Just don’t expect it will make you faster or more efficient.

It will, but it requires you spend a lot of time dealing with being slow and wanting to give up and reach for the mouse.

I swapped keyboard layouts (to a 52 key split layout) and it took me around 2-3 weeks of typing slow, hitting the wrong keys, and keeping several printed sheets (for all of the keyboard layers) on my desk in order to learn the layout. It was frustrating and it would have been a lot easier to just grab a standard keyboard but, in the end, it was worth it.

Learning vimkeys/application hotkeys does take a while and it is much easier to avoid it for any given task. Just grab the mouse and avoid the frustration of having to try to remember the hotkey (or, even worse, look it up). But if you can avoid that and force yourself through the uncomfortable frustration. You’ll find that the time investment is worth it.

If you couldn’t copy someone else’s art style, 99% of Deviant Art wouldn’t even exist. Ffs, painting and sculpture are broken into various periods based on how everything was a certain vibe. Where do you think Surrealism, realism, cubism and other terms come from?

Ironically, if you look at today’s top ‘memes’ in this community you’ll see that they’re all essentially a picture on a white background with text added to the top. Zero effort, zero creativity. Just find a picture, copy paste it into ms paint and put text above it (not even on the picture itself).

you’re over here defending copyright. The most capitalistic, corporate position you can take.

100%

A lot of people on Lemmy will self identify as being left of center and then run around promoting the idea that people can own ideas in perpetuity. Which is very much a right wing authoritarian idea.

The best way I’ve heard it described is that learning all of the motions, shortcuts, commands, etc is the best way to remove all of the possible friction between you having a thought and you putting that thought into text.

It’s like using Word and learning that CTRL+B toggles Bold. You don’t NEED to know that, you can click the bold icon. The extra 2 seconds that it took to grab the mouse and click the icon and then move your hand back to the keyboard seems trivial, but if you’re doing a lot of writing that can add up to a lot.

In addition, having to stop your train of thought in order to fiddle with a GUI can cause lapses in concentration. Constantly having to stop typing in order to fiddle with a GUI is annoying and requires you to switch context from what you were typing to looking for the icon or menu that you need to click.

Multiply that by everything else you need to do in editing text (moving the cursor to different places, selecting text, finding text, opening and saving documents, etc. That’s a lot of time that you’re spending messing around with a mouse and GUI annoyances.

Also, if you’re using Linux, a lot of tools use vim keys as their interface. So learning the basics (mostly hjkl for moving, / for searching, etc) can help you in a lot of programs.

For example, I’m using vimium in Firefox, so I can operate the entire browser without using the mouse. Press f and all of the links and form fields on the page are tagged with a 2 letter combination, pressing those two letters is like clicking the link/field. I can access shortcuts, open bookmarks, etc all without needing my mouse. In addition, the browser has hotkeys for tab manipulation (ctrl t for new tab, ctrl f4 to close tab, ctrl shift t to re-open/undo last closed tab, etcetc).

I try to have all of my programs be keyboard driven (and use a lot of terminal applications where possible). Vim keys and motions, in all of the various programs that use them, along with the shortcuts from the window manager (everyone knows alt + tab, but there are many more) and even individual applications make that possible (except for Freetube, which requires the mouse :/).

Overall, I would say that it’s not a requirement, but if you’re willing to spend a week or two learning (and moving very slow as you force yourself to learn and use the keys) then I think you’ll have a better time in Linux.

Also, it feels pretty ‘90s hacker movie hacker’ to just flail on the keyboard and have things happen on your PC.

Mike’s Used Appliances is not trying to fingerprint you.

Mike’s Used Appliances might use Google Analytics though.

More like, people say thing for a lot of reasons:

It’s copying the artistic style of a popular 4chan artist. Those are generated jpeg artifacts, which are worse than the regular jpeg artifacts.

I AI generated it, enjoy your moral quandary

Oh yeah, most people see AI as ‘the thing that has made search completely unusable’ and not ‘The thing that has solved protein folding’.

