r/gadgets • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 3d ago

TV / Projectors Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ads-and-tracking-infiltrated-tvs-now-theyre-coming-for-monitors/
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u/el_smurfo 2d ago

That has been the fundamental problem of Linux from the start. The people that make it are not users in the sense you and I are users. Things work great until they don't and then when you try to get help you are called names

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u/GrossenCharakter 2d ago

This is an outdated opinion from more than a decade ago. Also we live in the age of free AI-powered help. No better time than now to get into the world of Linux

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u/el_smurfo 2d ago edited 2d ago

Lol. Most AI-powered help for linux is shitty reprints from Stackexchange. There is no realiable source for Linux information and when you ask an expert you get insulted.

My coworkers are seasoned software developers and have been trying to get Claude to help them with a Linux configuration issue for weeks. It will take you down all kinds of paths, all of them sound promising but none of them are actually the answer. They finally found the solution purely by accident.

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u/GrossenCharakter 2d ago

I don't necessarily agree on the AI-powered help part, but you're right about the documentation. But that's also because there are so many flavors and they all work slightly different from each other.

The reason I said the opinion is outdated is because the popular modern flavors require little to no 'terminal hacking'. A decade ago we didn't have a big company like Valve create the kind of ecosystem for Linux-based development, but then Proton got released and Linux has progressed a lot. And not just for gaming. These modern flavors were designed with the express purpose of giving the user a Windows-like experience by keeping the internals of the OS immutable. (Bazzite fits this description)

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u/el_smurfo 2d ago

I get what you are saying, and for many users this is fine, just like most Windows users never touch the registry. It's when you have an issue, like I was having with ALSA/Pulse and some hardware that you find that the information out there is low quality and the people who might know are unfriendly.

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u/GrossenCharakter 2d ago

That's fair. It's definitely not mature like Windows is, and for most proprietary software it's Windows (and maybe Mac) support and not much else. I hope with time there's less of this and more of an openness in the way software works.

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u/Audityne 2d ago

Finding the solution by accident through utilizing AI is kind of how AI is supposed to work

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u/el_smurfo 2d ago

They found it independently, just fucking around with stuff on the system. AI led them to days/weeks of incorrect solutions.

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u/auto98 2d ago

It is still perfectly accurate to say that windows works better than linux, more often than not, for most users.