NPUs can do things we have already been doing on the CPU for a long time, just a bit more efficiently. Noise cancellation, object recognition, basic subject analysis, text prediction, grammar checking and many other things which are genuinely useful. Yes, it can probably accelerate some GEGL-like operations too, as you would want for aesthetics in photographs. What it cannot do is handle all the generative nonsense people hate working with. If it could, NVIDIA would be cooked.

Regarding rendering, it's fixable, just tweak the renderer settings. The issue is that LibreOffice is using Skia renderer with Vulkan by default, which is known to suck badly on Windows. Nobody except LibreOffice uses it. Either force software rendering or disable Skia.

If it was ever determined that a bank bailout would be a worse option than letting them crash, it would almost certainly be cheaper for the government to demand the write off of all remaining consumer mortgage debts of those who could pay up until the bankruptcy of the affected bank than it would be to chase people for the rest of the money. The rich would each do a Trump-style negotiation akin to what happened with Deutsche Bank, while the poor would do what happened in China, and everything would become worthless to repossess.

Each version is a work, so in theory, it could be enforced per newly added ffmpeg commit which resulted in a binary being created by Rockchip. That might actually be worse.

A few basic things which come to mind:

Resource management sucks under pressure. It's still possible in the present year to lock up a typical Linux desktop (running with default settings) by copying large amounts of data to/from slow USB drives. I shouldn't have to ionice when using cp to stop things hanging. Likewise for memory management when under extreme memory pressure, the system has no idea what needs preserving to maintain an interactive desktop and what doesn't. You can stress test Windows and macOS to the extreme and not end up with a completely unusable system (with Testlimit and memory_pressure, respectively) without the need to cgroup everything.

Audio DSPs are still poorly supported, with ALSA drivers unable to program them to produce the same high quality audio that OEM-provided Windows and [proprietary out-of-tree] ChromeOS drivers do. Easyeffects is not a fix for this, as it does everything in software. This means if you have a laptop with built-in speakers, they are almost certainly guaranteed to produce inferior sound on a mainstream Linux distro and desktops with built-in sound cards often can't play audio through wired external speakers as loudly (without distortion).

Discrete GPU support also is still lacking. NVIDIA drivers have no support for offloading to shared memory at all, while AMD drivers have power management issues (especially when using high refresh screens) using a bunch of workarounds to handle low-memory scenarios in lieu of proper VRAM management. Said workarounds (for example, offloading inactive VRAM to system RAM aggressively but rarely re-promoting back) will be just fine for the upcoming Steam Machine, where the workload consists mostly of the Steam client, a custom compositor and a video game... but will still remain inferior to how Windows manages it.

Hardware accelerated encoding (especially for WebRTC) is still pretty much non-existent across web browsers. Google locks it behind ChromeOS for Chromium-based browsers and Firefox is dependent upon a pair of Red Hat developers contributing gradual changes out the kindness of their heart. Thus, functionality like group video calls runs like absolute ass on mainstream FOSS Linux distributions when compared to ChromeOS, Android, iOS, macOS and Windows. Worse still, for NVIDIA and AMD users, even decoding is still unreliable, barely supported or outright broken.. and even on Intel GPUs, anything dependent upon Widevine won't hardware decode (again, unless you're specifically running ChromeOS). Even software like Discord struggles, and this is with Steam Machines on the horizon.

TL;DR: Having hundreds of distros, tons of desktop environments etc. isn't a problem. The technical underpinnings sucking *is* a problem.

Respectfully, most developers need to outsource package management to people who actually know what they are doing because most of them cannot help but churn out absolute crap. This applies especially to larger development teams like those working for Adobe and Autodesk.

On Windows, most software developers cannot even implement proper update mechanisms for their software, and many still insist on supplying EXEs instead of clean MSI/MSIX packages which can be managed automatically in a native way. When it comes to updates, sometimes they will install unwanted privileged helper services which may or may not be audited for security bugs, sometimes an automatic download via the software itself with insufficient security checks followed by an admin credential prompt, or they do not even bother at all. Uninstallers are often their own separate EXEs because they did not bother using correct packaging standards, and many of them do not work silently, so truly clean removals and updates become impossible. Even tools like winget and SCCM do not truly help sysadmins wrangle the mess because so much software is just so poorly packaged that manual installs and removals are still commonplace.

macOS is even worse for this, where even fewer applications automatically update because developers chose to either publish an .app directory inside a DMG or a legacy pkg file which does not even have a proper uninstall mechanism. At least with .app directories one can cheekily synchronise them over the network, but nothing will redeem poorly designed pkgs. Developers will blame Apple but most of them could have better designed their software to allow it to be published in the Mac App Store where everything actually works cleanly and where package management is taken care of for them, and where simple, lightweight MDM can help keep track of everything,

TLDR: Packagers should package and developers should develop. Developers are often the worst packagers.

This thing is basically winget but for Linux, so they should have called it linget! It is also a terrible idea which recreates a problem Windows and macOS have both long had, which is rampant resource wastage and unnecessary security issues due to a lack of correctly linking and reusing what should be centrally maintained runtimes.

