Personally I am a big fan of AI in multiple contexts, but the cons just out weight it completely. Although here some great things that can be done with it:

• image upscaling. Upscaling algorithms are always a best guess and will blur a lot things. That’s where AI shines. It can make crisp edge, and if you keep it to 2x, the hallucinations are minimum. I personally use Waifu2x, it has been made before the AI boom, but always has been reliable.

• Copilot. Not Microsoft’s “copilot”, but an ai acting as your copilot. Someone that reviews your stuff, give suggestions. You can do those suggestions or not, but that’s still rely on you to do them As an artist among non artists friends, not having anyone pointing out minor details or mistakes makes it hard to improve. With AI, you just throw your art at it and say “make it better”. The ai will give back an alternative version, and you can choose to add some detail it added. But you remain in control. There’s been an interesting talk about that in a blender conference that I cannot find back, but that illustrate it perfectly. I never actually used that technique, but if AI wasn’t so shitty I would.

TBF if I see some great ai art (which is rare) or inspiration, I save it. Although I make sure to not help any algorithms recommend more of it to others. Even less pay for it

I feel this pain. Having to deal with an inheritantly sync database in an async app is painful. You need to make sure at no point the transaction is stopped, make sure to set the timeout to a reasonable time instead of an iPad kids’s attention span, and a whole deal of other things

Can’t wait for turso to be stable.

Actually mint ship free software by default! Although there’s nothing preventing you from downloading more (no please add non free software checkbox)

Nvidia drivers are actually opt-in (it’s actually nouveau by default), so for the average person that should be fine… Personally I need the proprietary drivers for blender so I 'm stuck with it.

Although I don’t see how going to debian would help with anything…

Mint veteran here. You aren’t safe. Nvidia will come for all of us.

Meme aside, they have been pretty stable lately. But 2023-2024 had some pretty iffy drivers for my laptop GPU.

Kernel is on the older side, but safe. You don’t really need to have the latest kernel all the time though. All those 1% performance improvements can wait.

Went Mint > Nobara > Mint. I totally understand your take. It was fun tinkering a bit on mint, but I wanted more by going to Nobara.

I had to reinstall it 3 times. There have been some breakage due to KDE updates and Nvidia drivers, and when you go back from a long day at work and you just want to do some chill gaming, coming back to a non functional setup is a pain, even more when you just wanted to update and it wasn’t your tinkering.

So yeah, not for me. I do still think both have their own place in the world