I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.

I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.

But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.

But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.

But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.

Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.

That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.

Ya. I feel like professional VFX has largely migrated off Windows already.

Photoshop is perhaps the canonical example of software that does not run on Linux and is actually needed by “professionals”.

Photoshop does not run well enough on Wine that I would expect a pro to run it this way. And, if you are a print professional, there really are no Open Source tools that do what you need yet.

But outside of print, I think it is more about familiarity than capability even with regards to Adobe alternatives. And there are alternatives UI options for things like GIMP if the Adobe metaphor works better for you.

Inkscape seems to be attracting some actual professional use. Scribus seems close to getting there too. The furthest behind is GiMP.

That said, I am impressed with the development pace of GIMP now that version 3 has finally shipped. And it seems that proper CMYK support is on their near-term roadmap. I could see them shipping something functional next year. I would say similar things about non-destructive editing.

It will be interesting to see if attitudes change towards GIMP after these issues are addressed. The UI also takes a lot of heat. Now that there is a consistent cadence of releases (it seems), perhaps that will see steady evolution as well.

This is a funny take given that for most of Linux history, the majority of Linux desktop user have been “working professionals”, largely IT workers and developers to be fair.

At this point, you cannot really make a blanket statement about who Linux is appropriate for. It is down to individual use cases and preferences.

I have been using Linux for decades and, while I have also used Windows and macOS, other operating systems are frustrating to use due to the many limitations. And I have been several kinds of “working professional” over that time at many different levels of seniority. But I recognize that this is because all my workflows and expectations evolved on Linux.

The “working professionals” you imagine likely have the same issue. It is not that Linux could not work, or even that it is not a better place to start. It is document compatibility and familiarity.

At this point, Linux “being ready” comes down almost completely to a tolerance for learning and change. Nobody says you have to change of course. But working differently does not mean that something else does not work.

There are of course still some software gaps. CAD is not great on Linux (getting there). Print graphics professionals (people with CMYK workflows) will hit real roadblocks. Some debugging tools available on Windows are worth the productivity for certain workflows. Pro audio too I guess though this not my area. And “office document” users may encounter display inconsistencies when sharing documents depending on which features they rely on. Perhaps the latter is what you mean.

As for gaming, it depends on what titles you favour. Some Windows games play better on Linux. Some worse. And of course some not at all.

When choosing software for a company, I consider something that cannot work on the Linux desktop or through the cloud disqualifying. I can think of few cases where that has been the wrong decision.

It is pretty easy to point out how long we have been researching fusion. That said, few of the skeptics will highlight just what an explosion of private capital we have seen in recent years and how different that is to previous decades. They will not show you the previous times in history when we have seen similar patterns.

Sure this capital is speculative. And most of them will have picked the wrong winner. But history tells us that this is what it looks like before a technology succeeds. Not 30 years before. More like 10. Which means saying 5 is ambitious but not exactly crazy.

Fusion does not belong in your list. First, some of them exist. You can buy a 3D printer with bitcoins. Of those that don’t, none has more than perhaps one resource unconstrained backer. Not a lot of people think we are colonizing Mars anytime soon. Fusion has billions of dollars of private capital chasing it as this point.

The situation may be closer to Quantum Computing than your examples. And I would say there are more physical unknowns in quantum computing. Because we do not have a quantum computer we can see in the sky everyday.

Your list looks funny in another way. Did you know that a company just launched a solar power satellite to do AI in orbit. It is up there and operational. They want to build a solar powered AI data-center in space. Whether you back such and idea or not, you cannot say something is impossible that has already been done.

And sometimes things work out differently than intended. For example, the technology developed or fusion stelerators is being use for drilling. One use may be to drill geothermal power vents. Who knows, maybe fusion power research will inadvertently make geothermal so cheap that fusion reactors no longer make economic sense.

The Industrial Revolution was literally “are you truly impressed by a machine that can weave cloth as well as your grandmother”? And the answer was yes because one person could be trained to use that machine in much less time than it took to learn to weave. And they could make 10 times as much stuff in the same time.

LLMs are literally the same kind of progress.

Except we are not 200 years later when the impact on the world is obvious and not up for debate. We are in the first few years where the “machine” would be broken half the time and its work would have obvious defects.

They are just saying “why don’t we all just start murdering people”. This is a common trick when you do not have strong arguments for your moral position. You just switch to defending the most extreme position and act like any move away from the point you have chosen is a vote for murder.

You don’t agree with me? Well, I guess it is safe to assume you are an enthusiastic murderer.

I find myself much angrier at the third that did not vote at all than the third that voted for Trump.

A tiny fraction of those that stayed at home could have saved the world. What else did they have on that day?

Is the US still sending aid now? I thought they stopped.

I know the US is letting the EU buy weapons for Ukraine. Would that stop?

It seems that the most valuable asset Ukraine has in its arsenal are its domestically produced drones. The US wants to invest in those to further its own interests. This is likely to proceed regardless of the war.

I am with you until the last sentence.

In an actual war, the US would take Mexico in half a day. The US military is far more competent than Russsia. But holding it is another matter.

There would be insurgents for decades and you are absolutely right that it would spill over into the domestic United States. I would be an absolute disaster.

The Trump cartel?

Get a cheap desktop and run Windows on it. Remote Desktop into that machine to run your app.

You can use TwinGate or Tailscale to access your desktop from anywhere.

“Mac”iavellian. I see what you did there.

Yes please. 2013 MacBook Pro? I use a 2013 MacBook Air every day. I am sure your MacBook Pro is much better.

They are selling them. Look into ESU (Extended Security Updates).

$30 a year.

I was for many of us. So, they were not totally wrong.

I would rather see them fail in the open market. Things are going well.

I favour Arch because I prefer everything I want to install to be in the package repo and for it to be a version actually new enough to use.

But I actually use EndeavourOS because it is 99% Arch but installs easily with full hardware support on everything I own (including a T2 Macbook). It never fails me.

And now I have realized that I can use Distrobox to get the Arch repos and the AUR on any dostro I wish.

So, I now have Chimera Linux on 4 machines because it is the best engineered distro in my view. The system supervisor, system compiler, and C library matter to me (not to everyone). All these machines have the AUR on them (via distrobox). Best of all worlds.

You are going to want to use the AUR, so you need yay or paru (not just pacman). You can either still use pacman (for non-AUR stuff) or just one of the others for everything.

They all use the same switches.

That happens to the commercial folks too. It is just the nature of the adoption curve.

It is the same with price. A few will say that your product is already worth 10x the price. Most will say it’s too expensive. If you drop the price, a few more will see the value. Lots won’t.

More users is more users though. It is not something to get discouraged about. The advantage with Open Source is that, as long as it is useful to some, we have almost an infinite amount of time to expand it to new audiences. Baby steps pay off for Open Source.