Additional analyses show global stocks of fake accounts are highest for platforms such as X, Uber, Discord, Amazon, Tinder and gaming platform Steam, while vendors keep millions of verifications available for the UK and US, along with Brazil and Canada.**

Interesting stuff. I would guess this accounts for why products with only 4 stars on Amazon are so often shit. Real consumers only seem to affect the last star out of five.

Office 365 and teams work fine on Linux in Chrome or Firefox, including voice calls, video calls and screen sharing, and notifications with pop-ups and sounds.

Excel, in particular, is 100% inside Office365 in the browser when I have to interact with it. In the past, I have created Excel files in LibreOfffice and uploaded them to Office365 to convert. Though I haven’t been tempted to do so in a few years.

Most of my coworkers are not aware that I run Linux at work. My boss knows and doesn’t care. My peers are just surprised when I mention it, because I use the same tools without issue.

Zoom works great on Linux, as well, both in bowers and as the native app. Many corporate VPNs are compiant with open standards, and so don’t even require any additional install. Cisco’s isn’t made right, but they provide a Linux client that works fine.

Slack works fine in browser, including full first class notifications. I haven’t sought out a dedicated client app, but I recall having some options.

DropBox and Google have particularly decent Linux client applications, and of course, fully functional web tools.

There’s also some excellent ways to run Android apps nearly seemlessly inside an Android emulator of Linux. In theory, I could resort to those, but I haven’t because everything I need works in a web browser now.

I’ve heard that the two glaring exceptions are AutoCad and Adobe Creative Suite. I understand that neither works on Linux or in a browser (per other threads on Lemmy).

Oh yeah, and Linux has more and better ways to produce nice PDFs than Windows does, and of course reads them without issue

Oh, and yes, mandatory compliance stuff like antivirus tools and CrowdStrike also have compliant options for Linux. Some of the really shitty spyware level invasive stuff probably hasn’t been ported to Linux, but the “keep me virus free” stuff seems pretty available - because they want to sell copies for Linux servers.

Edit: If this seems needlessly thorough, it is because I worked to independently verify all of these details before my upgrade. I figure my notes might help someone making the case to switch, or just researching whether they need to not switch.

If I told JP Allard that I did not find their work authentic, I’m sure they would say “You’re absolutely right!”

If you have no junior developers, who will turn into senior developers later on?

At least it isn’t my problem. As long as I have CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Windows11, AWS us-east-1 and log4j… I can just keep enjoying today’s version of the Internet, unchanged.

Do you ever hit a group or business that’s only on Meta apps, whether fakebook or whatsapp?

All the time. I’ve had no trouble finding other businesses to buy from or other groups to join up with.

Businesses and groups with only a Facebook tend to have… other issues, anyway.

Edit: Removing the bit where I think I totally missed your point.

I’m not saying it won’t work. It will work.

But it will work because someone clever will fix the inate computer stupidity with hard-coded human cleverness. Again.

Yes. You’ve shared the use case where Agentic AI makes sense.

Basically, if I need more randomness than a shell script can supply, it makes sense to mix a learning model in.

The use case I think we will continue to see significant use in is (low quality) advertising in contexts where only the product matters (not the brand). The cost for failure is lower, and the reward for creativity is higher.

Even in that nearly ideal use case, many companies leveraging it are going to discover that their brand image cannot afford to be associated with sociopathic AI slop. So I think even that trend is about to peak and reduce.

“Hey siri create me an e-commerce site” isn’t likely to happen for a long while, because like you said it’s a complex thing that doesn’t have clear success measures.

One would hope so, but of course Someone is trying it, and it has gone as poorly as you might imagine.

there are ways to turn down the randomness to get more consistent outputs for simple tasks.

Yes: shell scripting, which we have had for half a century.

But the term “Agentic AI” sells better than “shell scripting with extra steps and shittier results.”

Right. That’s why I gave grandma Linux Mint, rather than asking her to learn Windows.

And sure as hell when she got some custom-software disc from hospital with embedded images from her x-ray or whatever it’s called, I wouldn’t want her to need to also deal with Linux possibly not being able to run it.

That’s a reasonable fear, but unmerited. Those discs open perfectly on modern Linux.

This thread is largely just basic computer skills advice that is necessary on Windows and Mac as well. (And that is great!)

So I’ll add the ones we skipped that have nothing to do with OS at all, but are the usual issues for new PC users:

• Give a quick overview of what the mouse is for.
• Talk about or just disable the CAPSLOCK key.
• Show them where to find and how to read the “do I have Internet?” icon (usually in the lower right, regardless of OS)
• (If not a laptop) Teach them that the monitor and the PC have separate power buttons. Maybe leave a sign out that says “Push both buttons to turn on.”

And as others have said:

• Show them how to search for and add software using the software center, (rather than download from random websites)

That it is another OS. It’s not Windows.

I used to feel that mattered, but today websites will detect my OS when it matters and just pick the right page (i.e. downloading something).

Then I double click the download to install it.

I, a tech nerd, forget what distro I’m running and eventually have to look it up, when I’m doing something weird enough that it matters.

For day to day stuff, I’m not sure that knowing my OS comes up anymore.

What version of Linux are you talking about?

I haven’t been recycle bin free in…any recent distro or desktop environment that I can remember.

Penis-face sure looks like he’s having a great time in that cold medicine ad!

Oh, that’s good to know! I’ve always installed KDE on Debian before, but I thought it was only because I just really liked Debian. Thanks!

One outcome will be a sea-level-rise in superfluous text that’s all coming from the same point-of-view and is pretty bland.

Searching the Internet for a banana bread recipe allows us to experience this full distopia, today.

The web used to be full of recipes. Now most of the web is copies of the same mediocre recipe wrapped in meaningless filler text and ads.

It feels like the village at the end of “A wrinkle in time”.

Cinnamon is a great choice. It’s the default on Linux Mint for good reason.

If she’s a Mac refugee, fuck if I know.

She could consider Linux Mint with KDE Plasma. KDE Plasma feels very like modern Mac, only nicer, to me.

They do look like bubbles.