It’s like the Internet is full of cavemen who are screaming and throwing rocks at a fire while, elsewhere, others are building jet turbines and combustion engines.

The average anti-ai zealot only know about Diffusion and Large Language models because they once used ChatGPT for 15 minutes, read some memes and are now an expert on how AI is ruining society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre

It’s essentially a kernel with only open source code. OP would need to research all of the hardware in their machine to ensure that there are open source drivers. I think there are some laptop manufacturers that sell units which are compatible, if you’re ordering from one of the major manufacturers then you’ll likely have some hardware (like wifi) that requires proprietary binaries.

The hardest part is usually finding a machine that has open source drivers for every component. You may have to do some kernel compiling and other low level tasks to get your specific setup to work. OP says they’re not a power user, but after this they will be

Around '99 or '00. A friend of mine was gifted a Linux Magazine subscription and made me a copy of the CD. It was noteworthy at the time because it didn’t have any copy protection and we were neck deep in piracy, keeping our friend group supplied with copies of games that we pulled off of IRC.

Getting a CD full of software that made no effort to prevent copying was intriguing enough that we sacrificed a spare machine one weekend (giving up the ability to play LAN StarCraft!) to see what another operating system looked like.

We tinkered on and off for a year, once we could get dual boot working (thanks to the IRC crowd) we used it a bit more often. Mostly ricing, though that wasn’t a term at the time, and playing with the hacking tools (for educational purposes only, of course).

I think there was some copy protection mode that was annoying to write on Windows but trivially easy on Linux, which was the first time that I can remember where it was just better than Windows. That, and ARP poisoning our LAN parties to packet capture and read people’s AIM and ICQ conversations because we were little shits.

Because the source code is copyrighted, the fact that userA has an email address userA@gmail.com isn’t copyrighted and so companies can ingest that data into their databases.

We needed that when Snowden leaked, now the political will is gone and the average person just accepts it because they get free services in exchange for letting advertising companies and law enforcement live in their pocket.

A funny loophole. The person who stole the data did a crime.

Now that the data is public then it is free game because it is public information.

Ah, I see you’re a man of culture as well

Can you name a single technology or human endeavour that doesn’t have negative side effects or potential for abuse?

The rise of anti-AI sentiment isn’t based on objective measurements of societal harms, it’s a meme because it’s new and popular and, like all memes, some people feed on the outrage-based reinforcement generated by social media interactions.

I’m not saying that there are no problems with AI. I’m saying that people are treating it as if it were a massive problem because their perception is warped by social media.

They used this access to suppress the Occupy Wall Street protests, including targeting the online activists, by designating it a ‘counter-terrorism’ operation.

If you participated in these protests online you’d suddenly find that the DEA knew about your marijuana use, the IRS decided that not filing your taxes was a criminal charge and your state and county police would receive ‘anonymous tips’ about any state laws that you were violating.

This was all because DHS intelligence services were combing through the online records of anybody that they could remotely link to these protests.

Literally every single online company is giving your data to law enforcement, often including real-time access.

This is the thing that Snowden leaked.

Facebook, Gmail, your cellular provider, Amazon, Credit Card companies, your bank, etc. They’re all systems that law enforcement intelligence can access, probably without a subpoena (a business can choose to give up business records since they own them, you don’t own ‘your data’).

If you’re doing something online, or on your phone, you should pretend that there’s a law enforcement officer sitting and reading over your shoulder because they effectively are. If they ever has cause to look at you they’ll pull the history of your account (possibly limited to 30 days back but there’s no guarantee of this) and see everything you’ve ever written and posted included things that you deleted.

If you did anything illegal they can use this information to start a new investigation, in addition to whatever investigation that led them to your account. This can allow them access to even more accounts.

So, if you’re using any commercial service that holds your data, you should assume that a law enforcement officer is combing through your information and trying to find something to charge you with.

You should not use commercial services if you’re in the US. I know I’m preaching to the choir in this community, but sometimes people need to see it written in black and white.