I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.

Nah, the SWAT would have to arrest themselves.

I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.

Doesn’t need to be a “green energy paradise”, just a reasonably well connected first world country.

Take a look at Electricity Maps. Unless you live somewhere isolated or with very poorly developed grid infrastructure (or some central US states, apparently), you should see a non-trivial amount of electricity being generated by non-fossil fuels. For example, at the time of typing this 77% of the electricity I’m using is low-carbon and 50% of it is renewable.

That’s the kicker. EVs don’t have to rely on fossil fuels to operate (but they can make use of them depending on the grid infrastructure). ICE cars on the other hand are burning fuel wherever they go.

Walking or cycling will always be the least polluting means of getting around, but if you really need a car then you could do a lot worse than getting an electric one.