The reason why winget works for Windows is because it makes life easier without upsetting the broken status quo. That being every application bundling its own Electron, GTK, Qt, wxwidgets or other related library which developers need to keep track of the CVEs for, as well as digitally sign and take custodianship of.

Even Flatpak has the common sense to avoid this pitfall by supplying centralised runtime packages, ensuring developers do the right thing when it comes to demarcation of responsibilities. This package manager does the wrong thing: It sources binaries from static AppImages or tarballs of statically compiled applications, whether they be from the ISV directly or community packagers. It is objectively worse than what we already have.

If users are able to get a better result from an automated summary than they are from reading your website, it is not the summarisation tool that is the problem, it is your website. The Internet is fundamentally a data sharing and/or retrieval tool and the World Wide Web was intended to be no different. Instead of making your website look like a shop window art deco fluff piece, maybe consider offering users a plain, bare-bones set of informative pages with a decent summary instead.

As far as ads go, that is a dead revenue source and has been for a long time. Either run your website as a hobby or do not run it at all. Expecting to be paid for supplying information when most of the world has long agreed information should be free, is peak stupidity.

The real reason many people are against these cloud-based LLMs is because of the centralised control over information which large corporations cannot be trusted to use properly, and nothing more. It is a very good reason, one we should be shouting from the rooftops about to make sure decent alternatives always exist, but such a reason will not get you paid. The tech bros are in the wrong, but they are not wrong when they say what they say. Mustafa Suleyman is an asshole but he is not wrong when he essentially says that once something is on the public Internet, people will be accessing and using it for free.

Some people may not want to be identified as having donated to Reform UK, because a traceable disclosure that they have made a donation might ruin their social reputation among their peers. Think of it as a bit like what happened to one of the Mozilla founders when their donation history was discovered, except on a smaller scale.

Truth be told though, nothing stops folks donating to a proxy organisation which passes on the funds from there. As long as the organisation does not publicly say the money will all go to Reform UK, then plausible deniability still works.

Apple is so flush with build capacity right now, they started pumping out laptops using their lower end mobile technology, all of which can be recycled later in other product lines, given the number of people happy to trade-up and how small the footprint of their SoCs are. Apple already takes extensive advantage of this for other parts already, including cameras. Sure, it would knock out bleeding edge innovation for a few years but that would equally impact a lot of key ARM and x86 rivals too.

As lower end consumers make up the bulk of Apple customers, they could just continue selling the lower end to keep themselves going, all while continuing to provide long-term software support to maintain loyalty at the higher end. There is no way Apple has not already considered this anyway, as they are diversifying their manufacturing locations for everything except the Apple Silicon SoCs themselves.

NVIDIA does outlast AMD for support lifecycle, it is just on Linux their support is garbage from day 1 and not worth having. BAR1 cannot use system memory as a supplement for dedicated VRAM, no vendor VAAPI support, CUDA cant overflow into system memory transparently, broken power management the moment you engage NVDEC among many other problems. Nobody cares about full suspend to RAM in 2025, since it is a gaping security hole anyway even with TME support, it is a joke when people imply that is one of the last few major issues with NVIDIA Linux support.

At least AMD provides proper Linux support these days, unlike NVIDIA, and now AMD have stepped aside on AMDVLK to help contribute to RADV instead, things should get even better,

They still do not have a temporary single-use TPM+key+datetime mechanism for BitLocker to allow for updates to be fully completed in a secure and autonomous manner on systems which normally need a password or PIN input. Worse still, they have not addressed the lack of security for BIOS updates on TPM-equipped systems, they still auto-suspend BitLocker in a manner which allows for data theft. It is possible to know the what the new PCR outputs will be ahead of time, so itâ(TM)s not impossible to implement multiple TPM key slots for BitLocker and avoid leaving a gaping hole in the first place!

It is very possible Trump wants the EU to use EU manufactured products, and wants the US to use US manufactured products and for China to use Chinese products, irrespective of the economic impact, and the perceived loss of control. Even the tariffs are reciprocal with the intent of having countries try to go Juche on internal manufacturing. The prez also recently turned up to the UN and told every country they should be more self-reliant, that they should have strong borders and that they should be thinking about protecting their own unique cultures in the process.

Before Putin dived off the deep end, he would often talk history and talk up the unique cultures of other countries in a non-judgmental way, emphasising similar viewpoints. It is also a very similar set of talking points to the views China espouses regarding the sovereignty of other nations and how they should operate.

Sure, Trump is clearly a bit mad these days, but he is Senator Armstrong levels of mad.

Except that most applications on iOS use CloudKit in various ways you do not immediately see. Those integrations only work with iCloud, even if you do not use iCloud Drive and such. Then there is the lack of being able to install software without using the App Store, the inability for third-party services to do full phone backups and the inability for background processing to occur freely, relying upon location tracking events or dummy push notifications as a means to wake threads for limited time periods. It most certainly is the cloud striking again.

Just use your web browser, not the desktop app. Then the data needed to do detailed checks is no longer available. If your employer insists they need you to run the desktop app, a simple Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridge unit will let you wire in, which disables Wi-Fi automatically on many laptops.