and even I don't care much that it is ~/.mozilla instead of ~/.config/.mozilla, but I will have to adjust a lot of scripts.

I'll counter your anecdote with my own. I know quite a few homeschooled kids who are now adults who are homeschooling their own children.

Religious motivations aside, those children can all read, write, and perform basic mathematics far above equivalent public school levels. Their grasp of basic science is pretty good, too, at least when it doesn't conflict with religious beliefs. And every one of them plays some sort of musical instrument, and is active in sports.

I was once a homeschooling skeptic myself, but the results speak for themselves. Done right, homeschooling provides excellent outcomes. Done poorly, not so much. But in that respect, it's certainly no different than a whole lot of public schools.

I know a few. I don't know what it may or may not mean. It may be relevant that the ones I know used a community-based approach, where groups of homeschooling families worked together to create something akin to a school, with different parents teaching different subjects. This meant that while the kids socialization groups were small, they did hang out with and learn with other kids, not just their siblings.

It's more than that. Research into the possibility of a link between vaccination and autism has been done, and no correlation found. This is evidence that there is no connection and it's entirely different from a case where no research has been done. One is evidence of absence, the other is absence of evidence. The GP is equating them, but they're not remotely the same thing.

Show me all of the studies that have evaluated the correlation between FSM action and autism. There has been a lot of research on the possibility of a correlation between vaccination and autism, and no evidence of correlation has been found. There is an enormous difference between "We've looked hard and found no connection" (evidence of a negative) and "We haven't looked at all" (lack of evidence).

In addition, there's no need for the CDC to debunk a claims that are not being made, or non-harmful claims. To pick a less-ludicrous example, there's no significant population claiming that eating grapes causes autism, so there's no need for the CDC to address it. Further, if there were an anti-grape lobby touting a connection with autism, the CDC probably still wouldn't need to address it because some people avoiding grapes doesn't create significant health risks to others.

But there is a significant population claiming -- against strong scientific evidence -- that vaccines cause autism, and that claim is causing them to reject vaccines, which does create significant health risks for others. So, the CDC absolutely does need to address it, since public health is their job.

Your analogy is terrible, in every way.

Yeah but I bet the price of antihydrogen molecules at Walmart won't drop by 1/8th. I bet they won't even go down by half.

The thing about adopting evidence-based policy is that you also need to review and if necessary change policy when more evidence becomes available. The kind of situation you're describing would surely qualify.