Adding to the comments about VIA and QMK, you can also use something on the computer itself to do ergonomics tricks and making F7 usable again.
I’m in particular using kanata, which then works on everything from notebook keyboards to custom ones. I’m not 100% happy with it and in fact considering to write my own software for this, but it’s good-enough for basic usage. It might be good-enough for you. kmonad is less buggy but has fewer features (definitely enough for F7 though).
Maybe some AI crawlers started to honestly report Linux instead of Windows as they possibly did before? Otherwise such a quick spike is hard to explain (unbelievable). Or did I miss any big news lately?
//I’m on Linux in the last 15 years and I don’t even care that much about what unrelated to me people use, although I always do help fellow Linux-ers when I encounter them in the wild.
Good starting point would be to focus on projects hosted on codeberg. Their official policy since recently is human-first. (The rules are detailed though, I don’t want to over-simplify. But very reasonable and vibe-coded stuff is definitely out of the window.)
My personal basic tools for learning:
man bash. That’s the documentation for everything. It’s very careful and serious though, so sometimes you need…At my current level of experience I need mostly man bash, and occasionally all of the rest. Before I used a lot of stackoverflow and simply thinking of what I even want.
Hey, yeah, shit like that happens in life. The jokes about that from your friends are understandable but inconsequential. After all, you probably love Linux not because everything is plug-and-play here, but because it’s free and customizable (and you can set up a lot of things to be plug-and-play, too, if that’s what you want).
By the way, heads-up on connecting Android phones for file exchange: those require the MPT driver, too. Some distros/desktop environments ship it out-of-the-box, some don’t.
And last thought from a social angle. With experience of using Linux and talking with other people in the last ~18 years, I would recommend not to advertise Linux, to yourself or to others, as a system that “can do everything that Windows can”. That’s just not true. Some stuff Windows can do that Linux cannot, some stuff Linux can do that Windows cannot. For me it worked best to get people interested in Linux if I:
Don’t push hard. I answer any inquiries eagerly, but I leave people the space to stay where they are. If they believe something is really good for them, I let them have it. Good advertising moments come themselves when people themselves note that they’re actually lacking something.
I teach, and more rarely do I just do something directly. I’ve noticed this keeps people engaged longer. “Don’t give the fish, teach how to fish”.
Sometimes it’s fun to share the awesome things you can do in Linux. And many people don’t know that all the routers, Android phones and servers are near-100% Linux. Learning that impresses them and seems count towards “good reputation” for the system in their eyes, too. (And it’s a true fact.)
I’ve noticed that *not using* youtube for a while gets you ublocked, too. Which is only good, if you think about it. Most often (even if not always), your days will get a bit healthier, and the lifting of the block is only a bonus when you really need that rare video, too.
I haven’t found other solutions or tricks; nor have I tried after I’ve realised that this one works. I take it as a “hint” from google, to get away from the screen (YT) for a few days.
I’ll skip discussions about my persona. But most certainly golf courses or video games have orders of magnitude lower impact on electricity and watee than worldwide LLMs (mostly in datacenters).
Currently, LLMs impact on electricity usage and fresh water usage across the world is HUGE.
The painful part to me is the choice on where to put the stress. Which areas to highlight and talk about.
Yes some weak LLMs can use comparatively little electricity. Yes some other industries use electricity, generate CO2 and consume fresh water, too. But the existence of other problems, to me, does not mean that eco impact of LLMs should be swept under the rug.
There are other questions
Not sure if that’s really _acknowledging_ the problem.
I’m on Linux, and I get hit by this bug a lot: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata/discussions/422
The official work-around is to use an additional F24 key press-release sequence: https://jtroo.github.io/config.html#tap-hold but that works poorly for me. Some apps are messed up slightly because of this (editors such as kate which stops understanding Ctrl Z properly), some work smooth, and some even break entirely to the point of becoming unusable (terminals such as raw tty3 or xfce4-terminal).