I love OpenRGB. It’s such a fast and lightweight alternative to Corsair iCUE, which is needlessly heavy, clunky, and resource-intensive just to tell your lights what color to be.
Depends on what you mean for security/privacy. You can use Tails or whatever and have everything encrypted and then just be logging into your Facebook account on Chrome without an ad blocker.
Most Linux distros are secure enough for the average person who isn’t being targeted by some crazy state level actor. If you’re particularly concerned stick with a distro that has a security team like Debian. As for privacy that has more to do with the sites you browse and have accounts with but obviously avoid Google (I just use Firefox instead of Chrome) use an adblocker like ublock origin, along with maybe something like decentraleyes.
Chrome phones home a lot. It’s not a good idea to use it if you care about privacy. Firefox even has metrics enabled by default, although you can turn them off.
This was my first distro! It’s very beginner friendly and customization was very easier without requiring knowledge of GNOME extensions (which aren’t hard to set up once you know they exist). The Wine integration is nothing short of fantastic making it very easy to install Windows apps and it even recommends some native Linux equivalents (Heroic Games launcher if you try to install Epic Games). I have since switched to Fedora Workstation Edition, but Zorin is a good way to dip your toe in the Linux pool while you learn more about it
“ Recent research has focused on enhancing the capability of smaller models through imitation learning, drawing on the outputs generated by large foundation models (LFMs). A number of issues impact the quality of these models, ranging from limited imitation signals from shallow LFM outputs; small scale homogeneous training data; and most notably a lack of rigorous evaluation resulting in overestimating the small model’s capability as they tend to learn to imitate the style, but not the reasoning process of LFMs. To address these challenges, we develop Orca, a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs. Orca learns from rich signals from GPT 4 including explanation traces; step-by-step thought processes; and other complex instructions, guided by teacher assistance from ChatGPT. To promote this progressive learning, we tap into large-scale and diverse imitation data with judicious sampling and selection. Orca surpasses conventional state-of-the-art instruction-tuned models such as Vicuna-13B by more than 100% in complex zero-shot reasoning benchmarks like Big-Bench Hard (BBH) and 42% on AGIEval. Moreover, Orca reaches parity with ChatGPT on the BBH benchmark and shows competitive performance (4 pts gap with optimized system message) in professional and academic examinations like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, and GMAT, both in zero-shot settings without CoT; while trailing behind GPT–4. Our research indicates that learning from step-by-step explanations, whether these are generated by humans or more advanced AI models, is a promising direction to improve model capabilities and skills.”
Based on Ubuntu, is KDE's "flagship" OS (so I trust they know what they're doing with their own DE), and is the first to get bleeding edge KDE updates. Everything else is pretty much standard Ubuntu.
A couple of months ago our company decided to standardise on only one GNU/Linux distro and they chose PopOS. While the default desktop is better then stocj GNOME it was still far away to what I am used from the powerful, featureful and customizable KDE Plasma so after about two weeks I switched to KDE Plasma (unfortunately they have an extremely old version in their repos, but still much better).
I can only guess that Cosmic will be on pair to their current improved GNOME but will still be way lacking compared to what even an old KDE Plasma offers. And I would also much more like to see if they put more attention to keeping more updated KDE Plasma and KDE software packages in their repo. Even for Cosmic I think they would be much better of basing it on the extremely flexible and configurable KDE Plasma base and make it a heavy modification of this.
That was my “entrypoint” distro to start fiddling with Linux. So I’d say, go for it until you are feeling confident enough to take the next step – Linux Mint.
Isn’t Debian an easy distro? I don’t get it. Debian defaults to GNOME, setup is easier than Windows, includes a software store etc. what else do people need?
Why do you say that? It defaults to GNOME, that essentially had everything out of the box that those ones you speak about have. GNOME’s default theme is also finally something decent.
I’m not saying GNOME is perfect, far from it, but at least they’re no longer using brown+orange as their default colors. Now lets see if they can fix the font rendering once and for all.
I think Zorin’s approach makes sense for people who don’t want to learn a new interface and don’t have a lot of technical experience. GNOME does generally already have a good interface, but I think a lot of non-technical people wouldn’t understand (or want to understand) stuff like shell extensions and GNOME tweaks.
I don’t think I would switch to it anytime soon, but I could imagine it being used in a university.
I think Debian is close to new user friendly IF they pick Gnome or KDE with all the default stuff there, and has getting closer with non-free firmware enabled by default now, but still isn’t quite there as a plug and play new user friendly distro. Things like flatpak w/flathub or snap out of the box isn’t there, and it’d be hard to get a full Debian setup without using the command line (especially for a non free software zelot who wants Spotify and discord out of the box)
Something like mint is just a tad easier, and that might be the different between an easy install and an unexpected set of hiccups that a new user might struggle with. The mint installer is also a lot more intuitive, at the cost of being less universally compatible (a big goal of Debian).
it’s even more “easy” in it’s presentation, the visuals are polished, it has a full windows like start menu, both on gnome and xfce, the theme config is clean and barebones, the choice of desktop configs with the bars and menu is reduced to like 6 choices, and little details like that to make it feel like a professionally made os, meaning it’s only use is for people with no idea of what and os is, it’s a little better at that than even mint, it does make it pretty shitty if you want to learn to use linux since many layers of simplicity are added on top of an otherwise full featured desktop
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