Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.

Well, I tinkered around a bit with Speech Note which has a good amount of features and is easy to install as a Flatpak. I think it has an option to do this, but requires a bit off fiddling, an extra tool and permissions for the Flatpak. I didn’t find any software with a particularly good integration into the Desktop, though.

Also read about Blahst but didn’t try it yet. Maybe that one is an option.

Good question. maybe I was wrong, I’ve used Debian for so long, I’ll either just update it or use the advanced installer… It’s certainly on the installation media now. Not sure if it copies it over to the system. Would make sense, though if it did…

Good luck! And don’t forget to add the non-free-firmware repo and maybe the other additional ones if you need them. A standard Debian comes without. And if you’re following an old tutorial, that might not cover the split between non-free and non-free-firmware which happened somewhat recently in Debian terms. Their own documentation is good and up to date, though.

Me too. I guess the internet is going to change soon anyway. AI Slop is going to displace a lot of things. And these cooking recipes don’t really work. So there will be a demand for genuine, human content. And the only way to tell is if you have some connection to the creator. So we might see a revival of human connection online. At least that’s what I hope will happen… And seems lots of people are fed up with social media as well.

Nah. She doesn’t. And I think the days of Blogs and personal websites are mostly a thing of the past. These days people doomscroll on Instagram. But I have some fond memories of the good old times as well. I used to have friends (of different genders) who would write publicly about technology, sugar-free recipes, I knew someone who did styling videos on Youtube. But that toned down as we all grew older and got other things to do, and the internet changed as well.

Whatever people do on computers… Surf websites, do emails, online-shopping, organize documents, vacation pictures, paperwork, type letters, draw diagrams, watch videos, do video conferences, stuff related to hobbies… I mean she isn’t a programmer or designer by trade or anything like that, but computers are just useful tools for a lot of things.

Hmmh. I mean I mostly play old games and they tend to work better in Wine/Proton anyway, so I don’t have a virtualized Windows. I ran into some annoyances with other operating systems though, since most mundane desktop environments do lavish graphics these days. Or I’d randomly watch a Youtube video in a guest system and that’d use a lot of CPU with a recent codec and full HD or more… I guess all of this really depends on what people do with their virtualized machines, though.

Doesn’t that do graphics in software? I suppose for optimal software you’d need hardware acceleration for that, or does libvirtd pass that through automatically these days?

My wife and some relatives? Along with countless other people… We have a zero electronics devices with fruit on them -policy, in this household. But we do provide Lightning cables for guests… I mean MacOS doesn’t even run on a Thinkpad without several stunts and a day of work involved… You need to patch the UEFI, do something to the graphics, patch the ISO, or happen to have the exact right model. And it violates the terms and conditions. So MacOS isn’t really an alternative, is it?

The way AI works, it’s likely to pick up on your style. I.e. if you ask with slang words or spelling mistakes, it’s going to answer very colloquially. And this translates to meaning… Once you ask “stupid” questions, it’s going to mistake that for a creative writing assignment. And I think your question is a bit alike »What’s better, oranges or papayas?« That’s just a weird question and you’ll get a weird answer. Linux and MacOS are very different things. Used by different people for different tasks. None of them is “better” without any context given.

Hmm. I think the main damage is done by other factors. I mean even before AI, everything turned into subscriptions and services. We use Office365 these days and the documents are in the cloud. There isn’t much need for Free Software Office Suites or mail clients anymore. Operating systems have less impact because honestly only old people use computers. Everyone else does their stuff on a phone. And then we finally crossed the barrier into a post-privacy world and people don’t care. And on top of that large companies take the nice database projects, libraries etc and monetize products with that. Without caring too much if that’s sustainable. And AI is one negative factor amongst many.

Add context or people can’t answer your questions. I’d say you’re mistaken and that’s a curve for more quiet, not cooler.

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I think educational activities work best once they have some application to someones life. So it’d be something within the realm of a 7yo. And it’s not fun unless there’s a sense of achievement every now and then, along with all the stuff to learn. So probably not too steep of a learning curve.

Sadly they discontinued Lego Mindstorms. I think robotics is a great hands-on topic. People can grasp what they’re currently doing, why they do it, and what it’s good for. It has a tactile aspect, so you’ll train dexterity as well and gently connect the physical realm with the maths.

But other than that, I bet there’s a lot of things you can try. Design a website (and deploy a small webserver). Maybe some easy to use photo gallery if they have a tablet or camera. Maybe a Wordpress for them to write a Blog? They should be familiar with the concept of a diary. Kids love Minecraft, so maybe a Luanti server if you’re into Free Software. But learn how to add NPCs and animals, that is (or used to be?) a complicated process in Luanti and the world feels boring and empty without. A chat server to their loved ones could motivate them to read and write text (messages). Or skip the selfhosting aspect and do the kids games available for Linux. Paint, LibreOffice…

I like the recommendations from other people as well. Sadly I don’t know which kids programming language works best. I think I heard you can just go straight for Python as well. Not sure if that’s true or what age group that applies to. It’s a bit more involved to learn the syntax and why you need brackets around certain things etc but at least they get to learn the real deal and something properly useful. 7 might be a bit young, though. And there might be a language barrier. But that applies to all the computer stuff behind the scenes, unless you’re a native English speaker.

Nice. I guess that’s about when I was born, so I only remember copying 3½-inch floppy disks for friends. And it was music on my cassettes. 😉 But I don’t remember it being called piracy either. We had a lot of games, though. Monkey Island 2 and a nice collection of DOS games. None of them were bought in a store. And I remember struggling with the English language, some games were off the table since I didn’t learn English until middle school.

I guess copying things lost some of the social aspect after that. We shared a lot of stuff in digital form after CD writers became affordable in the mid- to late 90s. But these days you’d sit alone in front of the computer and just download whatever. And pretty much everything is available. Or just connect a phone to the car and have arbitrary things to listen to. Instead of a fixed set of 3 pre-made casettes for the entire summer vacation road trip.

No idea what books to recommend, but the concept of piracy is very old. That translated to the realm of home computers, pretty much when home computers were invented and software licensing became a thing. People would share floppy disks and cassettes. And then stuff got easier with modems and the internet.

If you just want something simple that does the job, you can try a turnkey solution like YunoHost. There’s several other ones out there. Some with containers, some with more or less pre-packaged software… If you want to learn more during the process, maybe don’t and do it yourself because these things don’t teach you a lot. There’s some resources like the awesome-selfhosted list in the sidebar of this community. But I think for installing services you’d mainly look at the specific documentation of the specific service you’re just about to tackle. And maybe read up on Docker containers etc to judge whether you want to do it that way.

I like getting updates and new features? My computer isn’t new by any means. But I tinker with stuff, sometimes bleeding edge technology. Other than that I don’t really care. Rolling release, Debian Stable… I’m fine as long as it does the job. And for half the stuff it doesn’t even matter. I can write a letter with a 5yo LibreOffice or answer mails with any version of the mail client. Just give me modern, up-to-date tools when developing software, and it doesn’t hurt if the slicer knows about my new 3d printer from this year.

Or maybe @WhiteHotaru@feddit.org would like to do that for us?